Politics, Principles, and Standing Up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage the Republican Party
Politics, Principles, and Standing Up to Donald Trump: Moral Courage the Republican Party
- June 30, 2025
- Kristen Monroe, political science, Political Science Now, June 30, 2025 (2024 U.S. Election Webinar Series)
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“The presidential election of 2016 shocked both academics and the general public. In a special issue of The Atlantic, conservative columnist David Brooks described his response to Trump’s policies as personal grief, a mourning for what felt like a betrayal of his country and its basic values (2025). Brooks captured the deeply personal sense of loss that sent many Americans into a great depression. How could this have happened? What in the world was going on? It was a moment when the bottom fell out, and traditional Republican conservatives and liberals had to scramble to figure out what to do. This manuscript describes one pedagogical response to what is best described as political trauma. It asks about political moral courage by asking key Republicans: Why did you stand up to Trump when so many Republican leaders did not? The narrative interpretive analysis of morally courageous Republicans like Lynn Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Anthony Scaramucci describes what one class of students did to use scholarly research to understand the shock and pain they – and many of their fellow citizens – felt at Trump’s policies.”
Continue reading: https://politicalsciencenow.com/politics-principles-and-standing-up-to-donald-trump-moral-courage-the-republican-party-2024-post-election-reflection-series/
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