"Vote for Democrats!" Advise Two Conservative Senior Fellows

Trump and Trumpism are a threat to democratic values and the rule of law, according to Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, two conservative senior fellows at the Brookings Institute in their March 2018 Atlantic magazine article, "Boycott the GOP." One of the two authors is a "Burkean conservative with libertarian tendencies and a long history of activism against left-wing intolerance." The other has "argu[ed] that counterterrorism authorities should be granted robust powers, defend[ed] detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and support[ed] the confirmations of any number of conservative judges and justices whose nominations enraged liberals."

Do Rauch and Wittes sound like conservatives who would recommend boycotting the GOP and "voting Democratic down to dogcatcher" to save our republic? Not really, but they make a good case for doing just that.

Despite their whole-hearted endorsement of Democrats, they don't spare Democrats from their scorn: "Its left is extreme, its center is confused [I'll second that], and it has its share of bad apples," they said.

We Democrats are still quarreling amongst ourselves about the 2016 election ("Jill Stein wasn't consorting with the Russians! She was engaging in diplomacy!"), struggling to find a message other than supporting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) above all other issues, welcoming untold numbers of immigrants from everywhere and anywhere because as you know, America is still a land of largely uncharted wilderness needing to be settled, and proclaiming, with ample justification, that "we're not Trump."

Whatever our faults may be, however, we Democrats are not destroying the rule of law or the republic. When one party is undermining the rule of law and obstructing justice, which Trump definitely is -- by attacking the FBI, undermining the Justice Department, and firing staff in both the FBI (former Republican FBI director James Comey, who found out on TV in California that he'd been fired) and the Justice Department (acting Attorney General Sally Yates within a week and a half of his inauguration), then Trump, Trumpism, and the Republican Party must get a bloody nose.

Wittes and Rauch insist that the GOP pay a heavy price for not blocking Trump's assaults on the rule of law. Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Bob Corker (R-TN) have all made admirable speeches decrying Trump's contempt for the rule of law, but Senators McCain, Flake, and Corker are all leaving the Senate. (Sen. McCain, of course, is not leaving willingly. He has a particularly deadly form of brain cancer.)

The GOP is no longer a place for people with even a modicum of integrity when it comes to the rule of law. With Fox News aiding and abetting them, Republicans cry conspiracy because two of numerous FBI agents happen to be Democrats. FBI director James Comey is a Republican, or was when he was fired. So is special counsel Robert Mueller.

A bloody nose in 2018 might discourage the GOP's current stampede toward authoritarianism and an even broader expansion of executive power than we have seen before and the GOP's relentless attacks on democratic institutions of government as well as the free press.

Or as Pogo would say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Or rather, he's the GOP. The GOP is organized.

As Will Rogers once said, "I'm not a member of any organized political party.... I'm a Democrat."

See? If we were organized and less confused, we'd be dangerous, like the GOP! Or maybe we're just more likely to commit ourselves to the rule of law and to protecting our democratic values.

Not in Johnson County, Iowa, mind you, but in other places.