George Will's Wrong Move - Leaving the Party

George Will has left the Republican Party in protest over Donald Trump.

That's the wrong thing to do.

Really, the only thing George Will has accomplished in leaving the Republican Party is to take the party one step closer to being the Trumpublican Party. And the Trumpublican Party will be the party that is in charge of picking the next round of candidates in the next election. Many of those candidates will be in "safe" Trumpublican districts - guaranteeing that we will find Trumpublicans in the House and Senate.

This is simply not a smart thing to do.

The right thing to do is to stay in the party and to use one's influence as a member to improve the quality of the candidates that the party is putting on the ballot.

One of the principle ways we have gotten ourselves into the mess we are in is that moderate and sensible people - fed up with the stupidity and extremism of the Democratic and Republican parties, have left the parties. The parties themselves are being left more in the hands of arrogant extremists who shun compromise and see themselves as incapable of error.

This system is not working to give us effective government.

Whether we like it or not, the real world in which Americans live is one in which the two major political parties choose the candidates for the general election in almost all cases - one of whom will become President. If you, the reader, happens to live in a region where this is not the case, you may consider yourself lucky. However, what I describe here is the accurate real-world situation for the vast majority of voters.

This means we are turning the process for selecting candidates over to the most extreme, narrow-minded, uncompromising elements in the country.

The government that we see is the government that results from this type of behavior.

What we need to do to reverse this problem is to get into the position to influence who actually gets selected for public offices at the stage where those decisions are actually being made.

One of the things that this means is that, in a district where one of the major parties is dominant, one should join that party and become a part of that party's selection process. If one lives in a region where whoever the Democratic Party selects for an office is the one who will win, one should join the Democratic Party and work for the candidate (with a chance of winning) that most closely represents one's views. Even if one prefers a Republican candidate, if the Republican candidate has no chance of winning, one has a reason to support, instead, the most Republican of the Democratic candidates.

This applies to a Democrat living in an area that the Republican Party (or Trumpublican Party) dominates. One should join the party and at least support the most Democratic candidate among those available. At least in this way one has a voice in who wins the election.

Even as a member of the dominant party - with sympathies to the minor party - once the dominant party has selected the best candidate - one can still vote for the other party's candidate in the general election. However, given the fact that this candidate will almost certainly lose, the winner from the dominant party will not be as bad as he would have been without your input.

Or, we can continue along the same road we are travelling - allowing both major parties to become increasingly extreme and averse to compromise.