Bill Kristol - Democrats and the Fight to Salvage American Democracy

 

Bill Kristol, the arch-neoconservative who, with Robert Kagan, co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Politics, it's said, makes strange bedfellows and it doesn't get much stranger than Kristol and the Biden-wing Democrats.

Now editor of the online conservative news magazine, Bulwark, Kristol defends his support for Biden over the the Treason Caucus republicans. A call to defend America from what had been Kristol's Republican Party.

You want to save the Republican party? I’m all for it. In fact, the Republican Accountability Project, of which I’m a part, is doing its best to help do so.

You’re interested in exploring whether a new, centrist party is possible, as Joe Walsh urged last week? I’m game to take a look.

I am, however, not convinced that either of those alternatives presents a viable short-term path forward—at a moment when the short term is deeply important, because our democracy faces an internal crisis.

After all, we did just fail to have a traditionally peaceful transfer of power. One of our two major parties—having failed in a coup attempt—now claims that the current administration is illegitimately elected, the result of massive, coordinated fraud. The logical extension of this position would seem to be that the American constitutional order deserving of our allegiance no longer exists.

So we are at the edge of crisis, having repulsed one attempted authoritarian power grab and bracing for another.

...A conservative considers the real-world consequences of her principles. A conservative considers how adherence to—or deviation from—certain principles would help or hurt the goals conservatism seeks to achieve. Because it is these goals—liberty, justice, good government, democracy, stability, and so on—that matter. Not the “-ism.” Conservatism is a means to those goals, not an end in itself.

...And one of those facts of life is that a dangerous, anti-democratic faction—which pretty clearly constitutes a majority—of the nation’s conservative party is not committed in any serious way to the truth, the rule of law, or the basic foundations of our liberal democracy.

At bottom, I think we need to spend more time thinking through the challenges facing our democratic order today, and less time gazing into the navel of American conservatism.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m interested in debates about American conservatism. I’d like to save American conservatism. But I’m more interested in saving—and I have a greater sense of urgency about saving—American democracy.