No, #NeverTrump can’t “fail”

There’s a simple fact about many in the #NeverTrump movement that putative “conservative” pundits don’t seem to understand, try as we might to explain it to them: #NeverTrump is not the opening bid in some ongoing electoral negotiation. Rather, it’s a final position already reached — call it SETTLED SCIENCE! — and one that won’t change simply because the latest batch of party “pragmatists” lecture us on the need to act like “adults” and return ourselves to the “real world,” surreally defined these days as the one in which Donald Trump, a man with Mondale’s (D) trade policy , McGovern’s (D) foreign policy, and Wallace’s (D) populist charm (and a hefty haul of his remaining spiritual heirs) is the GOP standard bearer; while movement conservatives, who’ve rejected him for his loutish and confused populism, his lack of personal integrity, his frighteningly totalitarian tendencies, and his statist policies, are but silly obstructionist purists who Just Don’t Know How Things Work.

So let me be as clear as I can here: #NeverTrump means never Trump. I mean, it’s right there in the hashtag, for Chrissakes! And it can’t “fail” — as the burgeoning establishment narrative would have you believe — because it is its own self-enclosed system, one whose only condition for actuation is the very individual neverness that defines it. Whether Trump wins or loses is of no consequence to our entrenched neverosity. All that matters is that we aren’t responsible for either outcome. When the new Workers Party is frenzying itself to seize the means of production, we’ll be hanging back in our bourgeois suburban digs giggling at hapless hikers being eaten by giant spiders on Animal Planet Monster Week episodes.

Look: if you were previously anti-Trump but believe you need to back the presumptive GOP nominee because he’s the only person left standing in the way of the dangerous women he backed for President 8 years ago (and for Secretary of State after that*), I understand. To you it’s a practical choice. You’re a Party person. A Team Player! So thoroughly filled with common sense conservatism it dampens your pits! You understand that to have any actual impact on the real world you can’t just sit back and bitch on Twitter about how ugly is Trump’s body of lifework. Instead, you recognize that in order to beat the evil master-criminal Hillary you must actively stump for a guy who tries to intimidate judges and plaintiffs, who practices lawfare against “losers,” who supports a host of progressive policies and promises to make America Great again by reintroducing us to the wonders of trade protectionism, union vigor, price controls, federal mandatory minimum wage increases, racial nationalism (disguised as economic populism — and at odds with race-based affirmative action, which he supports), gender fluidity, and a medical system under which insurance companies are mandated to pay for pre-existing conditions while consumers aren’t compelled to pay any kind of fine for not purchasing insurance, thereby taking away every incentive to buy “insurance” in the first place. In one of the most ridiculous stated policy prescriptions ever recorded.

You do all this for FREEDOM, naturally.

But that I understand your position doesn’t mean your position is any less wrong. My ability to recognize your opportunistic practicality doesn’t make that practicality any less soul-crushingly stupid, nor any less enabling of a corrupted political culture driven by increasingly aggressive moral and intellectual rot. Your guiding principle, simply put, is backing the lesser of two evils — the payoff being that you share partial corporate ownership, you hope, in the ascendant evil that gets to be in charge of you for a bit. And you can justify your complicity by chiding the supposed “moral vanity” of those who choose not to spend the rest of their days averting their eyes from every mirror.

That’s your call. I understand it. And more power to you!

But once again, the truth is simple, and all your pleading and cajoling, all your shaming and cuck-calling, all your pointed barbs at “purists” and “TrueCons” with our outmoded principles (when you use that word, make sure you hit the second p hard, almost like you’re spitting it out), won’t change that truth: Never means never. No means no. And we aren’t negotiating. The issue is settled. The die is cast. And any further discussion is pining for the fjords.

Some of us, it turns out, are really quite okay with being “losers.” We’re perfectly content to remove ourselves from a sad, failed, corrupt party that for decades now hasn’t represented our interests and, in its leadership, openly disdains us and seeks our crushedness. And that’s because we recognize that what it’ll take to drag an orange con man over the finish line is not worth what we’ll have to give up to help those of you for whom winning is a form of personal validation.

So. To sum up:

We aren’t egoists. An egoist is the malignantly narcissistic candidate you demand we fall in line and support.

We aren’t sanctimonious. That appellation more properly belongs to those who insist that our refusal to heed their righteous call to defeat the Demon Hillary marks us as unclean and selfish, unwilling to join the congregation whose mission is to bring about the Greater Good, as articulated by a guy who tosses out law suits like Michael Moore does spare rib bones.

We aren’t “purists.” Purists are those who put party uber alles and demand others do the same.

And we aren’t “ideologues.” Because ideologues ignore experience. Ideologues refuse to learn from history. Ideologues base their beliefs on abstract ideas and utopian wishcastings — like, eg, that a guy with little political experience and a host of dubious personal connections to Marxists and race-baiters will heal the racial divide and lower the oceans; or maybe that a guy who has lived his life as a scion of corporatism and government cronyism for going on seventy years will suddenly evolve from boisterous sideshow “billionaire” to a national savior and a tremendous statesman.

We get it. But frankly? We don’t care. Truth is, we’re just not that into you.

Sorry.

*****

*even after Benghazi, Trump assured us Clinton was doing a “good job.”