I Lived Through The Fall of the Shining City
The transformation of Ronald Reagan’s party of The Shining City, to a dangerous white nationalist party flirting with outright fascism is the great story of our time. I watched it happen, up close and personal. That is what I am here to write about.
I begin with an introduction, and a recounting of where I’ve been and what I’ve done since the Trumpist takeover.
In the fall of 2017, after 37 years as a Washington state Republican staffer, candidate, lawmaker, and State Party Chairman, I left the GOP and joined other Never Trumpers in the political wilderness in search of an alternative to our calcified, dangerous new two party system. I have wandered many paths, tried different options, made lots of predictions that turned out to be wrong, and have written about this journey over, and over, and over, and over again. After six years I have to admit that little progress has been made.
For much of my journey I believed that electing moderate independents was the answer. In 2017 I became very active in an organization called the Centrist Project, which then rebranded itself as Unite America. Our mission was to create a political infrastructure to help independents run for office, and we succeeded. During the 2018 election cycle we recruited and supported strong, credible candidates for offices from state legislature to Governor and the US Senate across America. We helped them run professional, relatively well funded campaigns, just as we planned. And they all got crushed. Most finished with less than 10% of the vote. Unite America changed its focus to ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms, and I left and continued my search.
2018 showed that independents have no chance in competitive three-way contests with Republicans and Democrats. Still, I and others continued to believe that in a two-way race against a MAGA Republican an independent could win by picking up both independents and Democrats. So in 2022, I put that theory to the test by running for the State Senate as an independent against a Republican incumbent with no Democrat on the ballot. At the same time, Never Trump leader, Evan McMullin, was running for the US Senate in Utah, one-on-one against Republican Mike Lee. Polling in both our races was very encouraging — at first. But in the end, we both lost by fairly wide margins.
Trust me when I tell you the independent path is a dead end. No matter what voters tell pollsters early in a race, when November comes, most will retreat to their partisan corner because they know that voting for an independent may help elect whichever party it is that they hate the most. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s poll numbers cratered when she left the Democratic party and became an independent. For all the noise the group No Labels is making about fielding an independent presidential ticket next year, their own polling shows them running a distant third, and given the history with independents, their numbers are likely to fall even further next fall.
The hard truth is throughout history, here and around the world, democracy is based on the competition between political parties. I know now that to make a difference you must be a member of a party. So, the path for my Reaganite, now-moderate, Never Trump tribe is to either fight to restore the GOP to its center right path, or replace it with a new party. In early 2021, a group of us met to discuss how to do exactly that. The result was the launch of the Renew America Movement. (RAM) Ram was comprised of dozens of prominent current and former Republican leaders, ready to fight back against the Trumpist takeover of the GOP I had high hopes that this was the beginning of a robust new movement.
But less than a year later, the leaders of RAM decided to merge the organization with two others to form the new Forward Party. I joined Forward when my State Senate campaign ended, assuming that at least some of the principles RAM believed in would be part of our platform. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the leaders of Forward were determined to try and build a party with no ideology or platform. That approach is not working for Forward now, and I do not believe that it will be successful in the future. Even if I am wrong, it is not what I signed up for or want to be a part of, so I resigned from Forward. Another dead end in the wilderness.
The decision to merge RAM into Forward killed the nascent movement we were building as a Never Trump community to restore or replace the TrumpGOP. I was one of the few RAM activists who joined Forward. Most of the Never Trump leaders we mobilized in 2020 and 2021 have scattered. Other than helping to elect Democrats, there is no organized political action among the Center Right today.
The principled conservative, Never Trump community is still out here, wandering, waiting to be mobilized, but potential leaders have not come forward. Yes, helping President Biden defeat Donald Trump must be Job 1 now. But soon America will need an alternative to the Democrats on the left, and the MAGA Republicans on the extreme right. But sadly, I have to report that as of today no such alternatives exists.
Soon I will post a longer piece laying out all I have seen and learned during the fall of what was once the party of The Shining City. Over time I will hope to add more in-depth pieces on what happened, why it happened and what we need to do to save liberal democracy and our constitutional republic.
