By Jeff Flake, July 31, 2017<\/p>\n
We created him, and now we’re rationalizing him. When will it stop?<\/p>\n
Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama\u2019s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama\u2019s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president\u2014the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama\u2019s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn\u2019t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one\u2019s own party. Michael Gerson, a con\u00adservative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, \u201cThe conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,\u201d and conservative institutions \u201cwith the blessings of a president \u2026 have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a conservative, that\u2019s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, \u201cIf I took the time to respond to every presiden\u00adtial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.\u201d Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, \u201cIf I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.\u201d At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.<\/p>\n
Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. It is what we talk about when we talk about \u201cchecks and balances.\u201d Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, \u201cSomeone should do something!\u201d <\/i>without seeming to realize that that someone is us. And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.<\/p>\n
There was a time when the leadership of the Congress from both parties felt an institutional loyalty that would frequently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional prerogatives in a unified front against the White House, regardless of the president\u2019s party. We do not have to go very far back to identify these exemplars\u2014the Bob Doles and Howard Bakers and Richard Lugars of the Senate. Vigorous partisans, yes, but even more important, principled constitutional conservatives whose primary interest was in governing and making America truly great.<\/p>\n
But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals\u2014even as we put at risk our institutions and our values\u2014then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn\u2019t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president\u2019s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives\u2014who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union\u2014that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a con\u00adcerted attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.<\/p>\n
It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater\u2019s book, to a chapter entitled \u201cThe Soviet Menace.\u201d Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this part of Goldwater\u2019s critique had seemed particularly anachronistic. The lesson here is that nothing is gone forever, especially when it comes to the devouring ambition of despotic men. As Goldwater wrote in that chapter:<\/p>\n
Our forebears knew that \u201ckeeping a Republic\u201d meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.<\/p>\n
So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn\u2019t hesitate to speak out if the president \u201cplays to the base\u201d in ways that damage the Republican Party\u2019s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.<\/p>\n
We have taken our \u201cinstitutions conducive to freedom,\u201d as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.<\/p>\n
Jeff Flake is a Republican senator from Arizona. This article has been excerpted from his new book, <\/i>Conscience of a Conservative<\/a>. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.<\/i><\/p>\n