Are you tired of the clown cart that has become our government run by a man who has no business being in charge of any corporation let alone the most prosperous country on the planet? There is only one solution left to rid our people of the ever-growing damage Donald Trump is inflicting on the nation.
For those who are real Conservatives and find a home in the Republican Party, it is essential that they boycott the party if they want to save it. An article in The Atlantic written by Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes titled “Boycott, the Republican Party,” laid out the reality in no uncertain terms. The piece starts with statements from a man the Washington Post interviewed after the Virginia election in November 2017.
A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”
I have never bought into parties and agree with Christopher Hitchens that partisanship makes one stupid. I don’t believe that being a member of a party that represents the aggregation of one’s values is the problem though. As stated in the article,
The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to do as Toren Beasley did: vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).
I am one who believes that at a minimum we need two viable parties but preferably more. But I agree with what the piece says every thinking American must do in these times.
Lots of people vote a straight ticket. Some do so because they are partisan. Others do so because of a particular policy position: Many pro-lifers, for example, will not vote for Democrats, even pro-life Democrats, because they see the Democratic Party as institutionally committed to the slaughter of babies.
We’re proposing something different. We’re suggesting that in today’s situation, people should vote a straight Democratic ticket even if they are not partisan, and despite their policy views. They should vote against Republicans in a spirit that is, if you will, prepartisan and prepolitical. Their attitude should be: The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period. In other words, under certain peculiar and deeply regrettable circumstances, sophisticated, independent-minded voters need to act as if they were dumb-ass partisans.
The authors of the piece explained why two writers that aren’t Liberal are taking this stance.
For us, this represents a counsel of desperation. So allow us to step back and explain what drove us to what we call oppositional partisanship. To avoid misunderstanding, here are some things we are not saying. First, although we worry about extremism in the GOP, that is not a reason to boycott the party. We agree with political analysts who say that the Republicans veered off-center earlier and more sharply than the Democrats—but recently the Democrats have made up for lost time by moving rapidly leftward. In any case, under normal circumstances our response to radicalization within a party would be to support sane people within that party.
Nor is our oppositional partisanship motivated by the belief that Republican policies are wrongheaded. Republicans are a variegated bunch, and we agree with many traditional GOP positions. … we are horrified by the president. To be sure, we are horrified by much that Trump has said and done. But many members of his party are likewise horrified. Republicans such as Senators John McCain and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, as well as former Governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, have spoken out and conducted themselves with integrity. Abandoning an entire party means abandoning many brave and honorable people. We would not do that based simply on rot at the top.
So why have we come to regard the GOP as an institutional danger? In a nutshell, it has proved unable or unwilling (mostly unwilling) to block assaults by Trump and his base on the rule of law. Those assaults, were they to be normalized, would pose existential, not incidental, threats to American democracy.
Notice the authors need to maintain their false equivalence by equating a leftward movement of the Democratic Party to the rightward move of the Republicans. They forget that Democrats have been moving rightward for decades. That is why it is so difficult for the dangerous Republicans to get the message.
The authors point out that Trump turned a blind eye to the Russians corrupting our democracy as they disrupted our electoral process. They base their advice on the following syllogism.
(1) The GOP has become the party of Trumpism.
(2) Trumpism is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
(3) The Republican Party is a threat to democratic values and the rule of law.
And as such, one who wants the country to survive as a body of “democratic” constitutional laws must not vote for that party.
The authors end with a significant statement.
We understand, too, the many imperfections of the Democratic Party. Its left is extreme, its center is confused, and it has its share of bad apples. But the Democratic Party is not a threat to our democratic order. That is why we are rising above our independent predilections and behaving like dumb-ass partisans. It’s why we hope many smart people will do the same.
Viewers are encouraged to subscribe and join the conversation for more insightful commentary and to support progressive messages. Together, we can populate the internet with progressive messages that represent the true aspirations of most Americans.
