In the closing weeks of the 1964 presidential campaign, at a rally in Marion, Ohio, I rose to meet my first test of Republican loyalty. Things were tough that fall and many in the party were keeping their distance from the nominee, ducking for cover, scurrying away to escape an impending landside. But not my older brother Chris and me. No sir, we were proud to step up on the platform, lend our unequivocal support, and even offer a kind of written endorsement for Barry M. Goldwater. The two profiles in courage were pictured in the next day’s Marion Star. From left to right: Matthew Scully, his brother Chris Scully, and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater at campaign event in Marion, Ohio during the closing weeks of the 1964 election. Photo appeared in the ‘Marion Star’ Oct. 1, 1964. The paper-plate signs we wore, and the black eyes simulated with eye shadow, were my mother’s inspiration, playing off a well-known cigarette ad of the era in which customers declared they liked their Tareytons and “would rather fight than switch.” Her idea worked well enough to catch the attention of a campaign aide, who spotted us in the crowd and led us onto the stage — to the delight of Mrs. Goldwater, who said to her husband, “Look, Barry, isn’t he cute?”(READ MORE: The #MeTooing of Wayne Pacelle) I note for the record that my other older brother, Steve, would have been standing there with us that afternoon but for a meddling teacher at Columbus, Ohio’s St. Agatha School who should have been ignored. And it was Goldwater himself, many years later, who pointed out to me an “intriguing” detail in the background of the photo, a sign showing the left half of his opponent’s slogan ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ. Naturally, I have the picture framed in my office, as does Chris in his office, and it always offers much to ponder. Lately, time is a theme of my wandering thoughts. It gets the Baby Boomer Angst stirring when I reflect, for example, that 34 years after first meeting Senator Goldwater, I covered his funeral for National Review, and that article about his sendoff is already more than a quarter-century old. Indeed, if the ex-Republicans at the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark … have any trait in common with liberals, it’s that they will never, ever admit to being proved wrong. Or how about this: If a man in 1964 had shared a vignette of political history comparable to mine from that year, it would tell of a boyhood encounter with Alton B. Parker, the defeated candidate in the campaign of 1904 against another incumbent who had assumed office in tragedy. From the present back to that day in Marion, and from there to the McKinley-Roosevelt era, is the same distance of time. Or finally, consider that in October of 1964, a time I can remember, Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the Senate, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate from Minnesota was named Humphrey, Ronald Reagan debuted in politics, Jimmy Carter turned 40, Herbert Hoover died, and on the very same day Kamala Harris was born — two weeks before the ’64 election. And so on — fading scenes, the ever-receding past, the wheel turning. Heavy stuff. The Hysteria Machine Mostly, though, that 60-year-old picture on my wall helps keep me oriented politically — and, I like to think, also grounded in practical political reality. Experiencing first impressions of politics from Goldwater ’64 can prepare you for certain constants in Republican affairs, while conferring enough immunity from illusions about the Democratic Party and the media to last a lifetime. I guess the image is what Jungian analysis would call an “archetype” in my mind. If some Viennese psychiatrist were to take me into a room for hours of questioning, shades drawn as he probes for the innermost ideal that shapes what I perceive and seek in the political world, that’s what he’d come up with: the manful, principled, maligned but thoroughly admirable figure of Barry Goldwater, champion of freedom. Probing further, the analyst might extract a formative memory of the modern Democrat Party in action. This one, if you can bear a little more reminiscing, goes back to the 1970s. Watergate was a very big deal for me when I was a teenager, a matter I followed, after our family had moved east, every day in the New York Times, Daily News, and on television, and argued about with any high-school classmate or teacher who sneered at the name Richard Nixon in my presence. That man, so grotesquely caricatured by the press, was one of the finest, most astute and able ever to serve as president, and he was engaged at the time in trying to manage other crises involving the security and interests of America and our friends. An exhaustive archival search of White House mail from those days would turn up letters from me urging him to keep fighting on, and also commending Vice President Ford for his loyal defense of Nixon right up until August 1974. I