Conservatives should be asking themselves about the GOP: Should I stay or should I go?

It is easy today to find people who self-identify as conservative who oppose President Trump, and who even have gone as far as leaving the Republican Party because of Trump. Here is Washington Post columnist Max Boot explaining why he joined their ranks:

Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, is the latest Republican to say “no more.” Recently he issued an anguished Twitter post: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life,” he wrote. “Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

Schmidt follows in the illustrious footsteps of Washington Post columnist George Will, former Sen. Gordon Humphrey, former Rep. (and Post columnist) Joe Scarborough, Reagan and Bush (both) aide Peter Wehner, and other Republicans who have left the party. I’m with them. After a lifetime as a Republican, I re-registered as an independent on the day after Donald Trump’s election.

Notice the connection between these folks. Most of them are from what call the moderate wing of the Republican Party or have ties to liberal organizations; including Boot, there are three Washington Post columnists here.

Boot pillories conservatives that remain Republicans:

What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.

They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views.

Did you get that? Boot equates John McCain with Ronald Reagan. I think we’ve found the problem here. Boot wants to take us back to the good old conservative days of John McCain, Bob Dole, and George H.W. Bush.

Former conservative and pundit Bill Kristol has the NeverTrump syndrome so bad that he is “inclined to wish Kennedy hadn’t retired.”

Particularly telling is that many of the folks who are in this camp refused to get behind the most conservative candidate in the 2016 Republican primary, Ted Cruz, the only candidate who had a chance to derail Trump’s nomination. In other words, supporting a true conservative like Cruz was so distasteful to them they decided to take their chances with Trump–or Hillary.

I didn’t vote for Trump. But it is hard to ignore that despite his faults we have the most conservative presidency since Ronald Reagan’s. If I leave the Republican Party, it will be because we nominate another Dole or McCain in 2024.

Read the rest of Boot’s column here, though please do so with caution: liberalism can be contagious.