Fate of Republican Party

A recent email message from the resurrected iconic liberal magazine, The New Republic, was interesting and, I thought, perhaps sadly true.

“The Republican Party is Dead,” screamed the unambiguous headline.

The thrust of the message was not hard to discern: The Republican Party has ceased to exist as a viable and sustainable political party, having been transformed into unrecognizable shapes and forms by the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, soon to be former president. 

Folks on the liberal/left side of the aisle have been predicting the demise of Republicans and conservatives for almost as long as I have been breathing. Writing obituaries about conservativism and its Republican variations is a popular sport, particularly among the left/liberal leaning intelligentsia.

Even as the esteemed historian Richard Hofstader dismissed conservatives and Republicans as the forces of paranoia and anti-intellectualism, Bill Buckley launched National Review magazine because there was no coherent political movement advancing his notions of enlightened conservatism.  Buckley fused three branches of thought together – anti-communists, free market advocates and traditional conservatives into an interesting, if somewhat uneasy, alliance.

It worked for a while, despite all the caterwauling on the left about McCarthyism, Nixon/Watergate, a racist southern strategy, the warmonger Reagan, the disconnected George H.W. Bush and the existential threat posed by George W.  Bush and his imperialist designs. Let us be frank, all these lines of attack were hysterical and, within the context of a global ideological war in which millions perished in communist concentration camps or the West’s efforts to resist, rather petty.

Then, not too long past, the editor and biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote a pamphlet about the death of conservatism – way before Trump came along. Richard Rorty wrote an interesting little book called Achieving a Country, that basically wrote off every conservative from Coolidge on as impossibly disconnected from the finer instincts of our nation (yet he lauded, among others, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky along with the standard list of renowned liberal thinkers and writers). Jill LePore in her recent book, This Country, goes back even further – effectively to the founding of this nation as a conservative, racist enterprise that not even Lincoln was fully able to rehabilitate.

Okay, okay. We get it. Liberals and leftists are the good guys and conservatives, and Republicans are bad (Nixon did, after all – following the Kennedy model, try to bug Democratic headquarters. Shameful.)

I recount all this history a little tongue in cheek to make a simple point. As a conservative going on forty years, I am not prone to accept the exaggerations and fulminations of the left as gospel or even half-truth. I have always read the enlightened left/liberal brain trust with interest and continue to do so (Schlesinger, Galbraith, Harrington, Baldwin, Mailer, Hitchens, Vidal, Doctorow, Lilla, Lapham and many others). Their arguments were/are important as a balance and critique of conservatism. If they were misguided in their prescriptions for how to fix America, they were not generally as irresponsible or as reckless as the new left that has mostly supplanted them within the Democratic establishment. See Greg Weiner’s book, The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for a tidy analysis of both where right and left have gone wrong.

Buckley, in many ways, set the boundaries of acceptable discourse for both left and right. He debated virtually every major leftist and liberal seriously and helped shape political discourse on both sides of the political divide. When the kooks in the John Birch society tried to impose their ideas on the Republican establishment, he resisted and wrote them out of the conservative family. He likewise marginalized the cultists who followed Ayn Rand and the anti-Semites too often found in certain corners of reactionary/right-wing thought. He did this using reason and logic and serious ideas, and he held his conservative brethren to a high standard of intellectual integrity.

Oh, and by the way, he and those he supported (even if halfheartedly) won more than they lost. Republicans from 1952 to 2008 (shortly after Buckley died) won nine presidential elections, the Democrats five, two by a Bill Clinton who tried to move the Democratic Party to the center by compromising with the likes of New Gingrich and who actually balanced the federal budget. Buckley made mistakes – he was slow to appreciate the Civil Rights Movement and was perhaps overly bullish about the venture in Vietnam, but on both issues he saw his errors and also – equally important – the errors of those who opposed his position. He crystalized clear thinking. The foundation of purposive thought, he always said, was the ability to make distinctions, and the ability to make distinctions requires an ability to reason and to draw upon those reserves of knowledge and tradition that have been well tested on the playing fields of reality. This is what it meant to be conservative during my lifetime. Until 2016.

