Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch have a message for all conservatives in The Atlantic, a message which directly contradicts their usual thoughtful message:
We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans. …
One more nonreason for our stance: that we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity. Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.
So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.
Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered, and the party, as a party, has quickly moved on. A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.
And there are more sins they consider. It’s an article worth your time as they lay out their own backgrounds, and then the problematic behaviors besetting the Republicans.
I read Wittes from time to time on Lawfare, and his status as a national security professional, a traditionally non-partisan position, plus his generally sober analysis leads me to trust him.
I am not particularly familiar with Rauch.
Me? I plan to consider all candidates for offices for which I’m eligible to vote, in the belief that a sober, old-line Republican that can move the party back to the center is better than a fringe Democrat.
But I don’t expect to be confronted with such a choice. The Minnesota GOP went flying rightward 25 years ago, and I have yet to see any evidence of a return to sobriety. Indeed, a friend who recently had gone to work for them dropped out and, well, I didn’t dig into his withdrawal, but he seemed a little shell-shocked. I know he wasn’t voting for Trump, so perhaps the upset was, uh, upsetting for him.
I doubt a groundswell of support will appear for this article, especially among conservatives still caught in the tribal trap, but it’s worth a try.
And one more thing they mention:
… but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward.
That’s definitely a concern to me. Radical parties are threatening entities, which makes it easier to herd people into voting for other radical positions.
Not that radical positions aren’t eventually adopted by a party – but moving rapidly? That’s not a great sign.