credit my young self for grasping, amid the hysteria, how utterly contrived the Watergate drama was from beginning to end; how destructive it was to our country and to those who depended on us (the people of South Vietnam, among others, left to pay the horrific costs); and how self-serving were Nixon’s tormenters in the Democratic Party and its media apparatus. These posturers lived out their days being toasted as heroic truth-seekers. In reality, they had acted in devious, reckless, and contemptible ways that did lasting harm, a story best told by Patrick J. Buchanan in Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever (and also by attorney Geoff Shepherd in three excellent, irrefutable accounts of many events surrounding Watergate). Such was my disgust at the time that, to this day, the very word “Constitution” is marred for me because I often still hear it in the insufferable voice of House judiciary committee chairman Peter Rodino, the Democrat who presided over the impeachment hearings. Like other travesties to follow, such as the Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Watergate was a spectacle of fake indignation, bad faith, and guile that only liberals could conjure up. That era gave us the Washington hysteria machine they’ve been operating ever since, at full pitch and practically nonstop since Donald Trump entered the picture in 2015 — the make-believe Russian collusion investigation, two slapdash impeachments, and the recent array of spurious criminal cases, being just highlights in that story. It is no commentary on upright and proud Democrats individually, of course, but only on their party as a force in our national life to point this out. More even than the virtues of my own party, it might be the distinctive qualities of the other — the underhandedness of Democrats at the national level, their capacity for disingenuousness, their groupthink and way of turning barely-concealed agendas into all-consuming manias — that have made me a loyal Republican, in the Trump years as much as ever. The ‘Never-Trump’ Posture With this hardcore background to steady me, I have never had the faintest “Never Trump” impulse come over me these past nine years, even though, at the outset, I had mixed, unsettled views. If one longed for a candidate with the bearing and clarity of Barry Goldwater, or with the expansive, disciplined mind of Richard Nixon, to say nothing of graces we remember as Reaganesque, Trump was not the man. Along with a majority of Republicans, I suppose, I’d have preferred a more orderly and polished version of the same candidate, if such a being could even exist, with roughly the same agenda of issues that the party’s presidential candidates, consultant class, and assorted big thinkers had long ignored or else tried too hard to finesse. I didn’t exactly rejoice at Trump’s arrival but I didn’t mind it either. If he signaled a sudden re-shifting of allegiances in an otherwise static political landscape, a newfound connection with the concerns of voters my party had either neglected or taken for granted, and best of all an end to our reputation for milquetoast, “country-club Republicanism,” I certainly welcomed all that. In fact, as the large field of 2016 Republican candidates narrowed to a few, I called myself a “Never Kasich” man when the grating then-governor of Ohio offered himself as the last establishment hope against a Trump nomination — foolishly and characteristically inviting the very outcome he was resisting. “Populism” is an academic’s word, and discussions on the subject, as explanations for Trump’s appeal, hold zero interest for me. The most relevant point about 2016 was that so many anti-Trump Republicans were unprepared for the upheaval. That they were left so horrified only revealed, of course, how estranged they’d become from voters they should have been paying attention to. Even the post-Romney 2012 Republican “autopsy” report concluded basically that the party wasn’t enough like the Democrats on such matters as trade and illegal immigration, and on social issues such as abortion — the very opposite of what the 2016 returns would so explosively demonstrate. With such a clueless expert class, in both parties, Trump’s victory was as if a giant meteor had been hurtling for years toward Earth without a single astronomer noticing and giving warning until the thing appeared directly overhead. I can’t claim to have been especially alert myself. It fell to my brother Chris, a Trump supporter from the start, to set me straight. Early in the summer of 2015, as I was running through the relative strengths and prospects of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and other contenders lining up that year, he matter-of-factly told me, “Matthew, Donald Trump is going to be the next president.” He also informed me, long before it played out this way in early 2020, that progressive Democrats would end up coalescing to make Joe Biden their pliable front man as the nominee. So when