Death of a Party

I became eligible to vote in 1973, and from the first federal election through 2016 I have voted for Republican candidates in all significant races.

But in the 2016 presidential election, I did not vote for the official Republican candidate, choosing instead to write in an alternative Republican.

I seriously considered voting for Hillary, but could not make that leap.

But only two years later, I was ready to cross that line. It is not entirely about the particular candidates, though that is somewhat the problem. But it is more that the Republican Party has been on a downward spiral into “uber” conservatism.

In the late 90s and early 00s, I began to turn off certain conservative talk shows. I didn’t necessarily disagree with their actual political positions in all cases. But I was becoming disgusted by the snark concerning anyone who didn’t agree. Declaring liberal thought as a mental disease was among the earliest. It just got worse from there.

And when it comes to the left-right spectrum, I am just not that extreme. Fiscally conservative and socially moderate. But neither at the kind of extreme that the rhetoric moved toward. I remember my dad complaining about George Bush (Sr) as too liberal. But George may have had it about right.

That says something about where my politics have gone. The goal is not to force only the most conservative position on everything (or the most liberal if you are on the other side). It is in doing the necessary business of government. And I am not so conservative as to insist that only what must be done should be done. But I am not so liberal as to declare that if it can be done it should be done.

I lamented over the internal strife that our most moderate presidential candidate created back in 2008. They could have picked a somewhat more conservative VP running mate, but instead capitulated to the extremists. And out of that came the Tea Party and very Tea Party-influenced Republicans like Ted Cruz.

I think Beto O’Rourke was more liberal than I would like. But in 2018 I was willing to give him a chance in a Congress/Senate that was not a cakewalk for either side. One that required some compromise to arrive at anything. Would I get exactly what I wanted? Probably not. But maybe more than what I was getting at the time.

Then, just two years later, I would still have loved love to be part of the conservative side of the balancing act that is our “more perfect union.” Now, even as the presumptive leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, is beginning to lose his luster, the Party is still doubling down on stupid. I suggested elsewhere that what they need is a time-out. To be royally dismissed from the forefront of American politics. Maybe the result is that there is a replacement for the GOP that is not beholden to extreme partisans and conspiracy theories. Or just a return to something resembling participants in a more perfect union.

As this post has been morphing over several years, we are now just under a year until the 2024 election. I note that most of the GOP candidates (excluding Trump) are only recently saying anything against Trump, but even that is followed by praise for his presidency. There are a couple of exceptions. But none of them is even remotely in striking distance of taking the nomination from Trump.

And I am doing my part. I not only did not vote for Trump in the 2016 election, but I also did it again in the 2020 election, this time not voting for the GOP at all, but instead for candidates of the Democrat Party. That was a calculated risk but one I considered important. Why? Not because I am no longer conservative (even if only moderately so), but because the GOP needs to rethink its positions and priorities. Rather than just kicking the can down the street for someone else to deal with 2, 4, 8, or more years down the road, we need something now.

But the only way that it won't be Trump v Biden next year will be if a challenge under the 14th Amendment successfully disqualifies him from any national office. On paper, it looks fairly strong. But it will require that a conservative Supreme Court that has shown some willingness to simply go along with the will of the MAGA crowd considers the actual constitution and the arguments against Trump rather than either ruling in his favor or refusing to step into a political minefield.

But unless the GOP wakes up, they may find themselves on the outside looking in. The lack of clothes may become evident to too many of their own ranks and they may find themselves in a nearly meaningless minority.

That would be a serious problem for the country. I do not agree that government should do as little as possible, but neither should it do whatever it can. And several issues in the country will only be solved with a well-crafted governmental solution. The most liberal members of government cannot simply do what they want, but neither can the most conservative. Because of the penchant for conservatives to do mostly nothing, what will be required is for the liberal side to begin proposals to fix the issues. Start big. Swing for the fences. Next, the conservative side will need to restrain itself from simply saying "NO!" to everything and instead barter will the liberals to craft a compromise that will accomplish necessary goals without exceeding fiscal responsibility.

But the way things are going, the conservatives are going to double down on stupid and reject everything except lower taxes and less government." Let trickle-down economics do its magic." Well, the results of trickle-down economics are already in and it is not promising.

Meanwhile, the GOP is marching into oblivion. Maybe just a temporary exile. To avoid this fate, it must leave the la la land of some mythical USA of the past and return to the reality of a world that is not simply conservative and loving it.