Abnegation:
- The action of renouncing or rejecting something.
‘abnegation of political power’
- Self-denial.
‘people are capable of abnegation and unselfishness’
Noted in “Can the Republic Strike Back?” Andrew Sullivan, New York / Intelligencer:
My faith was never quite as deep [as Max Boot’s], and so the disillusion was never quite so complete or sudden as Max’s. I was able to endorse Clinton and Blair, for example, and found in Obama the moderate Republican I’d always admired. My breaking point was the revelation that the GOP backed the brutal torture of prisoners, the total abnegation of a politics of freedom. If you didn’t recognize the barbarism that lay just beneath the Republican surface then, you were blinded by something pretty powerful. Some of my hostility to the right thereafter was tinged with excess, hyperbole, and a sense of betrayal. I became a nonperson on the right before it happened to the Never Trumpers. Maybe I was too harsh. Or emotional.
