re: #60 Targetpractice

Makes perfect sense if you view it as a way of justifying voting for Trump but also denying that you’d side with Trump.

Why did you make them do that, liberalism?

That the thing about Never Trumpers; they deny that Trump is continuous with the previous strategies and arguments of US conservatism, but use exactly the same tactics. They take hostages, they create problems to solve, they operate from the basic premise that their opponents are a priori unserious and themselves a priori credible. They’re doing it right now, they’re just using slightly elevated language…

…because like Trumpers they believe in a natural hierarchy in which they are better than “liberals” (in the loosest, approaching-meaningless sense), they just derive that sense of superiority from different signifiers. And they despise Trumpers for upending their genteel oligarchy in favor of a populist oligarchy whose eruptions inconvenience them.