Every so often these days you come across a true principled conservative. Admittedly however this is almost as rare today as seeing a fish fly. With the advent of Trumpism, the personality cult of Donald J. Trump, conservatism has acquired an extremely negative and undesirable character. In other words principled conservatives are running as fast as they can from Trumpism and conservatism is general.
More and more we see long standing and respected republicans/conservatives such as the folks at The Lincoln Project signing on to support the democratic ticket during the 2020 election cycle. Principled conservatives like myself must, if they are honest, ask themselves one simple question. Does Trump represent the values and principles once advocated by principled conservatives in this democratic republic? To that question the answer is decidedly no.
Conservatives and republicans have been completely absent when it comes to balanced budgets and the national debt, even before Covid-19 hit our shores. Like his sycophants in government and the GOP DJT does not care about the national debt or budget deficits. A man with 6 bankruptcies to his list of failures is only concerned about gaming the system to achieve the greatest personal advantage and financial benefit.
Republicans at one time were concerned about protecting the environment and preserving the natural beauty of this marvelous land of ours. DJT has rolled back many of the regulations and protections that have ensured clean waters and good quality air. All in the name of the all might buck.
The party of Lincoln, the American president responsible for freeing African Americans from forced bondage now seems indifferent and sometimes almost hostile to the concerns of African Americans and other minorities. Sure they talk a good game but they have failed miserably to walk the walk. The evidence is readily available for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Donald J. Trump is, beyond a shadow of doubt, the worst human being to ever occupy the White House. Aside from being a "man" that never met a truth he liked when it reflects poorly on his narcissistic personality he is a rave danger to the very foundations of our democratic republic.
To be fair one thing DJT has done that reflects conservative values is that he has sprinkled conservative judicial appointments throughout the federal judiciary including tipping the SCOTUS to the right. Which of course potentially threatens women's reproductive rights.
Making the case for defeating Donald J. Trump much better than I isPeter Wehner, an opinion columnist for the New York Times.
Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020
After what we have seen during Trump’s first term, any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second.
“You’re a traitor to the cause.”
In one form or another, that’s the charge most often made against so-called Never Trumpers, a group of which I consider myself an early and unofficial co-founder. The well-being of both the Republican Party and conservatism, according to this line of thinking, requires supporting Donald Trump. To be against him is to be an apostate.
Now it is certainly true that in the short run, and possibly in the long run, too, many of us no longer consider the Republican Party our political home. But for me, at least, a conservative approach to politics continues to lie at the core of my political being — and it is for that very reason that I believe even more strongly now, after what we have seen during Trump’s first term, that any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second.
Put another way, to be anti-Trump is not to be anti-conservative; and to be pro-Trump is not to be pro-conservative.
That doesn’t mean that Mr. Trump doesn’t have any conservative policy successes he can claim. He does, though even here Mr. Trump’s record is not nearly as strong as his Republican defenders claim it is. From a conservative perspective, he’s gotten some things right and many things wrong.
The president is reshaping the judiciary in a conservative direction through his court appointments, but he has also given up on core conservative beliefs in limited government and responsible entitlement reform. He’s shredded federalism and embraced protectionism, both of which cut against conservative principles. It was also on Mr. Trump’s watch that, even before the pandemic hit, the United States set record annual deficits and exceeded $22 trillion in debt. (If Joe Biden becomes president, prepare for Republicans to rediscover a rhetorical commitment to fiscal discipline.)
The president’s conservative defenders point out that he has reduced unnecessary regulations on businesses, but they overlook the fact that he has proudly embraced crony capitalism and aggressively used the federal government to tilt the playing field and pick economic winners and losers.
Mr. Trump has promoted the conservative anti-abortion cause; he has also epically mismanaged a pandemic that has claimed more than 175,000 American lives. Before Mr. Trump, the Republican Party spoke out against so-called identity politics, yet today it embraces the worst form of white identity politics. The Republican Party once claimed to be home to constitutional conservatives, yet Mr. Trump has acted in ways that makes a mockery of our constitutional system of government, most recently through his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. (This is the kind of thing for which Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz and citizen Donald Trump excoriated President Barack Obama.)
Mr. Trump has increased spending on national defense, which has pleased conservatives, but he has also done more than any president in history to undermine NATO and the Atlantic alliance generally, which should not. The president has imposed tough sanctions on Iran even while engaging in bromances with Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin of Russia and bonding with the authoritarian leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He betrayed the Kurds and eroded our relationships with South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Germany and many other traditional American allies. He has also praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uighurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to his former national security adviser, John Bolton.
Under Mr. Trump, then, the Republican Party is only incidentally conservative. At its core it is now ethnonationalist and populist, meaning that in its anti-establishment fervor it incites rather than refines public passions; it is increasingly antagonistic toward free markets, inward-looking and reactionary, hostile to diversity, pessimistic rather than optimistic, encased in cultural grievances, more interested in looking backward than forward.
But that is hardly where the erosion of conservatism ends.
The Republican Party once portrayed itself as the party of “family values,” insisting that character counts, especially in our political leaders, and most especially in our president. That was certainly the case during the Bill Clinton presidency. But today it has jettisoned all that, defending a rogue who paid hush money to a porn star while cheating on his third wife. Social conservatives once (rightly) warned against cultural decay, the coarsening of society, vulgarity and indecency. Yet Republicans now stand four-square behind a man who is uncaring and indecent.
The “party of ideas” is a phrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to describe the Republican Party in the early 1980s; today, large segments of the party are anti-intellectual, anti-science and dismissive of medical experts, to the point that it has turned wearing masks during a pandemic that’s spread by respiratory droplets into a “culture war” issue.
The party of law and order aggressively defends a president who is lawless. A party that for many years positioned itself as the defender of objective truth, a bulwark against subjectivism and ethical relativism, has as its leader a serially dishonest man who is engaged in a daily assault on reality.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who spread the false narrative that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — and just last week the president praised QAnon, which Kevin Roose of The Times describes as “a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.” The lunacy and paranoia that was once on the fringe is now becoming more and more mainstream, which is hardly what one would expect to see in a serious, thoughtful conservative movement.
“Donald Trump is engaged in a disinformation campaign against his own country, which we’ve never seen before in an American president,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is writing a book about political attacks on truth, told me.
One conservative writer recently suggested to me that the Republican Party under Mr. Trump has become a dissident, anti-institutional party. There’s nothing that it really wants to conserve; the American right, under Mr. Trump, wants to burn things down. “It hates almost everything about contemporary America,” he said, adding that Trump supporters see the United States “as corrupt, degraded, and overtaken by forces they basically consider foreign in one way or another.”
Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November. If he wins a second term, whatever latent conservatism remains in the Republican Party will be extinguished. The redefinition of the Republican Party into the Trumpian Party will be complete and very difficult to undo. Conservatism as a political philosophy, as a political sensibility, will be homeless.
That would obviously be bad for those of us who are conservative; it would also be bad for the country. Conservatism at its best — conservatism properly understood — appreciates the complexity of human society, the role of civic institutions in the formation of human character, and the dangers of popular passions, mob mentalities and conspiratorial thinking. It places greater weight on human experience and practical wisdom than on the attachment to abstract theory and ideological purity that Ronald Reagan warned against in 1977.
The choice is ours to make. Think long and hard before casting your vote for Trump. The health and Well Being of our democratic republic is what is at stake. For the sake of the American democratic experiment please place your sights higher than the DOW and the dollar. Principles do matter. At one time conservatives had principles and placed value on truth, integrity, and decency. Lets return to those values and vote Joseph Biden on November 3, 20200. Your kids and grand kids futures depend on it.
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