Welcome to the Twilight Zone, where your moral compass no longer works

David Cholesterol (the good kind) is, by his own description, "a Buckley/Reagan conservative who did not vote for either Democrat in the last election." Like me, he is astounded at how easy so many who consider themselves conservatives have bought into the authoritarian, populist, profoundly unconservative bilge being peddled by one Donald John Trump.

Earlier today I emailed by junior senator, Joni Ernst, urging her (probably in vain, from what I see on her web page) to oppose the so-called "tax reform bill" which would grant most people a substantial tax cut- at the cost of driving up the deficit by between one and two trillion dollars. It's a typical populist, pseudocon trick, guaranteed to appeal to the masses and certainly to the core of Donald Trump's constituency but doing nothing to address the problems the nation faces and in fact making them worse. For anybody with any pretension to being an economic conservative, this bill ought to be anathema. Yet Republicans and pseudocons are flocking to its support, just as they have flocked to the support of Trump, the biggest pseudocon of all.

Trump may appoint conservative judges and all credit to him for doing so. I have to admit that whenever I encounter one of the many obnoxious, jealous, unfair, and often ungrateful foreigners (particularly those who are citizens of our allies) who take such pleasure in trashing America whether it deserves it or not, a part of me begins to resonate to Trump's frequency.  But the better part of me soon gains the upper hand. I remember that whether we want to be in it or not, we have been placed by history in a position to play a certain role in the world. Our friends and the international community generally expect us to play it. World peace depends on our playing it. And that means providing the calm, wise, and considered leadership. Mr. Trump is neither calm, no wise, nor a leader, and wants to run away from our responsibilities rather than exercising them. History will not forgive us if we yield to that temptation, and we will suffer the consequences right along with the rest of the world.

But my problem with POTUS runs far deeper than that. It has to do with what he has done not merely to the soul of the Republican party, of which I can no longer consider myself part, but to the souls of Republicans. It may be going too far, at least at this point, to speak of them "searing their consciences," to use St. Paul's term.  But following Trump and his pseudo-conservative agenda has certainly caused the moral compasses of Christian conservatives and of conservatives generally grave damage. The rabid partisanship which divides our nation has divorced these people from the very philosophy they espouse and alienated them from the very values for which they claim to stand. They should be fighting to reduce the deficit, not acquiescing in increasing it in what I predict will be a vain attempt to curry favor with a vanishing middle class it benefits far less than it does others.  They should be fighting for free markets and free trade, not buying into the very kind of self-destructive, whiny protectionism they have always disdained when labor unions and liberal economists have embraced it. They should be fighting our culture's descent into coarseness and promiscuity and the abuse of women by the powerful, not defending a coarse, openly promiscuous serial adulterer who brags about treating women like dirt and who claims to be a Christian who never asks God to forgive him for anything.

They ought to be looking for free-market solutions to the healthcare crisis, not simply signing on to any irresponsible scheme that gets rid of Obamacare. They should be fighting to create real opportunities for the disadvantaged, empowering them and enabling them to escape dependence on government programs rather than scapegoating them. They should be insisting that merit, not color or creed, should determine one's fate in life, not setting one American against another in order to appeal to the worst in all of us.

Insofar as they are people of faith, they should be battling for the values which have brought Western civilization to the pinnacle of human history, not mouthing the words while tacitly accepting sexual predation on the part of its leaders and candidates. It should be providing a stark contrast to the Left's increasing authoritarianism and desire to suppress viewpoints with which it disagrees by speaking out loudly and clearly for the principle that when all ideas are allowed free expression, the good ones generally win because only then can their merits be clearly seen and the faults of the bad ones exposed. They should not be tacitly encouraging calls for restrictions on freedom of the press and engaging in rhetoric which supports violence against those with whom they disagree, even when those with whom they disagree peacefully demonstrate at their own rallies.

Cholesterol, in his blog "National Compass," has written eloquently about what is so very, very wrong about Donald Trump and what he has done to Republicans and conservatives in this gem of a piece.  If you are still a Republican or consider yourself a conservative, and yet have fallen victim to the admittedly sore temptation the outrages of the extreme Left present to all of us to yield our principles in a blaze of hyperpartisanship and embrace Trumpism, populism, and pseudo-conservatism, I beg you to read it and consider where true moral north lies.

It does not lie in the profoundly amoral and even immoral leadership of the false conservative who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C.

Don't sell the birthright of your principles- and certainly not your soul- for a bowl of populist pottage.