It seems that Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, is looking favorably on Chris Christie for president. That is Christie pictured above. Paywall protections permitting, you can read all about it in a Noonan column published in the June 3-4, 2023, edition of The Wall Street Journal. Noonan's column is headlined, "Chris Christie and the Republican Party’s Peril."
It is Noonan's contention that if the "Trump Faction" of the Republican Party prevails in the upcoming primary elections, and if Donald J. Trump becomes the Republican Party nominee for President in 2024, this will mean that those who made that happen (Trump supporters and voters for Trump) will have "ended the Republican Party." Here is a brief excerpt from Noonan's column, outlining the situation, as she sees it:
There will be no Republican Party after a Trump ’24 race, which ... means the vehicle of conservative thought and policy will be gone.So the question right now isn’t so much whether you like Nikki or dislike Ron, it is: Do you wish the Republican Party to disappear as a force in American political history? If you answer honestly that you do, you will be leaving the entire national field open to the Democratic Party, where the rising energy will continue to be from the hard left. (The old boomer moderates of both parties are aging and leaving.) Do you want to abandon America to progressive thinking? If you do, you are no longer a politically involved conservative, but more like a nihilist. It’s all ugly and corrupt, blow it up. Like a young Antifa activist.To think about the long term, to be strategic, to be serious about the implications of your decisions—those are good and needed things right now (emphasis added).
Noonan, with her long ties to the Republican Party, is concerned about the future of the Republican party. I have no such ties. I am worried about the future of the country. Trump is, indeed, contending that it is "all ugly and corrupt," and he means our entire political reality - everything. He does intend to "blow it all up." Would he be successful, if elected? I don't know. I'd like to hope not.
However, just to make my concerns clear, I think Noonan's worries about the Republican Party's peril understate the case. I think it more important for us to think about the nation's peril. It is easy to be upset and dissatisfied with our current political reality. I am pretty much dissatisfied with that current political reality, myself. However, if our dissatisfaction with our politics leads us to "blow it all up," the realities we will then confront are almost unimaginably worse (though, in fact, it is actually quite possible to imagine them).
I am not any kind of expert on the history of Germany and German politics in the 1920's. I don't know much about the rise of the "Nazi Party," and I am betting that most Americans are a lot like me. What we mostly know about is how the ascendancy of the Nazis came to an end.
That was good - good that the Nazi terror was ended, but.....
Let's consider NOT "blowing it all up" in the first place. Could we deal with legitimate dissatisfactions with our political, social, and economic realities without having to do that, maybe?
I'd like to think so. Noonan's column makes it clear, though, at least to me, that the stakes are pretty high in 2024!
Image Credit:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-christie-and-the-republican-partys-peril-new-jersey-2024-primary-trump-b0fa150d
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