I just now happened to stumble on something that I and Peter Wehner — "a Reagan and double-Bush appointee," as I described him — wrote separately in May 2015. That, you may recall, was only one month before Donald Trump breezed down an escalator on national TV and incoherently announced his presidential candidacy, for which pluralities of Republican primary voters soon had the hots.
"In the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right," opined Wehner in those days before the infamous descent. "On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s." That Republicans "have become more extreme over the years" is but a liberal myth, he argued.
To which I observed: "A most convenient timeframe Wehner has chosen. Had he compared the conservative-progressive policies of the Obama administration to those of FDR, he would have found the same sort of conservative-progressive incrementalism; and had he compared today's GOP to President Eisenhower's era, he would have found that the radical right's 'stupid' and 'negligible' numbers, of which Eisenhower warned, have assumed control of the asylum."
What were the blazing red capes right before Wehner's bullish eyes in 2015, which those who soon became Never Trumpers — as Wehner did — entirely overlooked?
For one, in an inchoate blow to Beltway civility, "the Gingrich era" of the 1990s entailed a wholly politically motivated impeachment of a U.S. president. And that abomination would have been tremendously unlikely had Gingrich not first softened up the party for its egregious behavior by normalizing the use of extremist language and unrelenting assaults against Democratic pols. In other words, "the Gingrich era" of the mid-1990s cannot be divorced from the preceding Gingrich era — which Wehner nevertheless dismissed.
He also ignored the GOP's fundamental shift in fiscal policy, which began under President Reagan but outdid itself under George W. Bush. Annual budget deficits, once the bane of fiscal conservatives, became matters of no matter. The one GOP president who attempted to tame federal deficits, George H.W. Bush, Republicans angrily rewarded with forced retirement.
Also gone from the Grand Old Party were any real qualms about big government — again, a George W. legacy— as well as Burkean graciousness in the face of inexorable change.
Hence on "major issues," Wehner chose to dismiss Republican reality. His even greater deliberate oversight was that relating to the party's increasingly nasty temperament. Trump of 2015 had already made a popular splash with his racist birtherism, which congressional Republicans either went along with, or were cravenly mum. This was a dark harbinger of Trumpism, although it sprang from Goldwater and Nixon's Southern strategies and Ronald Reagan's Philadelphia, Miss., speech.
Merely a few months later, in 2015, conservative Peter Wehner became riotously apoplectic over Donald Trump and Trumpism, which, according to Wehner's older school of thought, represented an undesirable, radical break from GOP fundamentals. And so the Never Trump blinkers came off, as did the gloves, yet old schoolers had by then entered a knife fight with only their padded fists.
To Wehner & Friends in May 2015, the perception that Republicans "have become more extreme over the years" was but a liberal myth. Yet in the fast-ensuing months of 2015 and then like a thunderbolt in 2016, Mr. Wehner et al. realized that Republicans were indeed the very essence of extremism. Such metamorphoses occur only in durations of some considerable length. But Never Trumpers denied this, the bloody obvious, and most still do.
Unlike some folks on the left, I welcome a political alliance with Wehner's ilk. But they remain conservatives and would soon disparage any liberal turns in U.S. governance, bemoan these folks. Well, duh. Of course they are, and so of course they would. For that matter, they should, since every reigning political philosophy requires a counterbalancing act, just to keep things honest.
I do lament, however, that the Peter Wehners of Republicanism never saw what was coming. Worse, many among their ranks still believe Trumpism was but a sudden and terrible departure from what came before.