[Following is an abridgment of an article appearing in nytimes.com on August 11, 2024. Unabridged sections are in italics]

By David French

Opinion Columnist

“I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.

But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.

French’s reasoning is abridged as follows:

Since 2015, the MAGA movement has been a long-running, ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any consideration of character in leadership 

“What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?”

Lying is wrong: 

an uncontroversial assertion, especially to a party that envisions itself as a home for people of faith. Yes politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But we have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.

Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. Legal results speak for themselves. The severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty is found in the cascade of successful defamation lawsuits. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their vote counting conduct. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of “2,000 Mules”, an election fraud fantasy,

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process:

This should be another uncontroversial assertion. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era. Even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters. And, every American should remember Jan. 6 as a mob of insurrectionists ransacking the Capitol.

One party nominated a man who was indicted for his role in the criminal scheme to steal an American election that ended in a violent political riot. One party nominated a man who began the first rally of 2024 with a song by violent insurrectionists, “Justice for All,” a bastardized version of the national anthem by a group called the J6 Prison Choir. 

Trump’s cruelty is as contagious as his lies: 

Cruelty has embeded itself deeply within one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies, conservative evangelicals. It is difficult to overstate the viciousness and intolerance characterize MAGA Christians actions against political foes. Many churches and leaders are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian. Trump is changing the church.

A True Christian can’t Vote for a Democrat?

It is a strange claim when the prime-time lineup at the Republican convention featured a man who publicly slapped his wife, a man who pleaded no contest to an assault charge, and another man who had sex with his friend’s wife while the friend watched.

It is stranger still considering the Trump campaign watered down the Republican platform on abortion to the point it’s functionally pro-choice. Earlier pro-life generations would have revolted and made  clear that abandoning pro-life results in a fundamentally different party.

Abortion as the Single Issue:

Even if your focus on that issue decides your vote, the picture for abortion opponents is grim. Since Dobbs, the pro-life position is in a state of political collapse. It hasn’t won a single red-state referendum, and it might even lose again in Florida, a state that’s increasingly red yet also looks to have a possible pro-choice supermajority. 

Abortion rates and ratios increased under Trump.

In addition, the best available evidence indicates that abortion rates are up since the Dobbs decision.

Barack Obama was a pro-choice politician, yet annual abortions dropped by 338,270 comparing 2016 to 2008. Though Trump nominated anti-abortion justices and enacted a number of anti-abortion policies, there were 56,080 more abortions the last year of his term than there were in the last year of Obama’s presidency.

If present trends continue, then abortion opponents will have won an important legal battle, but they’ll ultimately lose the more important cultural and political cause.

“Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.

“At the same time, we should make the argument — firmly but respectfully — that this is no ordinary race and that the old political categories no longer apply.

“For example, how many Republicans would have predicted that voting for a Democrat would be the best way to confront violent Russian aggression and that the Republican would probably yield to a Russian advance? In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin. By voting for pro-life politicians down ballot, I can help prevent federal liberalization of abortion law. But if a president decides to abandon Ukraine and cripple NATO, there is little anyone can do.”

While some voters are experiencing a degree of Trump nostalgia, remembering pre-Covid life as a time of full employment and low inflation, there is a different and darker story to tell about Trump’s first term. Our social fabric frayed. It’s not just that abortions increased: The murder rate skyrocketed; drug overdose deaths hit new highs; marriage rates fell; and birthrates continued their long decline. Americans ended Trump’s term more divided than when it began.

“I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.

“The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 12, 2024, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Save Conservatism