Sen. Flake’s departure a sad day for GOP

Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement today that he will not run for re-election marks a sad day for the Republican Party.

If you believe in limited government, free markets, and honest debate over public policy, as I do, then Sen. Flake has been one of the good guys in Washington. I’ve been a fan of Flake since he arrived in the U.S. House in 2001. He was one of a minority of Republicans to support true immigration reform. He was also a principled supporter of free trade, including lifting the travel ban and embargo against Cuba and opposing such corporate welfare as the Export-Import Bank.

For conservative Republicans, it’s difficult to see why they would not support Flake enthusiastically. He has been a dependable supporter of all the major planks of the GOP agenda, from replacing Obamacare to reforming the tax code. It was Flake who led the successful House effort to eliminate earmarks from the budget. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee he has worked with his fellow Republicans to win confirmation of judicial nominees who support constitutional government, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. He is pro-life with a lifetime voting score from the American Conservative Union of 93.

Flake’s unforgivable sin in today’s Republican Party is that he has raised a public warning about the direction President Trump is taking the party and its conservative base. I share Sen. Flake’s concerns, which he’s articulated forcefully and civilly in his recent book, “Conscience of a Conservative.” I’ll end this political eulogy with this powerful passage from the beginning of Chapter Five, “On Free Trade, Not-So-Free Trade, Populism, Nationalism, and the Collapse of What We Believe In.”

Never has a party so quickly or easily abandoned its core principles as my party did in the course of the 2016 campaign. …

Seemingly overnight, we became willing to roll back the ideas on the global economy that have given America the highest standard of living in history and lifted hundreds of millions of others from poverty all over the world.

Seemingly overnight, we became willing to jettison the strategic alliances that have spared us global conflict since World War II.

Seemingly overnight, we gave in to powerful nativist impulses that have arisen in the face of fear and insecurity over the swiftly evolving global economy.

Seemingly overnight, we stopped speaking the language of freedom and started speaking the language of power.

Seemingly overnight, reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior became excused and countenanced as “telling it like it is,” when it was actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified.

Seemingly overnight, the word globalist became a grave insult among people in my party who also called themselves “conservative.” I remember a right-wing blog post during my election to the Senate that said that I had “been seen in the company of globalists in Paris, France.” Quel scandale! Globalist as opposed to what, exactly? A provincialist? A parochialist? A localist? In this country, we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population. We are 20 percent of the world’s economic output. And if we don’t trade, we don’t grow. Given the alternatives, I’ll take the globalist moniker, thank you.

Seemingly overnight, we became defined not by the limitless aspirations of a free people but by our grievances and resentments and our lowest common denominators. Rather than leaning in to the economy of the future, this nativist vision would have us clambering to reclaim an economy of the past — an economy, by the way, that even if it were possible to somehow reconstitute would make no sense in the twenty-first century.

Amen.