Where Have All the Conservatives Gone?

I’ve grown fond of avoiding Twitter lately. Just as I cultivated the perfect feed of conservative political thought, the Trump train rode into the station. The growing popularity of Hillary’s planted menace in our midst slowly but surely threatened to take over. In the beginning, conservative thoughtmakers would publish one comment clarifying Trump’s detrimental impact on the election. But, as his Craigslist-cast, MSM-fed popularity grew, the focus came off of the Hillary/Bernie opposition. Suddenly, the entire conservative mind was expected to be obsessed with Trump.

Like children fantasizing about a mythical monster in a closet, conservative pundits couldn’t stop talking about the D-lister from the ’80s. A small group of us warned, “He’s the Clintons’ new Ross Perot, move on,” to no avail. Apparently the ideological movement so enamored with Reagan was going to cling to the last vestiges of his infamous decade, come hell or high walls. In a panicked mania, conservatives began re-tweeting disgustingly racist, anti-Semitic tweets from Trump supporters. The tactic backfired, giving only more publicity to a faceless social media campaign that often plays more like a Putin spambot attack than a legitimate grassroots enterprise.

Then National Review, the bastion of conservative thought in print, devoted an entire issue to defeating Trump. It was a risky move. Most agreed that their base readership would already share these anti-Trump opinions, while those who supported Trump most likely wouldn’t read the magazine anyway. But, at least it was an attempt to put a face on the anti-Trump groundswell. For a moment in time it seemed to encourage conservatives who feared losing the GOP to fascists. But, the victory was short lived. Primary victories led right-wing pundits to start listing reasons why an ignoramus Trump would still be better than Hillary in the White House. Then, after Super Tuesday’s deference to Trump, ardent anti-Trump conservative Bethany Mandel reported on a Conservative Political Action Conference that was more akin to a funeral wake than an energizing election year political conference.

Now folks are wondering if conservatives should leave the party altogether. You can’t really blame them. After all, some are starting to feel very real, very threatening heat from Trump supporters, enough so that they’re arming themselves against fellow Republicans.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s folks are ramping up for the kind of nasty electioneering we haven’t seen since George W. Bush was compared to Hitler. Hillary made it even easier this time around, giving us the perfect liberal caricature of the “Evil Republican.” The “Trump = Mussolini” signs have already been pre-printed and are just waiting for distribution.

And the only thing conservatives (and Republicans in general) can seem to focus on is the embodiment of a walking dick joke.

The Left is presenting us with the choice between Stalin and Stalin with Bear Hugs and our best response is, “But we aren’t fascists, we swear!” The Never Trump fight is the culmination of the Right’s battle against a pop culture of declining morals and narcissism. Only now we’re stuck fighting someone who claims to be one of our own.

If you’re a conservative, you’ve spent 8 years railing against the European socialism at our doorstep. You’ve battled against nationalized healthcare, excessive government regulations on businesses, increased federal powers and Obama’s abuse of office. And you’re going to throw all that away on a loser’s 15 minutes of political fame. Whether you believe Trump is a Hillary plant or not doesn’t really matter. What does matter is how much time and energy you waste focusing on him instead of the real threat of European socialism waiting to walk into the White House.

Hillary couldn’t have picked a more auspiciously named stool pigeon.