Great New Republican Idea: Blacklisting People Who Support Trump

Jazz Shaw has some thoughts on this, which can be summed up as "It's a terrible idea."

I was going to write about this a month ago when I saw a lot of people doing the shit I hate, which is creating Coordinated Group Shaming Efforts to bully people into compliance, rather than attempting to persuade them. Yes, there are lots of lower-level Trumpites who attempt ferocious attacks to bully people, but the effort on the other side is coming from people in higher positions of influence and, one supposes, respectability.

This is not how you approach allies; these tactics are used on enemies only. Because believe me, if the person you're trying a bullying campaign on wasn't an enemy before you tried this, he'll be your enemy afterwards.

I think Trump is a cataclysmic event for the Republican Party. I can't help but notice, though, that Trump arose partly due to a party that had become sclerotic and fossilized by repeating its own received wisdom too damn many times without ever thinking about it -- much the same as the liberals had become fossilized by the nineties -- and the response to a party splintering over endlessly regurgitated group dogma is more endlessly regurgitated group dogma, this time with a "Conform or Be Ostracized" threat attached to it.

I've become fatalistic about this. Yes, Trump would be a disaster for the party in most ways. Yes we should do all we can do to avoid that -- and yes, that means if he's one delegate short of the nomination, he should be denied it.

Unless, by some miracle, polls show that he has some kind of reasonable chance to win the election -- which I doubt in the extreme; and also, I'm still not sure I could support him even if he wasn't going to drag the movement into the dumpster fire with him. He seems, frankly, crazed do me, with his bizarre fixation on hand-size and Megyn Kelly.

I have my own personal Psychological Fitness test, and Trump has flunked it as hard as someone could possibly flunk it.

I just don't trust him with the Bomb.

Even if polls show him not losing catastrophically, it might be necessary to run a third-party bid against him anyway.

But this catastrophe is coming, in one form or the other. Either Trump is the nominee and we lose, or he's not the nominee and we also lose.

Or, God forbid, he wins the election, and then we might really lose.

Knowing that you're going to lose, and that therefore there are no nagging pragmatic reasons to compromise yourself, is very freeing.

I think the important thing is to begin planning ahead, and planning on what we'd like the conservative movement to look like during the Hillary Rodham presidency.

Do we want to be the party of openness to ideas, and a tolerant party, or do we want to be the mirror image of the Social Justice Warriors, with a litany of angry dogmas and lengthy Public Shaming Lists?

posted by Ace at 05:42 PM

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