This piece by Never Trumper Max Book makes the correct observation on the surface but misses the big picture:
In 2014, Tom Cotton ran for the U.S. Senate proclaiming: “I believe in less government and more freedom.” Seven days ago, amid massive anti-racism protests accompanied by scattered looting, the Republican senator from Arkansas demanded the deployment of at least five Army divisions to the streets. “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” he wrote, employing a military term for “take no prisoners.”
There was no conceivable justification for such a draconian move. But Cotton’s panicky, premature demand is symbolic of the Republican Party’s transition from tea party libertarianism to Trumpian authoritarianism.
When President Barack Obama was in office, Republicans fulminated against executive orders and government spending. Now, they’ve learned to stop worrying and embrace both at unprecedented levels. (The budget deficit is projected to be $3.8 trillion this year, more than six times higher than when Obama left office.) The rejection of libertarianism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What’s worrying is that the Republican Party has become increasingly hostile toward liberal democracy.
He’s right that it’s become increasingly hostile to liberal democracy. But he’s wrong that this is a new phenomenon. The so-called “Tea Party libertarians” and today’s Trump cult are the same people. And they are no different today than they were then except for the bogus rationales they use to justify their hatred for modern America and the people with whom they are forced to share the country.
They have been in revanchist mode since the 1960s. Trump just finally ripped away the phony ideological veil they’ve been using to cover up their primitive desire to reverse all the progress that’s been made on behalf of racial minorities, women, gays and other forms of economic and social justice.
Trumpism is the conservative movement and the conservative movement is Trumpism. Whatever pretensions they had toward intellectualism, whether libertarian or conservative, were no more than an inch deep.
For instance, the allegedly libertarian Tea Party’s anger toward “health care reform” was incoherent and absurd, particularly considering that it was essentially a private-sector plan. Their anger was completely out of proportion and could only be explained as a backlash against the first African American president, the fear of losing power, and a deeply embedded reflexive reaction against any kind of government program that might benefit people who threatened their superior place in society.
In a way Trump did us a favor. It’s all out in the open and everyone knows what we’re dealing with now.