I don't remember where, but some years ago I predicted that those who would lead the GOP back to sanity would be the political consultants b/c they would see that the party was on a path to defeat & victory was all they cared about.

The nature of their work forces them to be clear-eyed and data-driven. And such people are also by nature non-ideological. They are just hired guns whose techniques apply equally to both parties. They are sort of like lawyers who don't care if their client is guilty or innocent.

That the consultant class nearly always stays in its partisan lane is mostly because their clients insist upon it, not trusting those who work for the other side. Also over time consultants acquire specific knowledge about the nature of each party's constituency that helps them.

But at their core, the consultants must be non-ideological to be effective. They can't allow their personal policy preferences to bias them against those policies most likely to win an election in a particular place at a particular time. That would make them bad at their job.

Which brings me to Stuart Stevens, a prominent Republican consultant who has turned against the party he worked for all his adult life. Ross Douthat criticizes him today for not being ideological, for turning against the GOP for non-policy-related reasons. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/trump-republicans-lincoln-project.html

For some reason, turning against one's party simply because its leader, its apparatchiks & its grassroots base are utterly repulsive and disgusting is not good enough. Douthat expects a critique of their policy positions and why they are wrong to be the reason for estrangement.

Stevens offers no such critique and thus Douthat implies that his criticism of the GOP is superficial or even insincere. But that is not Stevens' job, that is the job for policy nerds like me, which I happily provide in many, many books and articles. So do lots of other nerds.

At places like @NiskanenCenter. There are also plenty of columnists like @MaxBoot who attack Republican policies from the perspective of an apostate. I suspect that much of Stevens' disenchantment with the GOP is policy-related, but more in the sense that it is politically

counterproductive than because it is inherently wrong policy-wise. But ultimately, policy must be effective on its own merits if it is to be politically successful. My mentor, Jack Kemp, used to pound that idea into me back in the 1970s. If Republican policies were working

Stevens would still be on the Republican team. I know that my own estrangement from the party was originally rooted in policy disagreements. And part of that disagreement was that I thought that many of my former party's policies would ultimately lead to political defeat.

I thought the hostility to immigrants was particularly insane given the long-observed decline in the white population and steady growth of the nonwhite population. Certainly vote-counters like Stevens could see this as well. Yet clearly what drives the Republican hostility to

immigrants go far beyond the policy question of the economic effects of immigration b/c all the reputable economic analysis shows that immigrants are a net plus, economically. Therefore, the antagonism to immigrants is driven by non-economic factors that are either racist or

bordering on racism. I've always noticed that the anti-immigrant crowd never complains about immigrants from Canada or Scandinavia, only those with brown or yellow skins from Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. That is because they are fundamentally driven by racism.

If one is disgusted by the motives of those behind a policy that clearly is the driving political force for those in the GOP is this a policy disagreement or something else? I don't think it matters and that's why Douthat's criticism of Stevens rings hollow.

As a right-of-center columnist who was hired precisely because he is right-of-center, I think Douthat feels obliged to be critical of Never Trumpers like Stevens and the Lincoln Project. But he can't defend Trump or the Republican Party's indefensible policies, so he

criticizes those who criticize the party and its leaders. This is ultimately pedantic, nitpicking the critics to maintain nominal allegiance to the party and movement one was hired to represent without being 100% intellectually dishonest. Ross is a smart guy so I think

that is what he is doing. The problem is that it is totally unsatisfactory to Republican loyalists. It's like a lawyer who insists on arguing about errors in police procedure when the client believes that his innocence should be sufficient to win his case. Other columnists

like the right-wing imbeciles who write for the Washington Post care nothing about intellectual honesty or consistency. They clearly see their job as defending Trump no matter how idiotic or contradictory his actions, even at the cost of thousands of innocent lives.

Such people are like the pre-WWII communists followed the party line when Stalin said they were for peace and switched overnight when they were told to be for war. Party loyalty was an end in itself no matter how absurd it looked to those outside the party.

This is why I think Trumpism will long outlive Trump's imminent defeat. Trumpists would rather control the Republican Party even at the cost of electoral defeat, than admit any of their ideas are wrong, even if their ideas are only wrong in the sense that they no longer

garner enough public support to elect candidates or enact their preferred policies in Congress. And elected official who tries to push the envelope, even if it is essential just to get elected, will find themselves outside the party's corridors of influence.

Eventually, enough defeats will empower the consultants like Stevens who may be able to impress upon some future Republican presidential nominee that modification of the Trump policy and political approach must be adopted or defeat is certain. This may trickle down to the rest

of the party and lead to political revival. History suggests that the GOP will have to lose four presidential elections in a row, as it did from 1932 to 1948, before the forces of moderation, revisionism and pragmatism can defeat the advocates of mindless consistency.