Bret Stephens, conservative writer and deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, is resigned to Hillary Clinton becoming the next president of the United States.
In an open letter to “fellow conservatives” on Monday night, Stephens said, “Let’s fast-forward past that sinking October feeling when we belatedly realize we’re going to lose — and lose badly.”
Stephens told the Washington Examiner media desk on Tuesday that his letter was written in earnest and that the GOP will lose next November because of the party’s inability to unify behind a candidate who can realistically beat Clinton in the general election.
In the letter, Stephens suggested that the party’s voters are overwhelmed by a type of masochism.
“Let’s do this because it’s what we want,” he wrote. “Maybe secretly, maybe unconsciously, but desperately. … We want to drive ourselves to work as [conservative radio hosts] Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham scratch our ideological itches until they bleed a little. We want the refiner’s fire that is our righteous indignation at a country we claim no longer to recognize — ruled by impostors and overrun by foreigners.”
In recent years, the GOP has been dogged by a lack of sustained leadership that could effectively bridge the divide between the moderate and more conservative elements of the party.
The GOP presidential field has about a dozen leading candidates with four of them averaging 10 percent or more nationally. Of those four, two have never run for public office. The front-runner is Donald Trump, who Stephens described in his letter as “an insult machine whose political business is to tell Mexicans, Muslims, physically impaired journalists, astute Jewish negotiators and others who cross his sullen gaze that he has no use for them or their political correctness.
“Deep down, though, we know the political math doesn’t add up for us,” Stephens wrote. “We just don’t care. Because we’ve turned even the appearance of moderation, or the amenability to compromise, into a four-letter word.”