Chris does his forecasting, you want to listen. Plenty of fellow conservatives I respect simply don’t like Trump, regard him as a “bad man” even if he might at times serve good principles, won’t take the tradeoff in order to elect a Republican, and even now still aren’t sure they can bring themselves to support him against Vice President Kamala Harris. That’s just never been my take at all. I find qualities to like and admire in the untamed spirit of Donald Trump — his entertaining disregard of PC etiquette, his resilience, incredible stamina, and defiance against calumny and opposition, among other traits — and the impression is partly based, for what it’s worth, on a couple of brushes with him in 2016 and after his presidency. (As if to compel another vignette for this piece, we were introduced in Phoenix at the former residence of Barry Goldwater.) Yes, we Trump voters could all do without the time-wasting rally riffs, the disconcerting asides, the kind of pointless conflict with fellow Republicans that in 2020 cost a Senate seat or two in Georgia, some of the Truth Social stuff, and other downsides on a lengthy list that anyone, and above all his own campaign advisors, could draw up. (READ MORE: More Takeaways on the Trump – Harris Debate) And his comments about John McCain over the years stand as a bewildering mark against him, showing an animus I have never understood toward a truly heroic man and servant to our country whom I was honored to work for — and also a man who, one could easily forget, supported Trump in ’16 despite whatever deep misgivings he had. As some of these faults keep tripping up our standard-bearer in ’24, an agonizing spectacle at times, I imagine the advice that Nixon, who first noticed Trump’s political potential, would give him now: Speak to the unpersuaded, explain your positions, read prepared speeches, stick with a plan, lay off the nonsense and quit playing to a crowd that’s already with you. Everybody pulling for Trump can see these problems as clearly as the people who detest him can see them. The flip side is that everybody knows he’s sui generis and, as NR’s Andrew McCarthy puts it, the flaws are “priced in” to a package many voters will take anyway — a kind of durability that comes only when a candidate really stands for something. In the way of “bad men,” or merely deluded ones, there’s no denying that a large contingent of them made an appearance at the U.S. Capitol one afternoon in January 2021 — that “wild” day, as Trump promised it would be. In high-pressure scenarios that call for self-command and presence of mind, he handles assassination attempts better than he handles mob scenes. What pointed, evocative words would Senator Goldwater have chosen to describe that sorry ending to a presidency? Democrats, “Never Trump” ex-Republicans, and liberal commentators are here correct, for once, in treating this violation of norms as inexcusable. Still, if we wanted judicious appraisals as to whether this rendered the former president “unfit” for another term, they would be the last people we would ask. I have never been impressed by Republicans who make a big show of exiting our ranks in objection to Trump’s influence. And least of all do I take seriously the declarations and grandiose “open letters” of various former White House and campaign colleagues of mine endorsing Harris. If you’ve been around a while, you know that such ostentatious departures are among the constants that every presidential campaign season brings. It would violate a fixed law of Republican politics if, every four years, we did not hear news of certain Republicans announcing to reporters that they can be silent no more about the supposed extremism of a nominee; that each is so dismayed and alarmed as to “no longer recognize my party anymore.” President Trump does draw more than his share of this treatment, but anyone who thinks he is the first to receive it must have missed 1980, when, in a refrain of that primary season, as also of the ’76 primaries, a big-state governor told reporters: “If Ronald Reagan is nominated, this party won’t recover for a generation.” Reagan, George Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney are all held out now in liberal commentary as model statesmen and moral exemplars by comparison to Donald Trump. Do some searching and you’ll find, I promise, that each of these nominees had his turn as leading figure in the never-ending media narrative of dark and disturbing trends in the Republican Party. With my background in speechwriting for the second President Bush, Senator McCain, Governor Sarah Palin, and others, it has occurred to me that a week’s worth of minor fame and media pampering awaits even me, if only I will make it known that I’ve had it! with “all the extremism” and “can hardly recognize my own party anymore!” Though these performances by disenchanted Republicans date back to ’64, when some in the party declared Goldwater a dangerous if not deranged man (often citing