#JEFF FLAKE ARIZONA FREE#

In this version of a personality cult, conservatism is whatever their Great Helmsman’s most recent tweet says it is. To the fist-shaking Red Guards of Trumpism, Mr Flake’s crime is to argue-perhaps even to remember-that their movement once held to an enduring set of ideas.

They do not care that Mr Flake spent years in Congress opposing abortion, supporting gun rights and voting for lower taxes, enraging party leaders by campaigning against “earmarks” that directed pork-barrel dollars to favoured districts.

No matter that Mr Flake is a lifelong disciple of Barry Goldwater, the flinty Arizonan prophet of economic freedom, whose own call to arms against an overweening central government was entitled “The Conscience of a Conservative”. Instead they call him a de facto Democrat and a “liberal” who must be purged. Strikingly, such critics as Laura Ingraham, an anti-immigrant tribune reportedly sounded out for the post of White House press secretary, or Mark Levin, a splenetic star of conservative radio, do not accuse the Arizonan of exaggeration, or of muddling his priorities. Now they languish in an “unconservative stew of celebrity and authoritarianism,” spiced with conspiracy theories.īang on cue, Mr Flake’s book has been denounced by Mr Trump’s enablers in the world of conservative celebrity. Republicans succumbed as rapidly as a “tranquilised elephant”, he writes in “Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle”.

#JEFF FLAKE ARIZONA FREE#

He regrets that a demagogue, President Donald Trump, has lured Republicans into a “Faustian bargain”, offering power if they forget everything they believe about free trade and individual freedom, about leading global alliances against tyranny, and even about personal honour. It states aloud a truth that other Republicans voice only behind closed doors: that the American conservative movement is in crisis. SENATOR JEFF FLAKE of Arizona has written a brave book.

Jeff flake arizona