As a liberal, I’m appalled by what the former president doesn’t stand for and fearful of what he is prepared to do to gain power and profit for himself and loyalists: to violate the established foundations of the Constitution and to demonize anyone who dares to demand accountability for his words and actions.

Nothing would better serve the interests of America as I see it than an authentic conservative party, a party committed to the preservation of those values in evidential terms for which so many quiet patriots have given their lives.

None has been a more important value than opposition to anti-authoritarianism and fascistic appeals of all kinds. No liberal and conservative value has contributed more to our standing in the world than the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech.”

Mr. Trump believes in one form of speech — his own or those who echo him. Freedom of speech means as well the importance of dialogue in which each party may challenge and listen to the opposition with meaningful compromise as the outcome.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the esteemed British political philosopher and one of the founders of modern liberalism, puts it simply in “On Liberty” (1859): “He who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that.”

Citizen Trump has substituted myth for dialogue — MAGA — and hasn’t defined in a civil debate the meaning of “great” and “when” it existed. He has made magical appeals to an American version of a Golden Age which ancient Greek philosophers imagined only as an ideal. He has made an alleged fortune as CEO of the Myth America contest.

Howard R. Wolf

Amherst, New York