the helpful headline, “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to Be President”), they now come in a style and tone only our era could produce. Combine social media-driven vanity with Lincoln Project-level sanctimony and you get “Republicans for Harris.” Plus, of course, endless melodrama. I was amazed, on this score, to come across recently a Substack piece by an ex-Republican campaign professional I know, a man I like and respect a great deal even though poor judgment has got him writing and podcasting these days about Trump and nothing else, in a series called “The Warning,” while also extolling the newly revealed gravitas, awe-inspiring presence, and, well, sheer wondrousness of Harris. The piece was composed, he tells us, on a hike in Germany within sight of what remains of Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest. “I can see clearly,” he wrote, “the genius of Aaron Rupar’s phrase ‘sane washing’ to describe how Trump is covered in America, which is much like Hitler was covered in Germany. I see clearly how evil can emanate from a beautiful place like Palm Beach, Florida.” As Republicans convened in Milwaukee this summer, this same fellow wrote: “Donald Trump is a fascist. His convention is a gathering of fascists.” But when things start to look this stark and ominous, when you’re hearing Franklin Graham, Lee Greenwood, and Hulk Hogan but can’t get Nuremberg out of your mind, it’s not the party that is nearing the edge, and my friend should stop to clear his mind. Incessant alarm, overwrought sentiment, cliché, and undercurrents of ill will are as much the signature touches of “Never Trump” ex-Republicans as they are of the progressive causes these people have, in effect, embraced with their support of the Democratic Party. And you have to wonder if their mistake might have been joining the party in the first place, long before Trump arrived on the scene. Consider that the Lincoln Project, a snake pit of intraoffice acrimony over personnel and money, was founded by, among others, the top strategist for McCain 2008 and the top strategist for Romney 2012. Here are the guys Republican voters once counted on to help win crucial elections, and both are now professional “Warning”-sounders and MSNBC explainers of how hateful and dangerous Republican voters are. The story that the Romney 2012 guru tells is a brooding, self-involved drama of disillusionment and betrayal in which it finally dawned on him that this was a mean and “racist” party all along, going back to 1964 — a libel on Goldwater and others that I have answered elsewhere. A less trite, and more truthful, version of the story would tell of the cluelessness, arrogance, self-enrichment, and misplaced trust by which the 2012 election was thrown away to help set the stage for Trump’s takeover of the party. Peruse a list of embittered ex-Republicans like this operator who now bemoans the “lies” of others, then weigh that against a list of ex-Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Alan Dershowitz — substantial people with serious things to say — and you’ll want to keep the trading going. We’re coming out ahead every time. With another, less distasteful breed of “Never Trump” Republican, the basic problem has always been that they simply cannot get past the compromises and sullied motivations that come into play in politics generally, and so turn every discussion of Trump into an ethics seminar. Nor is there any liberal equivalent of their punctilious approach to weighing options, the strained even-handedness and tortured rationalizing that would have Republicans cast our lot with Kamala Harris despite disapproving of practically everything the woman stands for as a candidate. Like extremely scrupulous judges at a show trial, unaware of what’s actually going on, these commentators still take seriously the Left’s avowedly high-minded reasons for hostility to Trump — always a mistake. Thus a widely noted New York Times column in August by one Republican commentator: “To Save Conservatism from Itself, I’m Voting for Harris.” Try imagining an analogous piece from the Left — “To Save Progressivism from Itself, I’m Voting for Trump” — and you realize how one-sided, idle, and fixated the “Never Trump” case can be. Do progressives and their leaders pose no dangers to our country that might point informed conscience in the direction of the Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ticket, as the sole realistic alternative? Have the progressives in power today no troubling policy plans, abuses of power, or derelictions of duty to answer for? Republicans Against Republican Victory Can we Republicans please conduct our collective moral-purity test later and get on with trying to hold back the leftist agenda, with the democratically chosen nominee we have? Over on the Left, at least, they skip the “saving” of the sacred tablets and confessions of worldly aspiration to concentrate instead on practical imperatives, which is why their