Here is a distillation of the quixotic anti-Trump, Hillary-by-default campaign being conducted by the puritanical wing of the Republican Party – people like the libertarian think tanks and the editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and National Review:

If Trump wins, his ideas will take over the Republican Party, which would be unfortunate.   The best hope of the Republican Party is to combine and distill the best of the ideas of the various factions of the Republican Party.  Granted, four years under Clinton would be awful, and the Supreme Court would be lost to the Left for a generation.  But if republicans are ever to succeed in ending America’s failed experiment with central planning, they need to shift their focus from values (social issues) to principles (economics, national defense) and to undoing the damage inflicted by Obama’s evisceration of Congress, his attacks against the Rule of Law.

To those of us who do not see harakiri as a viable political strategy, it appears that the anti-Trumpists would rather be right than (help elect a flawed republican) be president.

There is some merit to their argument, though it might not have been raised by so many republican leaders if Trump had run a better campaign and his poll numbers had been stronger.  But why would these leaders still be raising it, unless they are dreaming that Trump will abdicate his nominee status and make way for  . . . Mike Pence? Ted Cruz?  Apparently the party leaders are throwing-in the towel on 2016 because they are confident the party will reclaim the White House with a better nominee in 2020.  But is it realistic to imagine that Clinton could be defeated in 2020 by a Republican party that had achieved unity on the critical ideas and picked a less-vulgar nominee?  Could the country pick up the pieces after four more years of our converting into a centrally-planned socialist model, eviscerating Congress, turning the Supreme Court into a kangaroo court, and completing the swap of Israel for Iran as our principal Middle Eastern ally?  Could four years of Trump make Republicans’ task in 2020 more difficult than it would be after four years of Clinton?

Rather than “I would rather be right than president,” the better motto for the behavior of the anti-Trump snobs might be that 1950s standby, “better red than dead,” which meant, better to surrender to the Russian commies (the “reds”) than die in a nasty  battle to resist them.  Update for 2016:  better to accept a corrupt socialist than fight to elect a vulgar capitalist.

Civilization is, by latest calculations, at least 20,000 years old, and it took a gestation period of 18,750 of those years for it to beget the world’s first sizable, liberal, democratic republic based upon individual freedoms and free markets:  the United States.  If you understand what Obama has done to this republic, and if you pay attention to what Mrs. Clinton is promising, you must realize that America’s 240-year-old miracle may be approaching its expiration-date.  Let’s not kid ourselves about republicans taking action in 2020 to turn themselves back into a capitalist nation. The socialist genie is never put back into the bottle; never has been, never will be.   (And please do not suggest that it has been, by Russia or China.) American capitalism is at the precipice of one- and-done.