The other day I signed an online petition sponsored by Republicans for the Rule of Law. It’s addressed to Donald Trump: “Mr. President: Firing Robert Mueller would gravely damage the Presidency, the GOP and the country. Please don’t do it.” Since this is an effort to rally Republicans behind allowing the Mueller investigation to go forward, I was asked by the website, after signing the petition, to check a box: “I am a Republican.”
I’ve got to acknowledge that I hesitated for a minute. Gordon Humphrey, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire and a staunch conservative, says that he no longer considers himself a Republican. George Will, surely the preeminent conservative columnist of his generation, is no longer a Republican. My friend Pete Wehner, a valued contributor to the conservative cause for three decades, a veteran of the Reagan and both Bush administrations, writes that he is now a man without a party. And I myself didn’t vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2016.
Furthermore, in just this past week, the Republican Congress has thrown together a $1.3 trillion spending bill that’s vulnerable to all the complaints Republicans have made over the years about how Democrats in Congress govern. And individual Republican members have continued to make fools of themselves. Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, trying to defend HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s purchase of a $31,000 dining room set for his office, claimed that “somebody in the deep state” had ordered the table in order to set Carson up—even though Carson acknowledged it was his wife’s doing. More broadly, it’s a plausible argument that it would be better for the country if Democrats won control of the House in 2018.
Still, I checked the “I am a Republican” box on the Republicans for the Rule of Law website.
Am I just a backward-looking conservative, refusing to face new realities? Perhaps. But one thing conservatism teaches is not to embrace new realities too quickly. Some of those new realities turn out to be transient; others prove harmful. Isn’t conservatism in part about resisting so-called new realities when you sense they might be questionable, even as people lecture you that you’ve got to get with the times?
So for now at least I’m choosing not to get with the times or go with the times. I’m choosing not to leave the GOP. I’m choosing not to accept the Trumpification of the GOP as an irreversible fact.
It’s not as if the Democratic party presents a particularly attractive alternative. It seems to be moving toward the left, not to the center. If it does so, and if the GOP stays captive to the charms of Donald Trump, then I can certainly imagine supporting an independent presidential candidate in 2020 against, say, a Republican ticket led by Donald Trump and a Democratic ticket led by Elizabeth Warren. But it would surely be better first to take a shot at reclaiming the Republican party. It’s not just nostalgia for the good old days of Reagan and Bush and McCain and Romney that leads one to balk at giving up the Republican party to the forces of nativism, vulgar populism, and authoritarianism. It’s also the fact that it would be bad for the country if one of our two major parties went in this direction.
And the Republican tradition is well worth defending. To have been right about the Cold War, right about the need to revive constitutionalism, right about resistance to “progressivism” in all of its illiberal modes—for a party that at its best embraced much of what was admirable about both classical liberalism and classical conservatism—is no small thing. And most Republican members of Congress remain alive to that tradition, even as they (temporarily?) succumb to the pressure to accommodate Donald Trump.
So for now, I—along with many others—prefer to fight rather than to switch.
Of course things could change. I remember Jeane Kirkpatrick writing a piece in 1979 on why she remained a Democrat. In fact, she stayed a Democrat when she joined Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. She did not switch parties until 1984. By then the Reagan Republican party was one that was becoming increasingly hospitable to a Hubert Humphrey Democrat like Jeane Kirkpatrick. Are Reagan Republicans going to find an equally welcoming home in the Democratic party of the 2020s? I’m doubtful, though life is full of surprises.
In the meantime, the Republican party, it seems to me, is very much worth fighting for. Despite the current climate, the fight is not hopeless, and the stakes are high. So I still check the box: “I am a Republican.”
