The Republican Party is very publicly committing suicide
Is an intervention worth the effort, or should conservatives and centrists build something new from the ground up?
Yesterday afternoon, I took part in a Zoom conference convened by Principles First, a grassroots organization that is looking for a way beyond the present state of our national discourse and politics. The link will quickly give you an indication of what we take as our guide.
The main question that participants kicked around was whether the Republican Party can be salvaged. Unless one is a hopeless Trumpist, it’s obvious that the GOP is infected by a toxin that is not only going to destroy it, but could, if unchecked, take the assurance of America’s Constitutional stability down with it.
Like many on the call, I came away still torn. It’s not an easy thing to build a new nationwide party. The last time it was done with the result of lasting viability was when the Republican Party was formed in the 1850s.
On the other hand, what late-stage Trumpism has done to the party and Trumpism’s role in ratcheting our national polarization to terrifying levels make a good case for letting the Republican project die.
Before sorting through these considerations, it needs to be said that Trumpism grew out of what Matthew Continetti, in a July 2015 Washington Free Beacon piece, called the radical middle. He didn’t coin the term, but he expertly brought the concept up to date:
Two decades ago, in the spring of 1996, Newsweek magazine described a group of voters it called the "radical middle." Formerly known as the Silent Majority, then the Reagan Democrats, these voters had supported Ross Perot in 1992, and were hoping the Texas billionaire would run again. Voters in the radical middle, Newsweek wrote, "see the traditional political system itself as the country’s chief problem."
The radical middle is attracted to populists, outsiders, businessmen such as Perot and Lee Iacocca who have never held office, and to anyone, according to Newsweek, who is the "tribune of anti-insider discontent." Newt Gingrich rallied the radical middle in 1994—year of the Angry White Male—but his Republican Revolution sputtered to a halt after the government shut down over Medicare in 1995. Once more the radical middle had become estranged from the GOP. "If Perot gets in the race," a Dole aide told Newsweek, "it will guarantee Clinton’s reelection."
Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences. The supporters of Reagan and Perot, of Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, have found another aging billionaire in whom to place their fears and anxieties, their nostalgia and love of country, their disgust with the political and cultural elite, their trepidation at what our nation is becoming.
A brash showboat and celebrity, self-promoter and controversialist, silly and mocking, a caricature of a caricature, Donald Trump is no one’s idea of a serious presidential candidate. Which is exactly why the radical middle finds him refreshing. Not an iota of him is politically correct, he plays by no rules of comity or civility, he genuflects to no party or institution, he is unafraid of and antagonistic toward the media, and he challenges the conventional wisdom of both parties, which holds that there is no real cost to illegal immigration and to trade with China.
Trump’s foreign policy, such as it is, is like Perot’s directed not toward Eurasia but our southern border. Unlike Perot, whose campaign emphasized the twin deficits of budget and trade, Trump has taken on illegal immigration from Mexico, fighting with both the identity politics left and the cheap labor right, with both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Like Perot too he has seized the public imagination, masterfully exploiting the media’s craving for ratings and for negative portrayals of Republicans, turning CNN into TNN, the Trump News Network, the finest and most exclusive cable channel on air.
Trump would enjoy press coverage no matter what he ran on. But the fact that he has chosen, perhaps unwittingly, illegal immigration to be his cause makes the coverage all the more polarizing, visceral, contentious, spiteful. He dared say what no one of his wealth and prominence ever says—that illegal immigration is not limited to DREAMERs and laborers and aspirational Americans, that it is not always, as Jeb Bush put it, an "act of love," that also traversing our southern border are criminals, rapists and narcotics traffickers and human smugglers, displaced souls from illiberal cultures who carry with them not only dreams but nightmares, bad habits, and other costly baggage. That his poor phrasing was sickeningly confirmed in early July, when an illegal immigrant who had been deported several times shot Kathryn Steinle dead in broad daylight on a San Francisco pier, only strengthened Trump's connection to the radical middle. So did the drug lord El Chapo’s escape from prison soon after Mexico received an extradition request from the United States.
It is immigration—its universally celebrated benefits and its barely acknowledged costs—that is the third rail of U.S. politics, with repercussions from the border to Eric Cantor’s district in 2014 to courtrooms and the Republican debate stage today. Trump didn’t step on the third rail; he embraced it, he won’t let go of it, and in so doing he’s become electric. Republicans, Democrats, journalists, corporations all want to define themselves against him, and their flaunting of their moral superiority only feeds the media monster, only makes Trump more attractive to the dispossessed, alienated, radical middle.
