After last week, the pace of
Republicans, conservatives and moderates alike, leaving the GOP has quickened.
The nomination of Donald Trump for President, coupled with the egregious denial of a roll call vote on the rules package, has led to a mass exodus,
and everyone from convention delegates to National
Review columnists to ordinary voters across the country have joined in.
I sympathize with all of them, but I
won’t be following.
For all its mistakes and outright abuses
of power this year, and especially last week, the Republican Party remains the
best vehicle available for instituting conservative reforms, at all levels of
government. The reality is that the American political system as it is
currently constituted effectively allows for only two political parties to be
viable over the long term, a liberal party and a conservative party. The
Democratic Party became uniformly liberal years ago, and now tacks further to
the left with every election cycle. This leaves the Republican Party as the
only one of the major parties where conservatives can realistically find a home
and hope to have their voices heard.
Whether they will be heard is a
different matter entirely, as the events of the past week have proven. What is
certain, however, is that a voter separate from both major parties will not
have a voice in the affairs of either. In many states, they are barred from
voting in primary elections. For Republicans disgusted with the nomination of
Trump, that means that, should a Trump-like candidate run for office in a
future election, those voters would have no opportunity to vote against that
candidate until the general election.
Whether the Republican Party can long
survive as it now exists, deeply split by both the Trump nomination and other
issues, is another question entirely. I’m inclined to believe it will, for the
simple reason that any party which has survived being shut out of all national
power for twenty years, a literal civil war, and numerous convention walkouts
and third-party efforts over its century and a half of existence is by nature
hard to kill. But if it does not survive, the foundation of a new party to
carry on the fight for conservative reform would obviously be vital to the
nation’s future.
But until then, working within the
framework of an existing party is infinitely preferable to building a new, competing
party from scratch. For now, fighting cronyism, liberalism, and Trumpism from
within the party is a better strategy than fruitlessly standing outside the
party looking in.
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