Conservative WaPo columnist Max Boot finds it necessary to confirm his decision to leave the Republican Party in the wake of it transforming into the Trumpian Party:
Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.
They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators.
That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must first be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.
It’s encouraging that some of the conservatives who populated the Republican Party recognize the disaster into which the GOP has transformed itself. But there really needs to be more than this: how this has occurred must be identified, isolated, and procedures put into place to discourage it from happening again. For example, one of my favorite hobby horses is the Team Politics rule and how it turns out that it encourages victory at the electoral box, but discourages the development of worthy leaders, locally and nationally. The result is that he or she who is best at lickspittle politics ends up occupying positions of power – the opposite of a meritocracy, which is the basis of the United States. This policy, this entire culture, should be banned by the leaders of the future reborn GOP, or whatever the legitimate conservative party ends up naming itself.
So when Mr. Boot waves a flag of national emergency, it’s all well and good. But we need to learn from this national mistake, and try to prevent it in the future, if possible.