presidential candidates were so readily switchable in July — Biden a beloved, FDR-like colossus one day and a cast-off ball and chain the next. To buy into “Never Trump” in 2024, you have to get comfortable with self-contradiction and make-believe, suspending reason and judgment in the hopeful expectation that a progressive Democratic presidency will somehow turn out better than a mostly conservative Republican presidency under Trump — “saving” our principles while everything else is lost. The method of “Never Trump” Republicans is to take any alleged vice of Trump’s and assume as fact the corresponding virtue in Harris, and then to lash out at the rest of us for not falling for a word of it. And it won’t really matter when none of these hopes materialize: there’s never any accounting, never any acceptance of responsibility for choices they have made and urged on others. They never go back and acknowledge that their hopes — for minimally competent economic policy under Biden-Harris, for anything resembling control of public debt, for basic border enforcement, for international crises averted, or for whatever else — were unfounded and that their assumptions were false. Indeed, if the ex-Republicans at the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark, and other such anti-Trump outfits have any trait in common with liberals, it’s that they will never, ever admit to being proved wrong. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — in a strange turn … the other day said that Republicans are now “the party of the common man.” Something else that the two groups have in common, which helps explain all the melodrama, is a way of taking politics so personally that it begins to overwhelm everything else; to determine one’s friendships, social standing, emotional well-being, or even, at the extreme, one’s own basic identity and sense of meaning in life. A top aide to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, who is also working now as a strategist for Harris, has described 2016 as the year that “will scar us for as long as we breathe the same air that Trump befouls with his every word.” The raptures of November 2008, by contrast, recall for him such a “blissful” time for Democrats, a moment when “me” became “we” and so many embraced the joy of “living part of their lives every day through and on behalf of Barack Obama.” People didn’t used to talk that way about election outcomes. Politics has always been a pretty intense business, of course, but it used to center mostly on tangible, rationally debatable issues, leaving all concerned to find meaning and self-worth on their own. You could argue with liberal supporters of, say, Henry Wallace in the ’40s, or Adlai Stevenson in the ’50s, without fear of encroaching on anyone’s bliss or denying them their joy, while also trusting that they could meet election-night defeat without facing existential shock. Mature men and women are supposed to be able to handle disappointment. Presidential elections back then were about — what else? — choosing the head of the executive branch of government; no one was looking for self-affirmation, purification, or nirvana. Trump gets blamed these days for causing depression, ruining friendships, marring family gatherings, “befouling” the very air we breathe. But really he is just the point of convergence for psychodramas of desolation and intolerance that we would see acted out in other ways. Such hypersensitivity in politics, the attitude that sees ultimate stakes in every presidential election, and spreads panic over the unbearable prospect of a loss at the polls, is built into modern liberalism — all along the main driver of hysteria and bitterness in American politics. A related feature of the progressive Left, and often of our permanently militant “Never Trump” ex-Republicans, is that whenever they throw an accusation our way, we can almost always be certain that they are guilty of the very offense in question. It’s uncanny how this rule applies in almost every case. We hear, for example, He’s a threat to our constitutional order. This from people on the Left who for 50 years have acted as if the Constitution and Supreme Court exist only to give them whatever they want, and now pledge to restructure a branch of government that has failed in its solemn institutional duty to deliver liberal outcomes. Another example: He’s cruel, especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This accusation comes from a political party whose most fervent cause since 1973 has been to exclude an entire category of humanity from the protection of law. I’ve long suspected that one reason why Democrats still wallow endlessly in past civil rights glories is that the mid-’60s marked just about the last time they were collectively on the right side of a crucial moral issue — and even their claim to those glories is exaggerated. And so we hear them today openly celebrating abortion, on demand and at any stage, as “freedom,” which no doubt is