PHILADELPHIA — A longtime Republican friend texted just as the Democratic National Convention was burying itself in balloons: “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m a Democrat.”
Another Republican friend called after President Obama spoke Wednesday night: “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a Democrat.”
No apologies necessary. But thanks surely go to Donald Trump and his spineless Republican enablers. The party of Lincoln, a sometimes laughable bragging point for die-hards whose racial attitudes survived the Civil War intact, is long gone. Its dissolution began at least with Richard Nixon, who embraced a Southern strategy that pandered to racists and set the course for today’s GOP.
Trump’s lack of cool and couth reminds me of the old quip, “Who’d want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member?” For many Republicans, the question is: “Who’d want to be a member of a party that would have Donald Trump as its leader?”
Not I, you may have noticed.
I suppose it’s time for a confession: I’ve never been a Republican and never said I was. I’ve been an independent since the early ‘80s and was a Democrat before that. If you’re disappointed, well, sorry. It’s not I who has changed.
Although I find Trump reprehensible and have written continuously out of a sense of duty to country, I’m not about to become a Democrat. What for? Parties, clubs and groups hold little interest for a person who delights in her own company and identifies with Florence King, the brilliant curmudgeonly commentator and author who once wrote: “We may be psychopaths in our own fashion, but we behave because we know that prison life is communal.”
Relax, snowflakes, she was being irreverent.
Like King, I’m a conservative, if this means everyone will leave me alone. Its further appeal, as defined by theorist Russell Kirk, is that conservatism is the negation of ideology. In a world gone barking mad in defense of this or that ideology or religion, I’m fine with the blank page and the wisdom of ages.
In a lecture called “Ten Conservative Principles,” Kirk explained: “A people’s historic continuity of experience ... offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffeehouse philosophers.” Hear, hear, though I as much as anyone do love a caffeinated debate about the meaning of squid.
Dearest to my heart is Kirk’s conviction that conservatives “uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.”
This gets at the essence of our debate about the role of government. Decentralized authority — to the extent reasonable and practicable — seems the obvious preference, given the alternative. But opposing collectivism also means opposing collectivist thought, which has increasingly come to define the GOP.
With its acceptance of Trump, the party has implicitly embraced the most un-American of litmus tests for citizens and immigrants based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Republicans are becoming ideologues of exclusion and marginalization, with hints of oppression to come.
Who’d want to be a party to that? Not I.
© 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
