What [Adam] Schiff and his admirers do not understand is that in their resistance, they are simply mirror images of Trump’s supporters. In 2016, Michael Anton said the choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton constituted the “Flight 93 election”—meaning that true conservatives had no choice but to support a deeply flawed candidate because the republic was on the verge of extinction. That formulation gave Trump’s supporters permission to explain away his lies and cruelty because the alternative would be so much worse.
The difference between Anton’s nonsense and Schiff’s is that Schiff doesn’t acknowledge the bargain he has struck. He ends his book lamenting the perils of a political culture in which different parties cannot agree on basic facts: “In the absence of that shared understanding—if indeed each party is entitled to its own alternative facts—then what basis is left for judging the merits of any particular agenda or platform? If everything could be true, then nothing is true.” In the end, then, Schiff is describing a problem he helped create.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I don’t really think Schiff and Anton are at all comparable. Schiff’s statements have repeatedly been undercut by the facts. Anton’s, not so much. In fact, subsequent events would seem to bear out his thesis rather firmly.