The last four years of politics have been depressingly lonely for principled conservatives and independently minded Republicans like me who have felt abandoned and unrepresented, and we may be doomed to continue our sojourn in the wilderness if the 2020 presidential campaign continues its present course.

The leading voice on the left despises capitalism and prefers to replace market freedoms with government control, eliminating choice and dictating our consumption of goods and services for crucial portions of our economy at an absurdly high cost.

Our incumbent president has recklessly disregarded conservative principles by irresponsibly increasing our nation’s spending and debt to record levels, ignoring free trade principles with tariff wars, alienating our allies (NATO) and rewarding our adversaries (Russia), scorning constitutional checks and balances with executive overreach, encouraging the cancellation of GOP presidential primaries to remove voter choice and discarding impartial justice and accountability to wantonly wage personal vendettas.

What’s worse, both of these leading voices stoke the flames of contempt, hatred, force, populist demagoguery and close-minded bigotry that so many of us thought our country had outgrown for a better way.

I believe there is still hope this year if we examine the election creatively and constructively. Interestingly, one candidate in the race has strong potential to bridge the chasm between the left and the right and pull us together: Pete Buttigieg.

He has impressed me as a candidate that appeals strongly to a traditional Democratic base with many of his policy ideas and yet can draw considerable respect from Republicans.

Why would he appeal to conservatives? It’s more than his military background, business experience and pragmatic executive track record as mayor. For conservatives he offers an antidote for what Trump lacks: a candid and serious examination of reducing our national debt, a respect for our military and intelligence leaders, a reverence for the rule of law and constitutional balance of power and an advocacy for free and fair trade.

He’s a different kind of candidate, not a typical ideologically baiting partisan who stokes fears and breathes contempt for the other side. He’s a creative idea advocate and a bridge builder who respects and works productively with people he disagrees with.

How am I so sure that Pete is not just another smooth political hack and that he has a genuine ability to collaborate across the aisle? Because I know Pete Buttigieg personally. He and I were college classmates at Harvard and were heavily involved together at the school’s Institute of Politics.

Through various events, debates and discussions on campus, Pete and I didn’t often agree on specific policy positions. We still don’t agree on many of those same issues. But I was always impressed that Pete didn’t try to cram his ideas down my throat, which would have been easy to do since I was in a small minority as one of the few conservatives at Harvard.

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Pete was constructive, he respected people like me that he disagreed with and he genuinely approached problems with an eye toward both the underlying ideals and principles as well as the pragmatic, common-sense solutions that could pull us together and make something good happen.

As a candidate for national office, he continues to strike me as the same prudent, cooperative, articulate and respectful leader I knew back in college. And while he’s far from perfect, and he and I continue to disagree on several important policies, I believe Pete is who we need right now to dissipate our national crisis of divisiveness and actually solve problems that could otherwise cripple our fragile economy and democratic republic.

Taylor West