Opinion | Ryan, Republicans and the Republic - The New York Times - 0 views
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it was the Faustian bargain he struck with the president, normalizing the abnormal and forgiving the unforgivable for the sake of a single mediocre policy win.
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It will remember the alacrity and ease with which the supposedly likable face of pro-growth, family-friendly conservatism opportunistically played the sycophant to the congenitally mendacious and previously priapic nativist bigot who, through a bad fluke, captured the White House.
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A conservative rejoinder to this critique is that the speaker had no choice; that Trump was the lemon with which he had to make lemonade. Nonsense. Congress and the White House are coequals, and Ryan and other Republicans who saw Trump for what he is never owed him obeisance
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They owed the country an alternative political vision, untainted by Trumpism, which could emerge from the debacle of this presidency with clean hands.
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There are also grass-root efforts, not all of them partisan or even particularly right-leaning, but committed to defending foundational liberal values globally in an era of creeping authoritarianism and debased populism.
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“There is still a center in Western politics, and it needs to be revitalized intellectually, culturally, and politically,” reads a plank in its manifesto
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“The center-right and center-left are still joined by a broad set of common values, including respect for free speech and dissent, a belief in the benefits of international trade and immigration, respect for law and procedural legitimacy, a suspicion of cults of personality, and an understanding that free societies require protection from authoritarians promising easy fixes to complex problems.”
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This may not be a strictly Republican position, certainly not in this administration. It is a republican one
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it offers conservatives disgusted with what their former partisan home has become a different sort of base from which they can begin to build a better form of politics, free of both the corruptions of Trumpism and the capitulations of Ryanism.
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Liberals who understand that our common political health requires a morally and intellectually sound conservative movement might consider getting aboard.