Max Boot has long channeled my feelings, in more eloquent words. I know I'm one of at least 4 or 5 on this tiny site alone that feel the same way. I know it's self-selective criteria....but most all my friends I went to college with and/or have worked professionally with also fit this mold. I guess this is just the gen x/gen y white college grad male stereotype.
I am socially liberal: I am pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-abortion rights, pro-immigration. I am fiscally conservative: I think we need to reduce the deficit and get entitlement spending under control. I am pro-environment: I think that climate change is a major threat that we need to address. I am pro-free trade: I think we should be concluding new trade treaties rather than pulling out of old ones. I am strong on defense: I think we need to beef up our military to cope with multiple enemies. And I am very much in favor of America acting as a world leader: I believe it is in our own self-interest to promote and defend freedom and free markets as we have been doing in one form or another since at least 1898.
You would think these political views would make me unexceptional. But in fact they have turned me into a political pariah — a man without a party. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are appealing to someone of my center-right outlook.
The problems with the Republican Party are symbolized by, but hardly limited to, Donald Trump. Long before he came along, the GOP had fallen prey to tea party absolutists who pursued a rigid, far-right ideological agenda and refused any entreaties, even from their own party’s leaders, to compromise. In a related development, the party’s conservative base had become increasingly nihilistic — focused on destroying “libtards” and “snowflakes” rather than implementing any positive agenda — under the influence of such pied pipers as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, and Alex Jones. All of them cater to their audience’s worst instincts to score rating points.
Now much of the GOP has been morally compromised by its de facto acceptance of Trump’s unacceptable behavior — from his firing of FBI Director James Comey in order to obstruct the investigation of his Russia links to his reluctance to criticize white supremacists and his pardon of racist former Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It tells you all that you need to know about the diseased state of today’s GOP that when Trump finally made a move toward bipartisan compromise — by trying to forge a deal to prevent the deportation of people who were brought illegally to the United States as children — a significant section of the right went
ballistic. Alex Jones suggested that Trump had been drugged, Ann Coulter argued that he should be impeached, and Breitbart dubbed him “Amnesty Don.”
