Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker has some advice for “rational or far-sighted conservatives”: since it’s too late to deny the Republican presidential nomination to “the monster they’ve created,” Donald Trump, they shouldn’t hesitate to support the “reasonable, experienced mainstream centrist,” Hillary Clinton.
Of course, Gopnik doesn’t think that’s likely to happen. He wrote in a Thursday post, “At this moment when [conservatives’] entire movement is about to fall apart and be handed out to a bizarre cartoon villain…the[ir] habit of hatred” for Hillary nonetheless carries the day. He alleged that “the same hysterical urge not to oppose or criticize Obama but to expose and humiliate and render him illegitimate is present in the conservative conversation about Hillary Clinton—she’ll be arrested! She’ll be indicted! She’ll be spanked!—this time with the sexual dimension embarrassingly blatant.”
From Gopnik’s piece (bolding added):
[Many] insist that Donald Trump is really the fault of the media—that a sensation-seeking shock circus has made a clown like Trump addictive and driven away grown-up discourse. And yet if successful politicians are now forced to become foul-mouthed circus acts, then how…did the most successful politician in twenty-first-century America somehow miss the memo? Obama’s eight-year demonstration of poise, imperturbable good humor, dry and sometimes biting wit…sucks up all the air from that argument…
…[O]ne, and only one, of our major parties has been going crazy for twenty years and is now having a full-fledged gibbering, I’m-The-Emperor-of-Antarctica breakdown...The Republicans have served up eight years of hatred and nihilism—and now they are surprised to find they have inherited hatred and nihilism as they actually appear in the real world, not neatly blown-dry and smirking but red and orange and heaving, cursing and swearing and contemptuous…
Various liberal types are recommending cross-voting for one of Trump’s Republican opponents where possible, but, wise or not, it seems too late for that…The weirdest thing is that, at a moment when rational or far-sighted conservatives should be sighing with relief that the alternative to the monster they’ve created is a reasonable, experienced mainstream centrist whose chief fault in progressive eyes is that she is too close to the conservatives’ own ideology —at this moment when their entire movement is about to fall apart and be handed out to a bizarre cartoon villain—the habit of hatred still seems to overwhelm [rationality]…The crazy is an addiction, the crazy is their language, the crazy is their life…It is as if, with the Joker about to take over Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon would be worrying that Bruce Wayne is the real problem: he has too many parking tickets to be trusted. The same hysterical urge not to oppose or criticize Obama but to expose and humiliate and render him illegitimate is present in the conservative conversation about Hillary Clinton—she’ll be arrested! She’ll be indicted! She’ll be spanked!—this time with the sexual dimension embarrassingly blatant.
