26th District candidate April Moore worries over the direction of her former party

April Moore lauds Front Royal’s Vigil for Democracy’s two-year commitment to political dissent. Photos/Roger Bianchini

As mentioned in Royal Examiner’s lead story on the launch of the third year of Vigil for Democracy demonstrations against the political agenda and lack of transparency of the Trump Administration, April Moore is positioning herself for a Democratic challenge of 26^th District State Senate Republican incumbent Mark Obenshain in the upcoming election.

Vigil for Democracy launches into 3rd year in the populist political trenches

In the above linked story we alluded to a concern Moore shared with vigil participant and former Republican Jorge Amselle over what both see as disturbing trends in the Republican base and that base’s elected representatives.

Moore said it is personally painful to witness what she considers a Republican abandonment of inclusive and constructive conservatism in favor of bigotry-tinged extremism because like Amselle, she too has Republican roots.

“I used to be a Republican; I grew up Republican. My parents, I am sure, would just roll over in their graves if they could see what their party has become. And I am trying to help Republicans who don’t like what their party has become to see it and reject it, so they can get to work building a decent, constructive conservative party. Because I think American needs a conservative party that’s constructive.”

Or as conservative columnist George Will has observed, “The American Eagle needs a healthy left and right wing to fly.” But a healthy, constructive conservative voice is not what Moore sees in the current Republican Party, either in Congress, State Legislatures or at its base.

“We’ve all watched what the Republican Party has become right in front of our eyes – and the nomination and election of Trump are just the most visible symbol of that. I mean, this has been building for a generation. We’ve had people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity with this kind of drum beat poisoning people’s minds and getting people to believe things that just aren’t true – getting them to think Democrats are their enemies instead of just people who care about their country and might have different ideas,” Moore observed.

Moore addresses her own concerns about the current political climate to those present to launch the third year of weekly Vigil for Democracy demonstrations against the Trump Administration agenda.

“And a lot of people fall for it. They believe what he or they are saying. It’s very dangerous to our democracy that we have something like 40% of our fellow citizens liking what they see when they watch Trump. I mean okay, maybe people voted for him because they thought ‘Oh okay, let’s have a change’. Now we’ve had three years to watch him tell all these lies and threaten our national security by not even believing his own intelligence agencies – he’ll believe Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un instead of what his own intelligence agencies are telling him. I mean, this is very dangerous. And we have to fight it and try to help people see that even after Trump leaves if you have 40% of our citizens liking what he did it will be an ongoing problem.”

Asked if the primary ongoing problem would be a significant, if at this point minority portion of the American public favoring a move toward authoritarianism based on cults of personality, Moore upped the ante on potential consequences.

“That’s very dangerous, yes,” she said of a rising tide of blind-faith political allegiance steeped in a vilification of enemies, real or imagined. “But even more dangerous than that is the threat of nuclear war. Because Trump has pulled us out of the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty,” she noted of an agreement between the U.S. and Russia dating to the Reagan era that has kept mid-range nuclear weapons out of Europe on Russia’s western frontier.

It is a frontier many political and military analysts believe current Russian leadership, and we all know who that is, would like to see re-drawn toward former Soviet Union parameters across Eastern Europe.

Asked if a military, perhaps even nuclear, conflict broke out between Russia and the EU or NATO, which side she thought a Trump-led America might throw in with, Moore laughed nervously and moved on to another pending crisis – climate change.

“Climate change is really the biggest challenge confronting humanity. And the president pulled out of the (climate) treaty and he’s saying it’s fake news and fake science – and it’s so harmful. It’s at a time when we’re in great danger and we need to be moving full speed ahead (to correct things). What we really need on climate is a World War II-type effort. We need that big a mobilization; and meanwhile he’s dragging us in the opposite direction.”

We pointed to the negative Republican reaction and vilification of freshmen Democratic House membership rolling out the idea of a “Green New Deal” similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic New Deal that created jobs and helped push America out of the Great Depression.

“Yea, that it’s socialism or what is it going to cost,” Moore responded, adding, “Why don’t they consider the cost of doing nothing about climate change, with all the dramatic weather which is only going to get worse; creating many more refugees?”

So one underlying question for many, including former Republicans like Moore and Amselle, at the current political divide across Chester Street in Front Royal on Wednesday afternoons, as well as across Main Street America on any given day, is whether the Republican Party can regain a more moderate philosophical center or will continue a flirtation with political, social and economic extremism.

Ultimately it is a question only those choosing to remain Republican will be able to answer.