Imagine there’s no Republican Party

It is, to put it mildly, not easy, but anti-anti Trumpism demands that you try:

It’s not even an original argument — his ShakeShack buddy Greenwald has been arguing for five years that American elites allied “across ideological lines” to oppose Trump, when in fact virtually all of the elites in the party that as of early 2017 controlled every branch of American government and a majority of statehouses supported behind Trump. The Republican Party remains a powerful force and Republican elites are even more in Trump’s pocket than in 2017. And Fox News is an absolutely critical and massively influential part of the Republican ecosystem. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s Fox that keeps this iteration of the Republican Party electorally viable despite its fanatical commitment to hugely unpopular upward wealth distribution.

Tabbi, in an even more crazy defense of he, Glenn and his buddies going full fash, is equally deluded about the typical Democrat:

From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of “noble lies” like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic mainstream isn’t just elitist and authoritarian, it’s almost laughably off-putting. In one moment it’s cheering for a Domestic War on Terror and in the next, declaring war on a Jeopardy contestant flashing the “A-OK” sign. It’s Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, maybe the most loathsome conceivable admixture. Who could be surprised a politically diverse group finds it obnoxious?

During the Trump years conventional wisdom didn’t just take aim at Trumpism. The Beltway smart set used the election of Trump to make profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy…

Let’s stop right here. Imagine writing, in June 2021, that it’s Democratic elites making “profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy.” Republican elites are currently engaged in a “debate” about whether formally legal forms of stopping Democratic electoral majorities from governing or whether extralegal violence is justified, but this one dump op-ed by an AEI fellow shows that it’s the Democrat Party that really hates democracy and the “populist” Donald Trump.

Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving legitimacy to racial despotism.

The statues of “Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt” aren’t coming down, and no mainstream Democrat or indeed anyone of any influence (the authors of the 1619 project very much included) is saying that American liberalism had accomplished nothing, but if you’re living in an elaborate fantasy world created to justify rooting for a cross between George Wallace and Calvin Coolidge to come back and own the libs, there’s no constraint on your imagination.