Along came a guy named Trump.  He caught fire because he capitalized on the untethered thought that began to emerge in the Republican Party as Buckley and those he mobilized or aligned with began to fade (Irving Kristol, Jeffrey Hart, Russell Kirk and later Charles Krauthammer, among many others). As the left moved further left, condemning even displays of patriotism after 9/11, the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh began to seed an anti-immigrant, anti-establishment narrative among their legion of followers that had the advantage of not being complicated by facts or nuance.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, focused on wars abroad and economic challenges at home, failed to mobilize effectively against his harshest critics. For eight years, Republicans and conservatives watched Bush and those who supported him get labeled murderers, fascists, imperialists, racists – pick your evil, they/we were guilty according to the left. Those on the right and even mainstream Americans who simply believed America was a force for good grew increasingly frustrated by Bush’s half-hearted defense of the values they cherished. Then came McCain, an admirable man but not politically effective, and Romney, who even now walks to the beat of his own drummer (admirably, I must say, in many ways). But neither had the passion or ability to fight for what responsible conservatives believed in and so as the left moved further left, many on the right went searching for leaders who might give them voice: Palin (yikes), Herman Cain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Gingrich, Rick Perry (who once suggested Texas might succeed from the Union), and finally four year ago Donald Trump, a man who has probably not read the constitution, much less Bill Buckley.

Let’s remember what Trump did in 2015 and 2016, fueled ironically by the” fake news” media he detests, but who gave him unparalleled airtime because they never thought he could beat Hillary and never took him seriously. So, they helped prop him up as more serious conservatives and political figures were ignored by the media and marginalized and ridiculed by both Trump and their leftist opponents. (Politics truly does make strange bedfellows).

After eight years of being outflanked by the Obama/Clinton machine and being demonized by the media and Hollywood left, grassroots conservatives, tea party loyalists, evangelicals and fringe movement reactionaries were desperate to embrace anybody that could voice their anger, resentment and concerns. It did not matter that Trump was ignorant about most things constitutional or conservative. It did not matter that he lied about his opponents shamelessly. It did not matter that he had never run for office or governed a borough, much less a state or nation. It did not matter that he was crude, narcissistic in the extreme and tied to no conservative principals beyond anti-immigrant rhetoric and platitudes about making America great.

None of it mattered. He was charming, in a roguish way, politically street smart, tough as nails and willing to go after root and branch every enemy of his political base. He was, in all but dress and name, a brown shirt as even early critics and Cruz loyalists like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin conceded before they jumped into the Trump cult. And then, lo and behold, the guy won, primary after primary, demonized Rubio and Cruz, and shocked the country and the world in November of 2016.

He was, I suspect, as shocked to have won as many were to see him win and was barely prepared to run the country. That he has governed more successfully than his critics could acknowledge is not to say he governed well. He brought chaos and confusion into our lives and our government non-stop, also in part thanks to a paranoid and disturbed anti-Trump media class. Everything was about him, but he had two magic bullets: the American economy and our system of government. Unleash the ingenuity of the American people and they will thrive and build economic miracles, Trump believed. Be willing to disrupt business as usual and good things might happen in foreign policy (and bad things, too, actually).  But to his credit, he did not engage us in wild adventures abroad, contained the ISIS, reduced our global footprint, and asked the rest of the world to grow up to its own responsibilities.

The funny thing about Trump that his critics did not get is that he is not anti-anybody. He mainly pro Donald Trump. He won’t mouth the pieties of the left or the right beyond playing to his base. He had political instincts that served him well and was able to do what many failed to do – to broker peace deals in the Middle East, push the economy forward and play to groups that had grown as tired of left wing politically correct patronizing rhetoric as the right had grown tired of conservatives that made peace with the Ted Kennedys of the world no matter their agendas.

