Quote:
Originally Posted by Chief Rum
You're not alone in this. Pretty much describes me as well. I too have wondered why there aren't more of us. Are we just not speaking out? It feels like the fiscal (as opposed to social) moderate conservative has disappeared, whoch other GOP members have either fallen into a Trumpist subset or the old ultra conservative Christian side.
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Emphasis mine. There are some moderate Republicans who are speaking out, but readily dismissed (such as George Will, David Brooks, and to an extent, Ross Douthat).
And then there is the other phenomenon. My wife's parents are big Trumpers. They have the hats, bumper stickers (along with other bumper stickers about "libtards" - regardless of the fact that both of their daughters are very liberal), etc. My wife recently told me that when Trump was running, they were adamant that they weren't going to vote for him. They thought he was abhorrent. Now, they weren't as moderate as you and molson. They were definitely far more conservative, but made a big show about they weren't voting for him. Then they said, well because of Hillary, we had to vote for him, but we didn't like it. And now they've gone fullbore supporters. And part of it is probably because "he makes liberals mad" and part of it is that it speaks to things they believe but never really wanted to speak openly (they have quite a racist streak - thankfully they stopped posting anti-Muslims shit on Facebook after meeting my family and really liking them - yes Muslim can be humans too).
Anyways, that being said, I think a lot of moderate Republicans just went in too deep. Trump voters became like old people - they aren't that much of the electorate, but you know they'll vote and they are loud about what they don't like, so they are captive to them.
If only a few of the moderate Republicans had the strength of their convinctions (we'd always joke that Jeff Flake would be very anti-Trump in rhetoric and then vote with him anyways), maybe we'd see more.
I thought for a bit that with 2016, TRUE moderate Republicans were going to start having to become Democrats. Because the current Republican party just went deep into the tank for Trumpism. I know there is an idea some moderate Republicans have that after Trump is gone, they can come back and resurrect the party into something they'd rather see, but I think that is gone.