Hardly - the most common criticism I see is that the Republicans are hypocritical opportunists. Linker basically says the same: No one can force someone else to see their own hypocrisy if they aren't willing to look for it. What's at play is the recognition that "your team" is under attack and it's better to piss outwards than in. As to the rest of it, the idea is that the Western World was going to mutherfucking collapse if Clinton won and that's batshit. It comes from a batshit essay, linked in the piece: To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024! Not to pick (too much) on Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who, at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer—“even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and war—right from the beginning. The strawmanning and misrepresentation here is egregious. Republicans believe in closed borders and trade wars? They're radical isolationists? WTF? To presume there is a philosophical basis for defending Trump presumes that Trumpism has a philosophical basis, rather than being the nihilism of a narcissist with minimal attention span. It's far more logical to presume that the Republican Party is attempting to get as much Republican business done as possible before the pendulum swings the other way. Because one thing Linker is right about: there are lots of Americans who don't like the way the establishment is going. But Trump isn't the only game in town and the alternative is going to suck for business-as-usual.From the liberal/centrist side of the spectrum, it is really hard to understand how the Republicans could be anything other than completely faithless, and two-faced liars.
There's obviously a lot of hyperbolic exaggeration and motivated reasoning going on in the account, and its blindness to Trump's own corruption, which dwarfs anything previously seen in Washington, is almost total.
To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
Yes and... ... there is the angle taken by the author that everything the Republican Party has ever stood for - American imperialism overseas, the military-industrial complex at all costs to quality of life at home, the imposition of Democracy on every culture on the planet, eternal war under the guise of anti-terrorism - is suddenly the "failed state" and due to the "deep state actors" that are some vaguely defined people in the past. Not Strom Thurmond and Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan and John Boehner and G. W/HW Bush and Dick Cheney and ... every Republican that has served in office back to Reagan! And it's just crazy enough, that I can actually believe that people who still call themselves Republicans - like my Mom - could actually believe this horseshit. I mean... yesterday Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in one sentence that her comments about "people in the FBI losing faith in James Comey" was just something she "made up on the spot", and IN THE VERY NEXT SENTENCE says that the thing that really upsets her the most is, "being called a liar." The capacity for the Republican mind to complete alter the facts, history, and their own words to meet some fluid "core set of beliefs they have always held" is truly a thing to behold. And it's going to fucking work, too. That's the scariest part. They've already won 2020, and I think are setting up for 2024 now.
What makes you think they've already won 2020? Trump only won in 2016 because he was running against the very definition of an establishment democrat, and one who was seen as corrupt and unpalatable by many voters. Even then, he only won because of the foibles of the electoral college system. Given the promising turnout from the midterms, a Trump victory (while certainly possible, mind) seems far from a foregone conclusion.
I guess KB's comment below demonstrates why the Republicans have already won 2020: The Democrats still can't figure out who they are, what they want to do, and 8 of the 10 people whose names you recognize running for the Democratic nomination are completely featureless, feckless, and unable to pull together any sort of compelling message. Meanwhile, the Republicans are voting for Republicans. It doesn't matter what the middle aged white guy says; as long as there is an R next to his name. That's the battle. And the Dems have lost it. Again.
Fundamentally: the Republican vanguard has largely chosen tribe over philosophy. This stands to reason as it's been Mitch McConnell's party free and clear since John Boehner pulled the ripcord and Mitch is purely transactional. Whatever the tribe says is gospel; Sarah Huckabee Sanders is living her best truth and if her best truth doesn't in any way align with objective reality that's because reality has a well-known liberal bias. The issue for the Republicans is that the message is now the message. You're Republican because you're Republican, not because you believe in anything. Trump's entire political message can be summed up as "own the libs." Paul Ryan got his tax cut and pulled the ripcord and ever since, it's been whatever Stephen Miller and the Federalist Society want because Trump has no central idea beyond "build the wall." So if you vote Republican what are you voting for? You're probably voting for the fact that you've always voted Republican. You might be voting for tax cuts if you're rich. You might be voting for fear if you watch a lot of Fox News but make no mistake: Fox News primetime is under 2 million viewers. Sure: that's more than watch MSNBC (most of the time) and slightly more than watch CNN (more than half of the time) but it's still one third the audience of Gray's Anatomy. That's the biggest myth of American politics: that people care that much. So if you're voting Republican, what are you voting for? You just linked to a thinkpiece attempting to reverse engineer the political motivations of the Trumpkin. It's borderline sovietology, a shadow analysis to determine if those missiles in Romania are anti-aircraft or anti-ballistic missile. The motivations are nebulous at best. But if you're voting Democrat, what are you voting for? Pick a slogan - "end corruption" "no kids in cages" "the rule of law" "medicare for all" "a return to normal" - they're all pithy and immediately relatable. They all have art. They've all been dragged through public debate so much that I fully expect to see the word "BURISMA" in crossword puzzles for the next 20 years. Trump was a protest vote. It's led to the protest presidency. Vote that way in 2020 and you aren't protesting, you're endorsing. And chances are good your kids and your grandchildren have been giving you plenty enough stink-eye for the past three years that you're ready to sit this one out.