By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 05, 2021
After losing a national election, it’s natural that a
political party goes through a period of soul-searching and internal turmoil.
The Republican Party, though, has taken it to another
level.
President Donald Trump brought most of the GOP along for
the ride during his conspiracy-fueled attempt to overturn the election.
His loyalists have been scouring the landscape searching
for Republicans to censure or primary for insufficient loyalty to him.
The most famous Republican House freshman mused not too
long ago about a space laser starting the 2018 California wildfires.
And Trump has maintained his hold on the party seemingly
effortlessly.
This dismaying chapter has led to declarations that the
party is doomed or calls to split it up.
A former chair of the Washington State GOP wrote in an
op-ed in the Seattle Times urging, as
the headline put it, “Let’s form a new Republican Party.” This prompted a Chris
Cillizza item at CNN headlined: “Should Republicans disband the GOP?”
There’s been a spate of articles by erstwhile Republicans
announcing they are done with the party.
Jonathan Last wrote a piece in The New Republic titled: “The Republican Party is dead. It is the
Trump cult now.” Washington Post
columnist Kathleen Parker declared: “The party isn’t doomed; it’s dead.”
This seems a mite premature about a party that represents
roughly half the country and is on the cusp of a majority in the House, tied
50-50 in the Senate, and in control of the governorships in 27 states and both
the governorship and state legislature in 22 of those.
If we are going to consider this geographically diverse
collection of officeholders — whose careers in many instances pre-date Trump
and will outlast him — a mere personality cult, the word “cult” has lost its
meaning.
The fortunes of our political parties ebb and flow, and
their iterations change over time, but they are deeply embedded institutions of
our public life.
As Dan McLaughlin, my colleague at National Review, points out, the Republican Party has, since its
inception, been a fusion of a classical liberal wing with a more populist,
elemental conservatism.
What’s different about Trump is that he represents the
ascendance of the populist wing after it had long been in a subordinate
position in the party. Even he, though, retained key traditional policy
priorities of the GOP, from tax cuts and judges to religious liberty and
abortion.
That said, the party does need to get beyond Trump, who
is a three-time loser now — in the 2018 midterms, in his 2020 reelection
campaign, and in the Georgia special elections. In electoral terms, “all the
winning” stopped circa November 2016.
If it feels now as though the post-Trump GOP will never
arrive, American politics moves quickly. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974,
leaving the GOP in utter disarray — and yet Reagan won a landslide six years
later. The Tea Party sprang to life from nowhere in 2009 and had disappeared by
2016, subsumed into the Trump phenomenon.
There will inevitably be an overwhelming controversy in
the Biden administration or a crisis that moves us beyond the politics of the
Trump presidency and the immediate aftermath.
New issues will emerge, and there are plenty of talented,
ambitious Republican politicians who think they are better suited to win a
presidential election and serve as president than Donald Trump 2.0. The
incentives are for them to slipstream behind Trump for now, but that won’t
always be true.
The temptation to splinter from the GOP might be alluring
to elements of both the populists and the Republican traditionalists, but this
is a dead end.
The Republican Party is the only plausible electoral
vehicle for any sort of right-of-center politics in America. It is worth
fighting over, and it will be.
That struggle is sure to be toxic and unpredictable — except for the fact that at the end of the day the Grand Old Party will still be standing.
No comments:
Post a Comment