Listen to these conservatives.
We’re talking about three committed, lifelong conservatives who still believe in fiscal responsibility, whose devotion to the American idea transcends partisanship and who understand the need for change.
The three are political writers whose conservative bona fides are beyond dispute: George Will, Michael Gerson and Max Boot. All have written many columns – including three published in this paper over the past two days and another Saturday – excoriating the damage Donald Trump has done to the country and, recognizing the threat, supporting the candidacy of Democrat Joe Biden.
That’s startling. These are critics who, sometimes going back decades, have lit into the performances of Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Hearts and minds, they are right of center. But something has induced them to embrace Biden this year, and we’ll be bold enough to suggest what that something is: love of country.
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Will is a columnist, author, television pundit and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He has written for the Washington Post since 1974, advocated for the presidency of Ronald Reagan and, more than any other columnist, made conservatism intellectually compelling. Here’s what this conservative said in a column published in this newspaper on Thursday:
A presidency that began with dark words about “American carnage” probably will receive what it has earned: repudiation. It will be, he said, a fumigation election.
Will’s voice is familiar to those who follow politics. While he has been known in the past to criticize Republican presidents, including George H.W. Bush, no one has confused him with a Democrat, much less a liberal. Yet of Trump, he writes, This nation and its patience are exhausted. He sees ahead a generational change that will usher in a decade of Democratic dominance.
Commenting on the subject of stress, he wrote: After the past four years, Americans know the feeling, which is why President Trump’s first and final contribution to the nation’s civic health will be to have motivated a voter turnout rate not seen for more than a century…
Gerson is a former top aide and speech writer for former President George W. Bush. He also is an author and sometimes writes from a profoundly religious point of view. He knows Trump to be a danger to the country.
On Thursday, this committed conservative observed that Trump, a deeply dysfunctional leader, completely failed the county on the coronavirus pandemic.
He wrote: In the past eight months, the United States has led the world in deaths from Covid-19. Trump has led the world in the production of alibis.
Among other criticisms, he accused Trump of committing a direct betrayal of duty in that his administration deceptively played down the extent and seriousness of the crisis. The president also scorns the bearers of unfavorable tidings and banishes uncomfortable truths.
With Trump, a senior administration official told me, there is “punishment for delivering bad news.”
Perhaps most direct in his criticisms of Trump is Boot, a foreign policy analyst and who was an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Note that with McCain and Romney, he was working against the Democratic ticket that featured Biden as vice presidential candidate. In Saturday's print edition of The News, Boot explains that he is not simply planning to vote against Trump, but for Biden.
On Friday, though, he argued not just for Trump’s defeat, but for the entire GOP to be detoxified and de-Trumpified. The party to which he belonged until just after Trump’s election in 2016 has suffered a descent into collective madness, he wrote, and has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult.
He wrote: Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.
Committing to vote a straight-Democratic ticket on Tuesday – and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses – he nevertheless understands that America needs a sane center-right party. What it doesn’t need, he writes, is an extremist party that undermines democracy, caters to white grievances, and rejects science and reason.
Our politics has become unbalanced. If either party lacks a credible opposition, it will drift into excess and toward corruption. The GOP, these three conservatives contend, is no longer credible. It needs to be repudiated before it can be resurrected.
Political parties aren’t forever, as any Whig can tell you. Perhaps a new party will arise – one that is interested in dealing with life as it is and conditions as they are from a right-of-center perspective.
That would be fine, too. But whatever comes next begins with sending a message on Tuesday that today’s Republican politicians cannot possibly misunderstand.
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