There was one huge problem. Trump had no cohering vision, no coherent set of values, no program, not even a set of talking points that made the case for his four years in office. He governed by rant. Sometimes that led to good things happening – see above. Sometimes, see pandemic, it led to confusion and chaos and a vacuum of leadership. He was attacked unfairly (see Russian collusion and impeachment) and this only deepened is own conspiracy mindset because, in his case, there really was evidence of certain state actors trying to undermine his presidency, if not overturn it. And so he is still ranting. It is no small thing to achieve what he achieved ranting, but there is precedent. See the 1930s before disaster hit.

And now that he has lost, and he has lost, whatever the bizarre and largely unsubstantiated claims of his loyalist, there is no responsible conservative movement or governing class. Outside the elite offices of National Review, Commentary magazine and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Republican party and the conservative movements has no leadership, no set of values it is trying to advance, no policy orientation or coherent political philosophy beyond love Trump. All things revolve around the ego and charisma of one man – again, see 1930s.

How did this happen? How in less than a decade did the Republican Party move from respected party to the fever swamps of Trump mania. The truth is hard to state in a polarized world where reason has lost its place at the table. But the truth is the left, already half mad, was driven totally mad by Trump’s success. And Trump, already half mad, was driven further mad by enemies who sought to orchestrate his downfall daily. What were we left with, to quote a famous movie? Madness.

And that is what we see across the political spectrum today in a post-truth, post-fact world. Limbaugh, who for years argued that for the left “it’s not the nature of the evidence, it’s the seriousness of the charge.” Yet here he has cast his lot with people like Sidney Powell. The absence of evidence is proof of just how nefarious and successful the conspiracy to undermine Trump’s reelection really was, so the reasoning goes – shades of G. K. Chesterton on insanity.

I have read at some length the charges about the election. Almost every single one of them has been reasonably and responsibly explained and still Limbaugh claims Trump won and was cheated. This is nonsense until real evidence and witnesses come forward in court, not with mysterious missing truck claims or ballot dump claims that have been investigated and explained or mass votes that were temporary mistakes and since corrected. Not a single responsible judge, Republican or Democrat, has seen any sign of the massive fraud Trump and his minions claim. But apparently all those Republicans across the country, governors, election officials, etc. who supported Trump are now in on the conspiracy as well. Meanwhile, the likes of Powell are so contaminating the well of discourse that they are encouraging behavior in Georgia that will likely cost Republicans the Senate. Thanks, but no thanks.

So, who is next in line – not Rubio, or Cruz or Haley or Scott?  No, Donald Trump Jr. (Ivanka could be a formidable political player as she has much of her father’s charisma without all his flaws). But really. Eight or nine Trump family members speaking at the convention? Not even the Kennedys were that bold. Is there any reason to believe that Donald Trump Jr., albeit I am sure a decent guy in many ways, is ready to be a leading presidential contender?

Yes, it is the voters’ right to decide. And I suppose the only thing that should matter in the fight against the leftward drift or our nation is who can win. It is an argument, I suppose. But I am not convinced – and neither were Reagan, Buckley, Goldwater, Kristol or Krauthammer, who were happy warriors mostly on behalf of their causes and who understood that the God, nation and principle came before ego and power. They lost elections to advance larger causes. They were aware of the famous axiom: patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Trump is holding the party hostage because of his own personal ego and desires, not because he puts the country first.  He has risked (I paraphrase Buckley on Ayn Rand) giving to Republicans and conservatives that bad name which its enemies have for so long sought to give it. He has discredited and marginalized many voices once considered respectable, at least on the right: Gingrich, Cruz, Levin, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Giuliani, now all marching not according to time-honored conservative principles, but to the beat of a drum pounded by one man, relentlessly, on his own behalf.

The party of Lincoln deserves better.
 
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