Who Were the Never Trumpers and What Motivated Them? By Dan McLaughlin
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/10/who-were-the-never-trumpers-and-what-motivated-them/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=
Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, by Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles (Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $27.95)
Slogans and labels serve a crucial purpose in politics, like banners on the battlefield: They rally the faithful to join a particular cause, and to know what cause they are joining. As soon as a cause acquires a name, however, the name becomes equally a term of abuse by its foes. Eventually, the name itself becomes a matter of contention, for both those who claim its ownership and those who seek to avoid its associations. So it is with “Republican,” so it is with “conservative,” so it is with “neoconservative,” and so it is today with “Never Trump.”
For those seeking to understand how the “Never Trump” banner was first raised and why some still claim it for their cause, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles have written an important and useful book. It is not a polemic. The reader will not find a brief against Donald Trump, or an attack on the Never Trumpers — though the book provides fodder for either point of view. Saldin and Teles have a perspective of their own, of course: They clearly believe that standing against Trump’s presidential campaign was the righteous thing for Republicans to do in 2016, and they want to tell the story of why some people did it and others did not. They cite, albeit with a footnoted quibble, political-science work claiming that democratic systems depend for their survival on the Right’s but not the Left’s curbing extremists. Still, the book will not be intolerable for conservative readers, whether they love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in between.
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