But since the political rise of Donald Trump, I’ve found myself at first deeply disappointed and now often at odds with the GOP. The party of Reagan has been fundamentally transformed. It’s now Donald Trump’s party, through and through.
That’s turned out to be quite a problem for me, because from the moment he announced his run for the presidency, I believed that Trump was intellectually, temperamentally, and psychologically unfit to be president. Indeed, I warned the GOP about Trump back in 2011, when I wrote an
op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal decrying his claim that Barack Obama was not born in America.
From time to time, people emerge who are peddlers of paranoia and who violate unwritten codes that are vital to a self-governing society, I wrote, adding, “They delight in making our public discourse more childish and freakish, focusing attention on absurdities rather than substantive issues, and stirring up mistrust among citizens. When they do, those they claim to represent should speak out forcefully against them.”
Instead of rejecting him, however, the Republican Party eventually
nominated Donald Trump. ...
Today I see the Republican Party through the clarifying prism of Donald Trump, who consistently appealed to the ugliest instincts and attitudes of the GOP base—in 2011, when he entered the political stage by promoting a racist conspiracy theory, and in 2016, when he won the GOP nomination. He’s done the same time and time again during his presidency—his attacks on the intelligence of black politicians, black journalists, and black athletes; his response to the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; and his closing argument during the midterm elections, when he retweeted a racist ad that even Fox News would not run.
It would be deeply unfair to claim that most Republicans are bigots. But it
is fair to say that most Republicans today are willing to tolerate without dissent, and in many cases enthusiastically support, a man whose appeal is based in large part on stoking racial and ethnic resentments, on attacking “the other.” That has to be taken into account. At a minimum, their moral reflexes have been badly dulled.
It’s impossible for me to know with any precision how much of the Republican base is motivated by ethnic nationalism and racial resentments and anxieties, but it’s certainly a higher percentage than I’d thought. A conservative friend of mine recently had a meal with a prominent Republican officeholder who, when asked what explained Trump’s growing appeal in his state, told my friend it was in reaction to Obama and it was mainly a matter of race.
...
I certainly don’t have problems with those who decide to stay in a party in order to improve it. There is even something admirable about doing so. If the GOP were to embrace a humane, aspirational conservatism—one that seeks to defend truth rather than to deconstruct it—I would certainly be open to returning to the fold. But whether I ever do or not, what troubles me in the here and now are those who, having decided to stay in the Republican Party, are allowing that affiliation to seriously impair their moral judgments and intellectual standards; to lead them to enable those in power to do grave damage to our civic and political culture; and to encourage them to protect a Republican president for acting in ways that they would condemn in any Democratic president.
The Republican Party, like all parties, has its flaws. While I was within it, those flaws were harder to perceive or acknowledge; from the outside, I see them more clearly. I’ve lost something, though, by my present alienation from the party. If I’m one day able to return, I hope that I’ll bring the compensating gifts of greater insight and critical distance back with me. And if I don’t, I like to think that the things I’ve gained still outweigh the things I’ve lost.
