If these leaders define the future of the Republican Party, it doesn't deserve to have a future
With President Trump trailing in the polls, there is palpable hope in some quarters that the Republican Party will get back to “normal” before long. That means a Reaganesque agenda of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, muscular internationalism, social conservatism and a welcoming attitude toward immigrants.
New York Times columnist David Brooks — an old colleague from our days together at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in the 1990s — is rightly skeptical of this assumption. “The basic Trump worldview — on immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc. — will shape the G.O.P. for decades, the way the basic Reagan worldview did for decades,” he wrote last week. But Brooks nevertheless suggests that a high-minded debate to define the nature of the GOP is underway among four youngish senators: Marco Rubio (Fla.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).
Rubio, he writes, “bases his vision in Catholic social teaching” and champions “common-good capitalism.” Hawley is a populist whose “core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level.” Cotton is an uber-hawk on everything from China to Big Tech. Sasse “is a Tocquevillian localist” who thinks that government’s job “is to ‘create a framework of ordered liberty’ so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.”
Brooks’s column accurately reflects what these senators are saying. But, I’m sorry, I can’t take any of their high-minded blather seriously. Not when they have spent the past four years acting as enablers for the worst president in U.S. history — or at least the worst in the past 151 years. Trump’s malign presidency has not only left 16.3 million unemployed and at least 159,000 dead. The wreckage he leaves behind also includes the smoking ruins of conservative ideology.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/10/if-these-leaders-define-future-republican-party-it-doesnt-deserve-have-future/
This is Max Boot's editorial referenced in elleng's post.