how it seems when you simply erase from your mind the fate of an innocent, unwanted fellow human. And because they cannot even speak and argue coherently on so profound an issue, because they have no respectable arguments to prevail in honest debate, they’re now reduced to instructing us, in the bellowing, self-satisfied voice of Tim Walz at their convention, “Mind your own damn business.” Likewise: Our rights, our very democracy, are at stake in 2024. This from people who in 2020 used every contrivance available to stretch the limits of voter traceability, as Democrats will do again even as they try to silence every doubt about election integrity; fell in with the lawless and destructive BLM madness of that year; and, instead of minding their own business, demanded our cooperation with all the little commissars and informants set loose on America during the Covid era, with no concern for the consent of the people or the Bill of Rights. Then there’s this insult, a judgement on MAGA rallies: They’re like a cult! The charge recalls again the recent Democratic National Convention, which presented us with an arena full of people chanting “Joy! Joy! Joy!”, hailing their suddenly reincarnated nominee as “the president of joy,” and other such displays of forced, programmed, unhinged emotion. It would have fit the picture had there been a mass “auditing” of delegates and an appearance by Xenu to help show A New Way Forward. And finally, this collection of accusations, courtesy of a recent “Republicans for Harris” statement signed by various former foreign-policy and national-security officials: Trump “undermined our allies,” “won’t stand up to Russia,” “brought danger to our country,” and “disparaged our veterans.” Reading the full statement from these wise men of the foreign-policy establishment, it helps to know that many of them in 2020 also endorsed Joe Biden, that master of the global chessboard responsible for a calamitous, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan that sent a signal of weakness across the world, and for practically inviting Russia’s ruthless attack on Ukraine by suggesting that an “incursion” could be tolerated. We are assured that Kamala the stateswoman has “demonstrated a commitment” to Israel, as if this meaningless verbiage could outweigh Trump’s record of shutting down Iran’s oil exports to deny funding for terrorists, ridding the region of the prime terrorist Soleimani, setting the Abraham Accords in motion, and defying timid, conventional thinking by placing the American embassy in Jerusalem. The Very Good People Who Support Trump In general, I seem to recall that Russia, Iran, China, and other hostile countries were all a lot quieter and more circumspect before Biden arrived. Examine the spotty records and globalist thinking of these same Republicans for Harris — think-tank Talleyrands whose idea of a shrewd move is to prolong the carnage in Ukraine and wage a proxy war against a nuclear power — and it’s obvious they are in no position to pronounce judgment on Donald Trump, a president who defended American interests and kept the peace. Which makes it only more reprehensible that their statement recycles the claim that Trump “disparaged our veterans,” evidently an allusion to a toxic smear tossed into the 2020 campaign by the liberal Atlantic magazine, which reported that Trump had insulted the memory of American soldiers who served in the world wars. It happens that over the last several months I’ve spent time with quite a few veterans, including ten very vigorous centenarians who served in World War II. To share just a toned-down version of the consensus, as a group these men do not think highly of the current president but they do support Trump. Run that foreign-policy experts’ statement by the men and women at any VFW or American Legion post in America and see how many Harris supporters you can sign up. If the election were to be decided by the votes of veterans alone, which candidate would you put your money on for a landslide? As long as Donald Trump’s name is good with men and women in those ranks, it’s good with me. Whatever it is about our three-time candidate that rates their approval does him lasting credit, and is an asset as crucial and telling as any his party can claim. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — in a strange turn, the figure in ’24 whose theme of resisting concentrations of power, private or public, most recalls the Goldwater era — the other day said that Republicans are now “the party of the common man.” Why shouldn’t we like the ring of that? Why not support and respect the guy who earned us the tribute? Honest reasoning may lead others this year to different conclusions. But as for me, I wouldn’t consider switching. Loyalty settles the question, and I will again proudly cast my vote for the nominee of the Republican Party. The post Republican Loyalty and the Self-Delusions of ‘Never Trump’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.