GOP Lifer Resignation Letter
When you leave a lifelong pursuit it always hurts. It’s not just a moment either. This is always a sad time that stretches longer and longer as you evolve. a time when all seems lost, and nothing seems to matter. It’s a time when you can’t find and angle, when you find you have to reevaluate every single stance you ever took. I know this well from my split with the GOP in 2009. (in the first half of 2009 I was still trying to turn that ship around.)
So having been here done that I’m ambivalent - I feel for this guy, but on the other hand I have to ask what the hell took him so long?
Fast-forward to our present leadership and the nature of our dilemma is clear. I watched Paul Ryan speak at Donald Trump’s convention the way a young child watches his father march off to prison. Thousands of Republican figures that loathe Donald Trump, understand the danger he represents, and privately hope he loses, are publicly declaring their support for him. In Illinois our local and state GOP organizations, faced with a choice, have decided on complicity.
Our leaders’ compromise preserves their personal capital at our collective cost. Their refusal to dissent robs all Republicans of moral cover. Evasion and cowardice has prevailed over conscience. We are now, and shall indefinitely remain, the Party of Donald Trump.
I will not contribute my name, my work, or my character to an utterly indefensible cause. No sensible adult demands moral purity from a political party, but conscience is meaningless without constraints. A party willing to lend its collective capital to Donald Trump has entered a compromise beyond any credible threshold of legitimacy. There is no redemption in being one of the “good Nazis.”
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