Never-Trump Confidential
By TOM NICHOLS
JULY 18, 2016
... Trump has encouraged a with-us-or-against-us mentality among his voters, and it is an especially sharp division between Trump’s base and the Republican apostates who oppose him. “You are probably a Democrat and a socialist with literally half a brain,” one recent email from an angry Trump admirer began. “You are most likely wealthy, with no true commitment to God, but of the devil.” Another correspondent, in a common refrain, told me I was unfit to call myself an American. Yet another wished me a pleasant stay in Guantánamo in the near future. On Twitter, I’ve been barraged with words like “traitor” and “treason” along with a fair number of less printable terms.
During the primaries, it was easier to find common ground among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters. At the outset of this election season, I knew very few people who were behind Trump; more often, I found myself in arguments about whether Marco Rubio was too young, whether Ted Cruz was too annoying, whether Jeb Bush was too … well, too Jeb Bush. Even in those more amicable days, however, when I voiced my categorical opposition to Trump, I would see a head shake slowly or eyes look away for a moment. The same phrases would pop up: “We’re tired of political correctness.” “He says it like it is.” “He’ll shake things up” ...
... I understand perfectly well how Trump is appealing to those voters. He’s promising to turn back time, to restore factories that were demolished years ago and to deport the Hispanic arrivals who turned the local barbershop into a storefront church. Trump is offering my friends and my family a buffet of economic impossibilities served up with sides of bitter racism and fantasies of revenge. And because I will not join them in their absolute belief in Trump, many of them now see me as an outsider. I’m no longer one of us. I’m now one of them.
I am not a natural choice for the part of Republican rebel. I spent a lifetime in the party, despite a short separation in 2012 when I quit it after Newt Gingrich and his plan to build Moon Base Alpha won South Carolina. For some time, I’d been concerned that the party was heading into a dead end of largely symbolic extremism, and Gingrich’s surge in a pack that included unelectable eccentrics like Herman Cain and Ron Paul, for me, clinched it. But I remained a conservative, and I never felt comfortable about leaving America’s conservative party ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/magazine/never-trump-confidential.html
Um ... well ... OK, Tom ... So now you know how it feels to disagree with Republicans. I’ve been barraged with words like “traitor” and “treason,” too, but not just since the 2016 primaries --- for decades and decades
