Should Joe Biden end up winning the presidency, his endorsers who still claim to identify as conservatives will face a test: Will they join the fight against his liberal agenda?
The term Never Trump has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Back in 2016, it was a way for conservative and Republican opponents of Trump to indicate that they would never be willing to vote for him — even in a general election against Hillary Clinton (regardless of whether they actually pulled the lever for her).
There was not much discussion in 2016 as to what would happen after the election, because most people assumed that Trump would lose. So once he won, the group drifted off in various directions. Some made their peace with Trump — wincing at his nutty tweets while recognizing that he was their only chance to advance their agenda and viewing him as ultimately an ally in the battle against the Left.
Others choose to take things issue by issue — criticizing his outrageous statements and actions while applauding decisions with which they agreed. Yet another group of dead-enders have sought to oppose him at every turn, even when he does something they may have, in a previous life, agreed with.
This latter group has taken the step of pushing for the election of Biden, and in some cases, for the defeat of all Republicans — as they see the party as entirely complicit in enabling Trump. The least cynical version of their argument is that getting rid of a toxic president, who pays deference to vile conspiracy theories from the White House, is crucial to the future of the republic. They argue that it is worth risking four years of a liberal president to get one who is willing to uphold some basic standards of the office.
If they get their wish, however, and Biden and Kamala Harris storm into office with a majority in both chambers of Congress and a willingness to nuke the filibuster to ram through a sweeping liberal agenda, what then?
There are, of course, Never Trumpers who were always moderate-to-liberal Republicans. And some for whom the Trump phenomenon created a greater and more permanent alienation from conservatism. But their ranks also include conservatives who passionately opposed most of the policies of Barack Obama, which Biden hopes to dramatically expand upon.
Biden has promised to add some sort of government-run plan to Obamacare, an idea which was defeated last time around. This would advance the longer-term effort to migrate to a socialized health system (which Harris endorsed during the primaries). He wants to reinstate the Iran deal. He wants to establish a $15 minimum wage and empower unions and fill the benches with liberal judges (while the Left pushes for outright packing of the courts). He wants to raise trillions of dollars in taxes and spend even more than that, adding to the record debt that Trump has helped accumulate.
For liberal supporters of Biden, this would all be fantastic news. But for Biden supporters who still cling to conservative ideological beliefs, things get more complicated.
One response would obviously be to determine that with Trump out of the way, they can in good conscience go back to focus on opposing liberalism, and thus join the fight against the agenda of Biden and Harris. However, this might not be the most likely one.
For one, people hate to be proven wrong. The conservatives supporting the Democratic ticket this year are trying to convince themselves, and others, that Biden is a reasonable and moderate liberal. So they may be inclined to give Biden more deference than they typically would a Democratic president and to grade him on a curve. Every time he pushes a liberal policy and they are called out by fellow conservatives, they may be inclined to keep making the case that he isn’t actually that bad, or that they’d much rather live with Biden’s policies than four more years of Trump anyway.
Furthermore, even with Trump out of the way, it will not end Trumpism. Quite the contrary, if Republicans suffer a major defeat this November, those lawmakers who remain are likely to be ones in redder states and congressional districts who were more loyal to Trump. And we’re already starting to see candidates even more fringey than Trump win Republican congressional primaries. The unrest in the cities, radicalism on campuses, distrust of the national media, and expected Biden-Harris agenda, are all likely to feed into the sort of sentiments on the Right that led to Trump in the first place.
Among the various factions that have developed in the Trump era, one group is known as the “anti-anti-Trumpers.” These folks may dislike Trump, but they tend to focus more of their attention on lampooning the excesses of Trump’s opponents. This group is viewed with particular scorn by Never Trumpers who see them as moral cowards for not being more forthright about the dangers of Trump.
However, the anti-anti-Trumpers might be the most likely model for how Never Trumpers will conduct themselves in a Biden-Harris administration. That is, they’ll focus most of their attention on the recalcitrant Trumpists within the GOP and on mocking elements of the Right, who will no doubt fall deep into conspiracy and extremism in opposition to Biden. They will call out as hypocrites other conservatives who criticize Biden for things that were excused when Trump did them. And they are likely to pay less attention to the damage that they understand to be caused by Biden’s policies.
