It is difficult to discourage and impossible to manage Justin Amash because he does not want much and wants nothing inordinately. He would like to win a sixth term as congressman from his culturally distinctive district around Grand Rapids, Mich. He does not, however, want it enough to remain in today’s Republican Party, which he has left because that neighborhood has become blighted.
Amash, 39, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, also has left that once-admirable faction because he does not define freedom as it now does, as devotion to the 45th president.
He is running as an independent, which might accomplish two admirable things: It might demonstrate that voters need not invariably settle for a sterile binary choice. And it might complicate Donald Trump’s task of again winning Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, which he did in 2016 by just 0.2 percentage points.
With a city named Holland and a college named for John Calvin, West Michigan’s culture reflects its settlement by Dutch Americans, who set about vindicating Max Weber’s connection between the “Protestant ethic” and the “spirit of capitalism,” a spirit incubated in 17th- and 18th-century Amsterdam. Distinguished Michigan denizens of Dutch descent have included Peter De Vries, America’s wittiest novelist.
