Arizona censured three fairly middle of the road Republicans for not supporting Trump’s attempted sedition. The Oregon Republican Party declared the siege of the Capitol a “false flag” operation. Hawaii’s state GOP sent out tweets in praise of QAnon.

It’s hard to imagine Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, or even Dick Nixon signing off on that level of absolute fuckery… and if you’re too tied up in conspiracies and chasing down enemies for Nixon, you really need to ask yourself how far from the flock you really have strayed.

The easiest thing in the world to do would be pack my bags and decamp from the Republican Party. What happens after that is a bit problematic. I certainly can’t register as a member of the Democratic Party. The number of issues I fundamentally disagree with them on is just too long. The Libertarians are OK, I guess, though they don’t seem likely to ever get enough of their members to agree on any one thing to be effective players. Going independent has a charm of its own, though it basically locks you out of the primary process in Maryland.

It’s that last one that, for the moment, is keeping me in the Republican Party. To have any voice at all in how the party shapes itself in the future, you’ve got to be there for the primaries – for the elections no one really cares much about – for the county commission races and the state delegates. Being a vote cast in opposition to batshit crazy and for elemental conservative values is the only way to exert any influence at all in who ends up being tapped for the main events in 2022 and 2024.

For the time being, it feels like a better use of whatever limited talents I have to be inside the party shouting dissent rather than on the outside throwing rocks.