As the designated contrarian of the Buckley Lounge, it gives me great delight (and no doubt irritates Jay) to reply to the question at hand by stating that the premise is wrong.

As I’ve written before, if you’ve embarked on the Never Trump journey, you’re already backing a third party. What label you affix to it & which candidate is at the other end is mere formality. So the question here is actually: should we go to the trouble of trying to wrest back the GOP label & infrastructure?

My emphatic response is no.

There is no indication that the populist uprising is a temporary madness and all conditions will return to 2012 levels once this cycle mercifully concludes. More than a third of the GOP coalition has unequivocally stated that they’re so thoroughly done with the “Establishment” that they’re willing to set themselves on fire like a Tibetan monk. I have no reason to play 3D chess with this faction and believe that what they’re actually saying is “this is just a one-off thing”. I believe the screaming evidence before my eyes that the populists are a permanent part of the new calculus.

As such, there is a permanent impediment preventing the GOP from advancing any agenda at a national level. If we try to reincorporate ourselves, it’s a certainty that the populist faction will sabotage any progress that might otherwise occur. There is the additional matter of brand damage — while the GOP brand hasn’t been particularly healthy for over two decades, it has now regressed to levels not seen since the Civil Rights era; possibly worse.

The neat solution here comes in realizing the GOP label is our most effective weapon against the populists. Somebody is going to have to clean up this mess — and I strongly suggest we let it be the populists who insist this is what they want. We’ve taken beating after beating over “intellectual elitism”, so let’s do the populists a favor & abscond with the intellectuals so they don’t have to deal with them anymore. We’ll leave the populist remnants with the political equivalent of Fukishima and set up shop somewhere above the flood plain.

Hijack the Libertarian party. The current management largely consists of well-meaning but incompetent loons. They’ve failed to organize a coherent, votable party and platform, so I suggest we employ our own power of democracy and overhaul their vehicle through force of numbers. What’s good for the goose…