Time to evacuate and fumigate my party

Dem wins in 2018 are the only way to save the GOP

Republicans once believed in limited government, fiscal restraint, support for the defense and national security establishments, family values, and a strong American role in maintaining global order. More than that, we were the party that believed in logic and prudence over emotion. Our hearts were perhaps too cold, but never bleeding.

Today’s Republicans, however, are a party of bellowing drama queens whose elected representatives blow up spending caps, bust the deficit, and attack America’s law enforcement and national security agencies as dangerous conspirators. Their leader expects banana republic parades, coddles the Kremlin, protects violent men in positions of responsibility, and overlooks child molestation. The rank-and-file GOP members who once claimed that liberals were creating a tyrannical monarchy in the Oval Office now applaud the expansion of the presidency into a gigantic cult of personality. So, am I still a Republican?

I get asked this question a lot since coming out as a Never Trump Republican during the 2016 campaign. When it comes from Democrats, it’s almost always a question asked in bad faith, as they want me either to quit my party or to answer for all of its current (and past) sins. When asked “how could you stay in your party” by people whose party has plenty to answer for itself, including the nomination of Hillary Clinton, it’s not a productive conversation.

However, Republicans themselves (and not just the Never Trump variety) are having the same conversations, privately and publicly. If President Trump is now the avatar of the GOP, how can anyone who once believed in the party of Lincoln and Reagan stay in it?

I am a conservative who joined the GOP in 1978. I had worked for a Senate Republican, and in 2014 I still rooted for GOP gains in Congress. When Trump won, I stayed, because I believed his victory was a bizarre aberration. One day Trump will be gone, and reasonable conservatives will have to recreate the GOP as a center-right party rather than a vehicle for inane populist keggers.

But for now, I really am a Republican In Name Only. I actively want to see the Republicans defeated in 2018 (and 2020, if Trump is not primaried out of his seat). I want to see them cast into the political wilderness for a few years — or longer, if that’s what it takes to break the fever.

That makes me a pretty lousy Republican. On the other hand, I might argue that I am a better Republican than the opportunists on the White House staff and Capitol Hill who have left the party but refuse to give up the name.

The same could be said for “Republican” voters. Do they really represent the party, or are they The Coalition of the Incoherent?

Like the president, they have no political compass, no policy preferences, and no attachment to anything that cannot be expressed on a bumper sticker. Indeed, what seems to unite Trump voters is a generic hostility to immigrants and a demand that government resources and transfers not be shrunk but redirected — to themselves.

I’m taking a gamble based on history. Populism is not a belief but a reflex, one that fades once the work of governing looms. It’s a great vessel for expressing anger. It’s not good at keeping the lights on and delivering the mail.

If going to the wall for deficits, wifebeaters, mall creepers and Vladimir Putin isn’t enough to drive me from the party, what is? And how much longer can this go on before the Trump team damages the words “Republican” and “conservative” permanently?

My answer is to see whether enough conservatives agree with me in 2018 that the party needs to be purged of the New Know-Nothings.The GOP needs to be returned to its foundations in conservative ideas instead of left to drift in mindless rage and willful ignorance. It does not need to be abandoned or burned to the ground. But it definitely needs to be evacuated and fumigated.

For the near future, the GOP losing is the only way to win. I’ll stay for now, because I believe in a loyal opposition — even if it has to be within my own party.