"If Hitler invaded Hell, I should make at least a friendly reference to the Devil in the House of Commons"

Much has been made on "our side" of Never Trumpers.

Don't trust them, some say.

They're just pissed off that Donald Trump is saying the quiet things out loud, they say.

And, to some degree, they're right.

But there are degrees of Never Trumpers.

There are the likes of Rick Wilson. He hates Trump, no doubt about that. But that doesn't mean he looks kindly on Democrats. His sneering condemnations of Democrats not being "tough enough" to take on Mauron, or that when they do sullenly take him on they're doing it the wrong way and should just jettison all Democratic priorities and become liberal Republicans, out him as a not good-faith ally. He's an ally of convenience, who will go back to scorched-earth campaigns against us once this peril is averted.

But that's fine. For every Rick Wilson, there's a Jennifer Rubin. Remember her? She loathed Barack Obama. She excoriated Democrats in her columns for the Washington Post.

But, an actual authoritarian in the White House, aided an abetted by a bankrupt party, does much to concentrate the mind.

Does she lapse sometimes? Yes. Is she a liberal? No.

But what she is is a believer in the American experiment. She's a believer in liberal democracy. She believes—knows—that right now the nation is in a peril it hasn't faced in its history, not since the Civil War. And this is worse than the Civil War. In the Civil War, the central government fought to quash a rebellion. Today, the central government is in the hands of a cabal which wants to enshrine a dictatorship. You have only to read Attorney General William Barr's outrageous screed to the Federalist Society to realize that these people want nothing but a theocratic dictatorship. And Jews and other minorities like Rubin will have no place in the New Order.

And Bill Kristol, whose tweet leads this piece? My God, how often have I trolled him in the past for being "Wrong Way Bill"? Every time he prognosticated something, he was so excruciatingly wrong that I felt some pity for him. He was a right-wing warrior par excellence. His father was, in fact, the progenitor of the neo-conservative movement. Surely, he too would be in league with Trump?

But Wrong Way Bill has found his way. He, too, at the end of the day, is a believer in America. And, he, too, as a Jew, sees no place for himself in the New Order that kapos like Stephen Miller and the Kushners are working to usher in.

From what I've seen, the majority of Never Trumpers, while not having a Damascene conversion and seeing the light of liberal Democratic policy, are principled conservatives. They will disagree with me and you on policy. But they don't deny our right to exist. They fight their fights in the peaceful political arena. They have no use for brownshirts. They want an America which embraces diversity, where liberal and conservative ideas contest the public space, but do so peacefully, in the normal course of politics.

This isn't to say that they don't have much for which to atone. Just this week, Joe Walsh—yes, that Joe Walsh—asked for forgiveness again for his part in ushering in Trump. The conservative movement, including Never Trumpers, laid the groundwork for what we're suffering now. That shouldn't be forgotten.

But, where atonement is made, forgiveness should be granted. As a pragmatic liberal, I can't hold on to hatred. I can't afford to dismiss allies, whether of convenience or of true commonality. Our times are too perilous. We are in a war, and anyone who strives to defeat incipient fascism I will count as my fellow in the trench.

It will take much time to salve the toxicity of our age. But I yearn for the day when I can again needle Kristol and Rubin and Walsh. But no longer with animus, but with the joy of a democratic contest. As James Baldwin wrote: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” We need to create a new modus vivendi where political disagreements are not existential matters. For longer than we care to admit, that hasn't been the case. If we're to survive as a unified republic, we need to fashion that world anew.

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