What Republicans are trying to figure out is not so much how to handle Trump as how to handle his supporters. Ignore or confront? Mock or treat seriously? Insult or persuade? The men and women in the uppermost ranks of the party, who have stood by Trump in the past as he gave them his endorsements and cash, are inclined to condescend to a large portion of the Republican base, to treat base voters’ concerns as unserious, nativist, racist, sexist, anachronistic, or nuts, to apologize for the "crazies" who fail to understand why America can build small cities in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a wall along the southern border, who do not have the education or skills or means to cope when factories move south or abroad, who stare incomprehensibly at the television screen when the media fail to see a "motive" for the Chattanooga shooting, who voted for Perot in ’92 and Buchanan in ’96 and Sarah Palin in ’08 and joined the Tea Party to fight death panels in ’09.
These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago. They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote.
What the radical middle has seen in recent years has not given them reason to be confident in our government, our political system, our legion of politicians clambering up the professional ladder office to office. Two inconclusive wars, a financial crisis, recession, and weak recovery, government failure from Katrina to the TSA to the launch of Obamacare to the federal background check system, an unelected and unaccountable managerial bureaucracy that targets grassroots organizations and makes law through diktat, race riots and Ebola and judicial overreach. And through it all, as constant as the northern star, a myopic drive on the part of leaders in both parties to enact a "comprehensive immigration reform" that would incentivize illegal immigration and increase legal immigration despite publicopposition.
He wrote that at the outset of the Trump era. We now have the record of the subsequent results of letting this sentiment (it would be far too generous to call it a philosophy or an ideology) take over the party that was destined to be its natural repository.
The following month, Thomas Sowell had a piece in National Review, which is interesting for two reasons. One, his prognostication about the 2016 presidential race is perhaps the only exception there’s ever been to his being right about anything. He vastly underestimated the impact of this new impulse within the Republican Party. However, reason number two is that he was correct in his analysis of how it arose. It basically echoes Continetti’s:
Donald Trump has virtually no chance of becoming even the Republican party’s candidate in 2016, much less being elected President of the United States.
The reason is not hard to understand: Republican voters simply do not trust him, as the polls show. Nor is there any reason why they should trust him, given his chameleon-like changes in the past.
Why then is he the “front-runner” in the polls?
One reason is arithmetic. When there is a small army of Republican candidates, each with a tiny set of supporters, anyone with enough name recognition to get the support of a fifth or a fourth of the Republicans polled stands out, even if twice that many Republicans say they would never vote for him.
When both kinds of Republicans are counted, Donald Trump is both the “front-runner” and the leading pariah. The danger is not that he will get the nomination, but that his irresponsible talk will become the image of the Republican party, and that his bombast will drown out more sober voices that need to be heard, thereby making it harder to select the best candidate.
Many Republican voters are so disgusted with their party that they are immediately attracted to anyone who voices the outrage they feel.
More is involved than arithmetic, however. Many Republican voters are so disgusted with their party, especially over its repeated betrayals of them, and of the country, especially when it comes to immigration, that they are immediately attracted to anyone who voices the outrage they feel.
Prescient indeed.
It also needs to be said that the morphing process the Democratic Party has been undergoing over the past century-plus, that has come in phases such as the original Progressive movement (Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Woodrow Wilson et al), New Dealers such as Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins, Communists such as Hunter Pitts O’Dell infiltrating the civil rights movement, the New Left and the student radical movement it spawned, Michael Harrington’s founding of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Gramscian long march through the institutions that gave us the Midwest Academy, the Insitute for Policy Studies, liberation theology, the Saul Alinsky-Cloward & Piven approach, and finally, the Obama phenomenon, has accelerated over the past half-decade. Whether one wants to talk about what are commonly called “social issues,” climate alarmism, a redistributive approach to health care and education, or matters of race, it’s obvious that the most vocal Democrats have moved left. We hear a lot more from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez than we do from Joe Manchin.
Joe Biden, who is ostensibly the great hope of centrism and unity, has signed off, along with Bernie Sanders, on the Democrats’ 110-page policy document that calls for universal pre-K, the expansion of Social Security, raising the national minimum wage, and a public option in health care. Biden has given John Kerry the task of fleshing out the details of America’s joining the Great Reset.
So, clearly, a viable, coherent conservatism is needed to provide a solidly thought-out countervailing force to this.
To many, it appears that all we have is this dying animal called the Republican Party.
And it is preoccupied - as evidenced by the 126 GOP House members and 17 state attorneys general who signed onto Ken Paxton’s infantile lawsuit - with trying to somehow reverse the presidential election, Constitutional guardrails be damned.
It gets worse. Allen West, a decorated war veteran who has been in good standing as a respectable conservative, is is floating this idea:
Texas GOP Chairman Allen West said some states should break away from the rest of the United States and 'bond together' in a call for secession not seen since the American Civil War while vloggers Diamond and Silk questioned: 'where is the military?'
