By Underscoring Its Failures, Trump Has Outlined The Republican Party’s Future

[corbe]

By Underscoring Its Failures, Trump Has Outlined The Republican Party’s Future
 
There are many ways in which post-Trump conservatism could go wrong. But there is no way in which the anti-Trump remains of the old GOP can go right.

By Nathanael Blake
September 26, 2019
 
In theory, I should support a primary challenge to President Trump. I did not vote for him in 2016, and while this time I prefer him over any of the likely Democratic nominees, I am still part of the fifth of voters who like most of his policies but dislike him personally.

But somehow, the alternatives are even worse. The quixotic nature of primary challenges to sitting presidents always attracts oddballs, but the current batch of candidates represents a nadir of anti-Trump Republicanism — a (mercifully small) collection of has-been, might-have-been, and never-were candidates. Examining them is like strolling through a graveyard of dead and decaying GOP factions and politicians.

Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld is a reanimated corpse of Rockefeller Republicanism, a breed of liberal accountants that once roamed the Northeastern seaboard. The surviving members of this vanishing species sometimes camouflage themselves as libertarians. Weld supports abortion, opposes religious liberty, and wants to execute the president for “treason.”

One-term former congressman Joe Walsh used to love Trump but now hates him. Is he a principled convert or just a grifter looking for new marks — does it even matter? Political junkies may know who Walsh is, but no one else does, and the same goes for Weld.

Mark Sanford’s name is better-known, but for the wrong reasons. The former governor of South Carolina became a national punch line and had to resign when his claim of “hiking the Appalachian Trial” was revealed as a cover for visiting his mistress in Argentina. A couple years later, he made a comeback and was elected to Congress, but lost to a primary challenger in 2018. He might be the most credible Trump opponent, but a relic of Bush Republicanism with a sordid personal history is unappealing.

Trump Challenged Past GOP Failures — and Won

<..snip..>

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/26/trump-has-outlined-the-republican-partys-future-by-underscoring-its-failures/

[Absalom]

Nation/states mature and prosper through the grit and resolve of their people, producing greatness.
That quality is measured by the power of their ideas and hardly by shallow material betterment.
By that criteria, our best days are long gone, which should be apparent to any truly serious person.
That we have been lost and wandering for most of a century, given our leadership, should be obvious.
Trump, however worthy his intentions might be, emphatically is certainly not the answer.
We either find our way out of this morass or we don't; in which case our decline will accelerate.
Finding the "ideal candidate" is embarrassingly laughable as our condition was self-created
and we the people are the only ones who can correct it.