What One Gains by Leaving the Republican Party

Recently I wrote a post about my feeling of becoming politically homeless having left the GOP years ago and now disgusted with the idiocy of many Democrats who were too blind to see that they were being set up and played for fools by the far right in the Northam controversy which was quickly followed by attacks on Justin Fairfax and Mark Herring's self-confession after Herring had demanded Northam resign.  The irony as it turned out was Democrat elected officials worrying about the black vote - and hence, in reality their own re-election - when a Washington Post poll showed 58% of blacks in Virginia wanted Northam to remain in office. All of this leads me to a long column in The Atlantic by a former Republican who had spent all of his adult political life in the GOP, even serving in two White House administrations.  The point of the piece is that by leaving the GOP, he argues that he gained much needed perspective and an ability to be more open minded to other views.  Not surprisingly, what drove him away was the rise of Trump and the degradation of the GOP ever since.  Here are lengthy excerpts that I hope my Republican acquaintances will read:

I’m a politically homeless person these days. For most of my life, I’ve been closely affiliated with the Republican Party. My first vote was cast for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I worked in his administration, as well as that of George H. W. Bush; for seven years, I was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush.

Most of my professional friends and almost all of my former colleagues—those with whom I served in government as well as in the think-tank world—have been Republican. The GOP has been my political home since college, a party I was once proud to be a part of, and a source of cherished relationships. Part of my identity was undoubtedly shaped by my party affiliation.

Most of my professional friends and almost all of my former colleagues—those with whom I served in government as well as in the think-tank world—have been Republican.

The GOP has been my political home since college, a party I was once proud to be a part of, and a source of cherished relationships. Part of my identity was undoubtedly shaped by my party affiliation.

It was hardly a perfect party. Like all political institutions, it fell short of its ideals; it was also led by some deeply flawed individuals. Yet in the main, it stood for principles that I believe promote human flourishing.

But since the political rise of Donald Trump, I’ve found myself at first deeply disappointed and now often at odds with the GOP. The party of Reagan has been fundamentally transformed. It’s now Donald Trump’s party, through and through.

That’s turned out to be quite a problem for me, because from the moment he announced his run for the presidency, I believed that Trump was intellectually, temperamentally, and psychologically unfit to be president. Indeed, I warned the GOP about Trump back in 2011, when I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal decrying his claim that Barack Obama was not born in America.

Instead of rejecting him, however, the Republican Party eventually nominated Donald Trump. His defenders say, with some justification, that he has delivered on the agenda that they wanted. But that is hardly the whole story. Trump has shown himself to be a pathological liar engaged in an all-out assault on objective facts—on reality and truth—concepts on which self-government depends. [Trump] The president is also cruel, and dehumanizes his opponents. He’s volatile and emotionally unstable. He relishes dividing Americans along racial and ethnic lines. He crashes through norms like a drunk driver crashes through guardrails. And he’s corrupt from stem to stern.

Some Republicans quiescently accept Trump’s transgressions, unwilling to take him on, fearful of incurring his wrath. Others convince themselves that the Trump agenda is worth the price of lavishing praise on him and turning a blind eye to his offenses. Still other Republicans protect and defend him at every turn, serving as his attack dogs. As an institution, the party rallied behind him. . . . The Republican Party is both shrinking and getting more Trumpified. 

At the same time, unlike some vocal Trump critics who have left the GOP, I remain philosophically conservative. This means that the modern-day Democratic Party, lurching further and further to the left, doesn’t have room for me.

The main thing I’ve gained in unfastening myself from the GOP is critical distance and detachment. One can see certain things from outside the silo that one cannot see within it.

When I was a card-carrying member of a political party, I wasn’t automatically blinded to other points of view, or unable to challenge conventional orthodoxy. I did it on issues ranging from climate change, to the Tea Party’s anti-government rhetoric, to the characterological and temperamental defects of Newt Gingrich; so have many others. Nor did I knowingly put party above country.

But here’s what I think does happen. People who are part of a tribe—political, philosophical, religious, ethnic—are less willing to call out their own side’s offenses. That’s human nature. To be sure, some are more willing to show independence of judgment than others, but none shows complete intellectual independence. I certainly didn’t.

Some of this has to do with feelings of solidarity, of not wanting to alienate those whose affirmation and support is important to us. . . . When we’re part of a team, we have a natural tendency to let our sympathies shape our views and opinions of others. As a result, we perceive the world differently, often more narrowly and sometimes incorrectly.

I assumed that the claim that the Republican Party’s effort to win the South’s support in the late 1960s was part of a “southern strategy” relying on a coded racial appeal was unjust. Enforcing law and order is certainly a legitimate issue for politicians to run on, and a basic function of government.

Today I see the Republican Party through the clarifying prism of Donald Trump, who consistently appealed to the ugliest instincts and attitudes of the GOP base—in 2011, when he entered the political stage by promoting a racist conspiracy theory, and in 2016, when he won the GOP nomination. He’s done the same time and time again during his presidency—his attacks on the intelligence of black politicians, black journalists, and black athletes; his response to the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; and his closing argument during the midterm elections, when he re-tweeted a racist ad that even Fox News would not run.

It would be deeply unfair to claim that most Republicans are bigots. But it is fair to say that most Republicans today are willing to tolerate without dissent, and in many cases enthusiastically support, a man whose appeal is based in large part on stoking racial and ethnic resentments, on attacking “the other.” That has to be taken into account. At a minimum, their moral reflexes have been badly dulled.

It’s impossible for me to know with any precision how much of the Republican base is motivated by ethnic nationalism and racial resentments and anxieties, but it’s certainly a higher percentage than I’d thought.

So the rise of Trump has led me to reexamine these earlier episodes in the party’s history. I’m not insisting that my most recent interpretation is the only reasonable one, in part because discerning the motivations of others is difficult. . . . . All I can say is, I’m much more open to the case that the political operatives who produced the Willie Horton ad intended at least in part to appeal to racist attitudes, and that it fit into a two-decade-old strategy. . . . that the GOP’s southern strategy used coded language such as forced busing and states’ rights to make racist appeals.

Detaching myself from my longtime political party means that I find myself more willing than I was to hear the views of people I once tended to tune out, to listen to those I once thought didn’t have much to teach me, and that I now put a greater premium on epistemological modesty than I once did. Aware of having been wrong in the past, I’m more open to being wrong today, and I trust that I’m more open to correction.

I might have shed one particular set of blinders, but I’m hardly free of others. I have certain predilections and life experiences that affect my angle of vision. But I do think I can see better than before how easy it was to turn those with whom I had political differences in the past into caricatures and cartoonish figures. As a very tough, vocal Trump critic, my challenge today is to resist the temptation to turn Trump’s supporters into caricatures, making sweeping, uncalibrated assessments of tens of millions of Americans that are unfair to them.

[W]hat troubles me in the here and now are those who, having decided to stay in the Republican Party, are allowing that affiliation to seriously impair their moral judgments and intellectual standards; to lead them to enable those in power to do grave damage to our civic and political culture; and to encourage them to protect a Republican president for acting in ways that they would condemn in any Democratic president.