Rush Limbaugh’s fall from superstar status within the conservative movement has reached these depths, as he also suggests the secession idea:
Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera appeared Thursday on The Story With Martha MacCallum where he slammed conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show on Wednesday, Limbaugh said that the country is trending toward secession.
“I actually think that we’re trending toward secession,” Limbaugh said. “I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’” He added, “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way. So I know that there is a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that that is where we’re headed whether we want to go there or not.”
And Rivera did not mince words when he addressed those remarks.
“I think talk of secession is treason,” Rivera said. “I want to be very clear, Rush Limbaugh is a powerhouse broadcaster, he’s one in a zillion. They come along once in a generation, but that talk is reckless, it’s irresponsible.”
Mike Lindell, who in recent memory had the admiration of a great many Americans for exemplifying a great American success story, overcoming addiction to turn an idea - a more comfortable pillow - into an entrepreneurial juggernaut, has gone beyond beclowning himself and moved into the realm of dangerous conspiracy theory, against the television network that largely made his success possible:
CEO of MyPillow Mike Lindell spoke to the crowd at a pro-Trump march in D.C. on Saturday, and singled out Fox News Channel as being “in on” a major conspiracy to overthrow the Donald Trump because of their having called Arizona for Joe Biden.
“We cannot give up ever on this,” said Lindell to the crowd, which in no way was giving up, being as they were in D.C. marching under the banner of “Stop the Steal” and in protest of the election results and, more recently the Supreme Court. “This is a spiritual warfare in our country and in the world.”
“This fraud is real,” he said. “It’s of epic proportions that this election was stolen.”
After several more statements along the same lines, including his frequent line about having “broken” some mysterious “algorithms,” he pointed the finger at Fox News.
As the crowd cheered he continued. “I’m serious, they had to be on it!”
He also said “they should all go to prison when they are found out.”
At the conclusion of his remarks, he delivered another line that is going viral on social media. Lindell was saying that the fraud will be proven, and that Trump will somehow still be elected.
Then Lindell suggested we might already be in the Biblical “end times” just as the crowd was chanting “four more years” of Trump.
At that rally, politicization of the pandemic was on display:
Looking out at the largely-maskless throng of attendees at a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Republican congressman-elect Bob Good dismissed the coronavirus pandemic as “phony” and lauded the crowd as “a group of people that gets it.”
“I can’t tell you how great it is to look out there and see your faces,” said Good, who won Virginia’s 5th Congressional District seat last month. “This looks like a group of people that gets it. This is a phony pandemic.”
“It’s a serious virus, but it’s a virus, it’s not a pandemic,” continued Good, who was wearing a Trump 2020 hat but no mask.
Good’s remarks come as the United States reports record-breaking COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. On Wednesday, at least 3,124 people in the U.S. died from the coronavirus. It was the first time that the daily death toll has surpassed 3,000.
As was rather explicit threat of violence:
Conspiracy theorist and internet personality Alex Jones told a crowd of pro-Trump protesters in Washington, D.C. on Saturday that President-elect Joe Biden "will be removed one way or another," while addressing the protesters from a stage.
All these people are still taking their cues from the top:
[Trump] ranted after midnight Friday about getting “screwed,” boasting he “got more votes than any other sitting president in history” — yet “purportedly lost” (because Joe Biden got 7 million more votes).
Trump had “intervened” on behalf of the Texas lawsuit seeking to toss all the votes in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which happened to vote for Biden. The suit was backed by 17 other red states (“wonderful states,” the president noted in his tweet).
But the court tossed the suit Friday because Texas “lacked standing” to challenge votes in other states, it said in a brief, unsigned order.
In “a flash” the suit was “thrown out and gone, without even looking at the many reasons it was brought,” Trump angrily tweeted. “A Rigged Election, fight on!” he added.
He complained bitterly that no court has yet judged his complaints about election fraud on their “merits” — even though there is absolutely no evidence of election fraud. “It’s a “legal disgrace, an embarrassment to the USA!!!” he tweeted.
He grumbled that the Supreme Court “really let us down,” and has “no wisdom, no courage!”
Twitter marked the tweets about a rigged election “disputed.”
The president didn’t detail how he might “fight on.” But Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the mastermind behind Trump’s failed legal assault on election results, told Newsmax Friday that more suits will be filed.
Toward the end of yesterday’s Principles First call, there was general acknowledgement that the task at hand is rather urgent. Anyone who can see that, between the Trumpist right and the hard left, we are losing our collective memory of what we’ve been as a nation, is asked to get on board.
It’s quite late in the day, and a determination has to be made. Is the party of Lincoln still where we should be trying to keep alive the remaining sliver of daylight?