I wrote this after thinking about Rush’s second hour on Wednesday, January 24, 2018. He discussed a survey question by Axios/SurveyMonkey, “Do you want another Republican to challenge President Trump for the party’s nomination in 2020?” reported in the Axios article Younger Republicans want an alternative to Trump and asked: Why Do Millennial Republicans Despise Trump?
The Conservative “never-Trumpers” are easy to understand when we consider leaders like John Sculley of Apple and Roger Smith of General Motors.
Sometimes, they are all “team-shmeam”: Go-along to get-along, be “diplomatic” until/so-that the cows come home, compromise on your values until the other guy “understands” you, and never take a stand for what you believe because that would alienate the people you want to convert.
Other times, they are well-read, engaging in deep discussion, hyper-analytical, love public-funding (even as Republicans or ‘Conservative’ Democrats), and often achieve some very remarkable things we respect them for. Yet, somehow they keep bumping into a glass ceiling on desirable results in their personal and vocational lives. Their elevators just don’t go all the way to the top floor when it comes to finding the results they want.
No matter who they are, they somehow overlook a few key things that make all the difference, such as taking the road less traveled or stopping to consider which road to take. So, they either hesitate at times they should assert themselves or assert themselves at times they should step back. When things go badly they can’t figure out how to turn them back around.
They manage the steam created by others, they travel in the wake of a larger organization, they may be the only good voice in the larger organization, but they can neither found nor create their own organizations that last. They often fail to properly attribute the causes of their combination of limited success and limited failure.
They conflate the “Biblical-Moses morals” Clinton violated with the “Gorgias rhetoric-ethic” of “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it” Trump cares little for. They don’t see a difference.
They cannot recognize the warning signs of a thriving company vs a dying one.
When proven wrong, they don’t pause to re-evaluate no matter how obvious. This is not because they are dishonest, but because they just can’t see the proof that they are wrong; it is invisible to them. Like frogs in a pot, they don’t believe the temperature is rising. To them, anyone who says that the temperature is rising just wants to exploit the frog-in-a-pot principle when it’s not actually true—so they think.
In about half of the things in their lives, they are like the kid who can’t keep a campfire going, even to save his own life.
Trump offends them because he takes the stand on values and work ethic that they either can’t quite bring themselves to take for fear of offending the people they hope to convert or that they somehow think are not important enough.
Whatever idiosyncrasies or quirks Trump has yet to refine in his manners, whatever caustic contribution Trump heaps onto America’s age-old problem of division, they can’t get past it—they can’t tolerate Trump’s human shortfalls—because they don’t know how to see and recognize the results, fruit, proof, product, effects, paydirt, harvest, or any other value that follows.
They don’t envision the house built in the end; they only smell the construction dust and complain about the jackhammers because they really believe that, while construction tools are necessary, the specific tools on site won’t make any positive difference. They aren’t open to opinion even though decades went by and the house never got finished. To them, the jackhammers are just too darn loud and building the house isn’t worth it.
Most importantly: These are very, very good people. They achieve many good things that we all hope will continue. They are not bad or ill-intended. Maybe that’s the problem: In some ways, they play life too “safe” and are either unwilling to scramble the eggs to make the omelet they want or they just don’t care for omelets anymore.