When Boycotting a Political Party Becomes a Patriotic Duty
In a vital piece for The Atlantic, the conservative-leaning Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes make a point that cannot be emphasized enough:
We have both spent our professional careers strenuously avoiding partisanship in our writing and thinking... This, then, is the article we thought we would never write: a frank statement that a certain form of partisanship is now a moral necessity. The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy. The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s the larger political apparatus that made a conscious decision to enable him. In a two-party system, nonpartisanship works only if both parties are consistent democratic actors. If one of them is not predictably so, the space for nonpartisans evaporates. We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to... vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).
The challenge in defending our democracy from authoritarianism, and reversing the "truth decay" that has become a central component of the right's ongoing war on empiricism and accountability, demands civic engagement from all of us, no matter our political persuasion. For some good background on the stakes before us, see Ezra Klein's piece on the new book "How Democracies Die." The key takeaway is that it's not authoritarian demagogues who destroy democracy; it's the political parties and actors who go along with it, calculating (erroneously) that it's worth the cost for enacting their preferred policies. The Republican Party---as countless historians and political scientists and many conservatives have tried desperately to point out---has been making this tragic mistake.
The conservative Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's former chief speechwriter, puts it well: "the greatest source of cynicism is not the existence of corrupt people in politics; it is good people who lose their way." He warns his fellow Republicans that supporting this administration is an act of epic cowardice that's putting at risk everything for which they claim to stand. Brian Beutler, meanwhile, responds to Rauch and Wittes, in another article worth reading in full:
Defeating Republicans at the polls is, of course, a precondition for ending the country’s slide into right-wing authoritarianism. But Republicans have been defeated before without being chastened. To reverse this alarming antidemocratic trend, the modern-Republican Party’s style of politics must be made anathema. That won’t happen without a large-scale civic censure of political actors and institutions, like the GOP, that reject empiricism and equality, attack mediating arbiters of authority, and embrace propaganda and bad-faith argument as ordinary brickbats of political war.
...The Republican Party isn’t going to 'right itself or implode' unless that kind of unprincipled behavior is rendered toxic. It should be considered disreputable outside of movement conservatism to work for Fox News or for the same RNC that propped up Trump, and then backed Roy Moore in Alabama. If you conduct yourself the way Devin Nunes has conducted himself as Trump’s agent atop the House Intelligence Committee, you shouldn’t just have to worry about losing your seat, but about your name being dirt.
...After Trump, Democrats could adopt a more aggressive approach than they have in the past, on the fool-me-twice principle. They could abolish the filibuster, expedite legislation to widen the franchise and reform campaign finance laws, right Mitch McConnell’s theft of a Supreme Court seat, and conduct oversight of the institutions of government Trump corrupted. They could set up a commission to examine the role of propaganda in American media, and report out how and why, under Trump, the Republican Party entered a de facto partnership with hostile foreign intelligence to influence American politics.
...But to truly marginalize the GOP’s political style would require a level of cooperation from many conservatives that doesn’t exist, and a level of buy-in from generally non-partisan institutions—the media, the bureaucracy, corporate America, and civil society—which have proven ill-equipped to defend themselves from Republican efforts to coopt or discredit them.
Steve Schmidt, John McCain's 2008 campaign manager, put it this way:
Fire is part of the natural life cycle of the forest. It destroys the forest but also purifies and renews it so that the cycle of life can begin again. So it must be for the Trump-Republican party. Only through repudiation and defeat can it be renewed.
The corrupted, rotten and complicit Republican majority that is abetting this President's damage to our institutions, national security and domestic tranquility must face electoral annihilation. A massive coalition of Democrats, independents and appalled Republicans must come together to deliver a message to the world that the American people will defend our Republic and the inheritance bequeathed to us by previous generations.
The challenge before us should, and must, unite conservatives and liberals.