I'm out, too. After more than 40 years, I'm leaving the Republican Party. <thread -- I'm afraid it's a long one. Sorry.>
2. I started my professional life as a conservative Republican, moving from a entry-level job at @NRO just after college to Washington to work on the Hill. I've worked on campaigns for Republican politicians in four states, and in government for...
3...Republican elected officials from four different states, in both houses of Congress and the Capitol here in Madison. For both political and personal reasons I did mostly business and nonprofit work in more recent years, retaining my political identity as a Republican...
4...along with a lifelong belief that I knew better than the Party's leaders what was good for the country. My formative experience was as Senate staff in the Reagan years; the modern Republicans I most admired were legislators like Bob Dole and Richard Lugar, who understood...
5...the importance of American institutions -- the Senate above all -- and American leadership in the world. And of course the men (in their time it was mostly men) who had made the best of the Republican tradition in American politics -- Lincoln first, Theodore Roosevelt...
6...Lacey, Pinchot, Stimson, Lovett, Eisenhower and Reagan -- had great meaning for me, and still do. But their day is over, and their party is dead.
7. I commend recent thoughtful essays by @MaxBoot and @RadioFreeTom on their own respective decisions to leave the GOP. My reasoning is a little different though not entirely inconsistent with theirs. The language of electoral politics is one I understand and appreciate...
8...but as a means to an end, nothing more. The end is government, and government is responsibility: for the whole country, its interests around the world, and its future. There is nothing more important. Failure in government is a serious matter; abandonment of responsibility
9...is unforgivable. I've seen a mostly successful Presidency, and an effective Congress; I know what they look like. More recently I've seen what failure looks like: wars carelessly undertaken and not won in spite of enormous expenditure of lives and resources,...
10...a Congress unable to timely pass routine legislation and spending bills, massive tax cuts passed to provide campaign donors a return on their investment, the financial services industry left deliberately to regulate itself until it nearly blew up the global economy,...
11...and triggered a devastating recession, the worst in 80 years. Then followed abandonment of responsibility. In the face of this cruel recession, that cost millions of Americans their jobs and hundreds of thousands their homes,...
12...the Republican leadership in Congress resolved to do...nothing. There was a Democrat in the White House, and a Negro one at that -- the seething resentment of Barack Obama's race was something he never wanted to acknowledge; I didn't either, but there it was.
13. Eight years followed of Republicans in Congress appropriating the name & heritage of their party to beg for money before the richest people in the country, keep Congress & all of government from functioning, hoping that the minority of Americans who vote would reward them...
14...for abandoning their responsibility. Which they mostly did, to their discredit, right through the 2016 election, when through a fluke of the Electoral College Donald Trump became President.
15. C2K: Corruption, Criminality and the Kremlin. There are Republicans who revel in these principles of the Trump administration, and Republicans who are merely terrified of the President, but what is quite clear is that each of these principles has a devoted constituency...
16...in Trump's party. In a Republican Party grown dependent for support of its enormous campaign infrastructure on concentrated private wealth, Corruption was already well established before Trump even got to Washington and started using the Presidency to enrich himself.
17. The single most corrupt act during the whole sordid Trump era to date was last year's tax bill, written as its predecessors in 2001 and 2003 had been to reward donors of large sums to Republican candidates. This bill was mostly written in Congress.
18. Criminality by Trump personally was helpfully detailed by the New York Times just a few days ago: the man is a massive tax cheat. A steady stream of Trump associates and supporters have gone before Robert Mueller's team of investigators, and thence to prison.
19. It's as if the President of the United States were the center of a criminal conspiracy. As If. As to the Kremlin, let's be perfectly clear: Republicans in Congress are determined that Russia's intervention on Trump's behalf should not count against his Presidency.
20. Trump's sponsorship by the heirs of Stalin's secret police has inspired no rebellion among any Republican elected official. All Republicans in both houses of Congress are fine with it. I think we ought to take American patriotism a little more seriously than they do.
21. I would do Trump himself an injustice were I to leave C2K as the whole of his contribution to American government. His rank, stinking, putrid ignorance could be bottled and exhibited at the Smithsonian for the next thousand years as an unequalled specimen of its kind.
22. Trump is more indolent than some corpses. He despises black people, loathes Hispanics, thinks Muslims not contributing to his skeezy hotel business are terrorists, and incorporates all his backward prejudices into government policy. Trump hurts people, and enjoys it.
23. To the extent Trump can be said to govern at all, he governs only for his supporters -- the chumps who go to his campaign rallies, the white-right, the flatterers who appeal to him on TV day and night, and of course -- always -- the donors.
24. What is there left of Lincoln in today's Republican Party? Of Theodore Roosevelt? Nothing. The party of Trump is the party of the Charlottesville white-right mob, the party of concentrated wealth, and perhaps most of all the party that rejects responsibility.
25. So I'm out, and for good. I will be an Independent. I will oppose Republican candidates for public office, and support Democrats whenever possible. We're in a dark period in America, and the road to something better does not go through, or near, the Republican Party.[end}
Last Monday I posted a thread about leaving the Republican Party (reprinted below). It got quite a reaction — always gratifying for any writer. I want to thank everyone who RT’d & liked, & apologize to anyone who replied I neglected to acknowledge.. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1049500…
