The Great Republican Freak-Out

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, December 15, 2022

 

 ‘On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf once proposed, “human character changed.” If one substitutes for that date “on or about October 2013,” one might say the same thing about the Republican Party. It took a little while to find its most potent form, but, give or take a few days, that was when it all began. October 2013 was when the GOP’s healthy mistrust of its establishment was transmuted into irrational disdain, when voters’ reasonable fear of losing turned into panic and defeatism, when the party’s imperative strain of optimism gave way to talk of “Flight 93” and of “American carnage.” October 2013 was when the nihilism began.

 

The presidential election of 2012 was perhaps the most misunderstood plebiscite in modern American history. Considered from 30,000 feet, it was not especially peculiar that the Republican candidate lost. Politics is cyclical, and, in 2012, the Democrats were still firmly within their cycle. The GOP had the presidency for twelve years, between 1980 and 1992. The Democrats had it between 1992 and 2000. The Republicans had it between 2000 and 2008. And, with their win in 2012, the Democrats ensured that they would keep it from 2008 to 2016. As had been the case from 1992 to 2000, when Bill Clinton was their avatar, the candidate that the Democrats ran in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama, was superbly talented and would have proved tough to beat in any year. Given the financial crisis, dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, and voters’ generalized fatigue with the GOP, 2008 was tougher still. But 2012 was no gimme, and so it proved.

 

Despite this, the loss provoked a mass freak-out across almost every segment of the party. Panicked, the Republican establishment decided that the problem must have been that the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, was too tough on illegal immigration and that the party didn’t slice and dice the electorate enough to appeal directly to minorities. Furious, the Republican base submitted that the problem had been that their candidate was not sharp-elbowed enough to appeal to truly conservative voters — who, they suggested, had stayed home en masse. Both were wrong.

 

Worse yet, these wrong conclusions reinforced each other. The establishment’s conclusion that it needed to surrender more easily on issues that were important to the base led to the base’s concluding that it must never, ever give in on anything, irrespective of the details. The result was the 2013 government shutdown, during which the establishment infuriated the base by blithely dismissing its concerns and the base infuriated the establishment by insisting that if Republicans simply shouted loud enough, President Obama would agree to repeal his presidency in full.

 

Perversely, this dynamic worked in the party’s favor for a little while. In 2014, Republicans swept the midterms in one of the greatest GOP victories of the previous hundred years. Had they wished to, Republican primary voters could have learned a valuable lesson from this: Namely, that when the different parts of the party constructively shape each other, Republicans can win big. In 2014, both sides helped each other. The base brought its energy and hard work, made clear where its red lines had been drawn, and killed off some of the bad ideas that the establishment had preferred after 2012, while, having learned the lessons of the 2010 cycle, the establishment ensured that the candidates the party offered up were acceptable to the electorate at large. The result was nine pickups in the Senate, 13 pickups in the House, and the largest number of state legislatures under Republican control since 1928.

 

And, from this, Republican primary voters concluded that . . . the GOP couldn’t win, and didn’t want to win.

 

Why? Beats me. In the time between the 2013 shutdown and the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party did about as much as it could, given its position at the levers of power. The House of Representatives killed the immigration bill that the establishment had suggested after the election of 2012, the Senate stonewalled President Obama’s SCOTUS nominee after the sudden death of Antonin Scalia, and, in the states, Republicans expanded gun rights, limited abortion, cut taxes, passed right-to-work legislation, and more. With the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, social conservatives did, indeed, take one on the chin. But that was hardly the fault of the GOP establishment, or of the now-disdained George W. Bush, who had run hard against gay marriage in 2004 and whose two SCOTUS appointees dissented unflinchingly in that case. Certainly, the prospect of another loss in 2016 should have scared the GOP and its voters. But — and this is the key point — there was no particular reason for those voters to assume that such a loss was on the horizon. Barack Obama was not running. The war in Iraq had been drawn down. The financial crisis had receded in the public mind. And, as the 2014 midterms had shown, the country was tired of the Democrats. Things were set up nicely.

 

And then, suddenly, they weren’t. Suddenly, it was not sufficient for primary voters simply to pass on Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham; it was necessary to choose Donald Trump in their stead. Suddenly, everything needed to go out the window. The GOP was deemed a traitorous disaster. Its support for free markets was passé. Its middle-class base needed to be jettisoned. Its new leaders were to be chosen primarily on whether they would annoy the other side.

 

This was a massive overcorrection — and one from which the party is still suffering today. Since 2014, the Republicans have had one good election cycle — the election of 2016 — and, in that year, their presidential candidate got 46 percent of the vote against the most hated woman in American political history. Trump’s first midterm, in 2018, brought with it a blue wave. Trump’s reelection bid gave us Joe Biden as president. And 2022, which promised a “red wave”? It was a disaster everywhere Trump interfered. Don Bolduc lost. Kari Lake lost. Blake Masters lost. Dr. Oz lost. Herschel Walker lost. One can reasonably argue about Trump’s record as president: For what it’s worth, my view is that Trump did well in many ways, but that his greatest achievements were facilitated by the very establishment infrastructure (the Federalist Society, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan) that he and his apologists insist they hate. One cannot, however, argue about Trump’s electoral record. It’s a bust.

 

Writing this, I can already hear the rejoinders: “Yeah, as opposed to what?” Well, I’ll tell you: as opposed to the Republican Party before Donald Trump, which, like any political outfit, was subject to the usual undulations, but that had an electoral record of which to be proud. The period from 2017 to 2021 was the first in which the Republican Party held the White House for only one term since 1893. The GOP had the White House from 1897 to 1913, from 1921 to 1933, from 1953 to 1961, from 1969 to 1975, from 1981 to 1993, from 2001 to 2009, and from 2017 to 2021. Congress is a different story, but, since the Republican takeover of 1994, the party has controlled the House for 20 years out of a possible 28 (that’s 71 percent of the time), and the Senate for 16 years (that’s 57 percent of the time). This was not a party that had trouble winning elections.

 

And it’s not a trouble that the party will have again — if, and only if, it can jettison Trump, set its gripes in the correct historical context, and reacquire a conservative optimism that is tough to beat at the polls. As candidates such as Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, Doug Ducey, Kim Reynolds, and Glenn Youngkin have recently shown, ideological conservatism is not a deal-breaker for most American voters, provided that it is not advanced by smarmy, bellicose freaks. The 2012 election was a disappointment, but it was not a disappointment that came close to justifying the response. Ten years later, that should, at last, be clear.