The desperate struggle of the NeverTrump movement

‘We ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about’, Arthur Koestler declared in The God That Failed, the volume of essays by lapsed communists that appeared in 1949, the year that the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and China went communist. There’s a certain loftiness to Koestler’s statement that can be rather grating, as though the formal badge of entry to opposing the dark side requires having submitted to darkness in the first place. Indeed, at the outset of the cold war, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who never flirted with the left (unlike many of his British contemporaries) expressed his qualms that more than a few of the ex-communists had retained their commissar-like qualities in opposing their former credo. But it’s also the case that they did possess an intuitive grasp of their former faith that eluded those who remained wishfully blind to the horrors of communism.

In a new essay in Esquire, Sam