The blame game’s in full swing. Armchair campaign strategists just know that Kamala Harris should have thrown Joe Biden under the bus, or gone on Joe Rogan, or – the perennial favorite among self-declared centrists – trashed identity politics. Of course, it matters a great deal to find out why people who voted for Democrats in 2020 failed to turn out; of course, there needs to be an explanation (not freewheeling speculation) about Trump’s gains among Latino men in particular.

Yet one larger question deserves at least as much attention: why does anything recognizable to international observers as a center-right option seem to have disappeared from our politics? Why was the only 2024 choice between the far right and a vaguely progressive (not progressive enough for progressives, to be sure) center party?

This is another way of asking: why has never-Trumpism been such a failure? After all, among the self-exiled and the ejected, the movement featured creative political minds and, at least for a while, quite a bit of cash.

Part of the answer is that such figures never faced up to a proper reckoning with the history of the post-second world war American right (which also made Harris’s embrace of the Cheneys such a politically and morally dubious choice). If in doubt, never-Trumpers would default into Ronald Reagan or John McCain idolatry: such apparent moral icons would seem to provide the maximum........

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