In the late 1970s, early 1980s, before the evidence of policy failure was incontrovertible, I embraced many of what were then bold ideas from the conservative movement. I read “Commentary,” read Milton Friedman and Thomas Slowell, read Buckley’s “National Review”.

I had disagreements with my progressive friends. I remained committed to my progressive goals but I believed the failures of what was clearly calcified liberal policies in the 1970s offered a reason to explore conservative alternatives.

In the late 1970s, conservative methods were portrayed as an alternative means to the same progressive goal— a more just society, fairer to individuals, with more opportunities for growth than what appeared to be dead-end liberal programs.

With high unemployment and high inflation and high interest rates, the late 1970s seemed to expose fatal flaws in the liberal economic paradigm. Conservative thought offered potential answers. I thought it was worth trying.

As it turned out, conservative economic theory was just as flawed as the calcified liberal economic theory of the 1970s. Or maybe both theories were just poorly executed. Or maybe economic theories have little to do with the real world.

Instead of boosting the middle class and producing a more fair and just society, the conservative paradigm embraced by both political parties in the 1980s and 1990s led to a collapse of the middle class, ruinous national debt (except under 2nd term Clinton) and social unrest.

By the mid-80s, particularly after the Reagan Recession and his vicious busting of the Air Traffic Controllers Union, I came to see conservative “policy” as window dressing for the GOP’s real goal: accumulating power and pandering to wealthy donors.

Instead of arguing for conservative principles, as their intellectual elites like Friedman, Sowell, and Podhoretz did, Republican politicians embraced increasingly divisive race-baiting to win elections. By the mid-1990s, race was the unspoken but defining Republican issue.

Even the party’s bogus embrace of “Christianity” was race based, since the Christians the party most ostentatiously embraced where White Fundamentalists. Fewer and fewer Republican policies were more than window-dressed with conservative “principles”.

Today, there is no real conservative intellectual basis to the #GOP, no brilliant conservative theorists offering fresh new solutions to genuine national problems. Denial that there are social and economic problems is the current Republican orthodoxy.

I’m not ashamed of my brief late ‘70s flirtation with conservative thought. At the time I believed the ideas presented were worth exploring given the apparent failure of liberal policies. When conservative policies also failed, I rethought my position. That’s what you do.

Still, that experience of embracing conservative ideas gives me perspective to recognize the Republican Party has not been a *conservative* party for decades. It is a cynical organization devoted solely to the advancement of wealthy elites through the manipulation of racism.

Such a party has no ideology, no reason to exist other than power. It’s time for the #GOP to die. Conservatives more than any other group have the most to gain with the Republican Party’s death. The party has used you and abandoned you.

Abandon it in turn.