One day we'll be needed to recreate the GOP as a center-right party rather than a vehicle for inane populist keggers. For now, I hope Democrats win Congress in 2018.
Republicans once believed in limited
government, fiscal restraint, support for the defense and national
security establishments, family values, and a strong American role in
maintaining global order. More than that, we were the party that
believed in logic and prudence over emotion. Our hearts were perhaps too
cold, but never bleeding.
Today’s
Republicans, however, are a party of bellowing drama queens whose
elected representatives blow up spending caps, bust the deficit, and
attack America’s law enforcement and national security agencies as
dangerous conspirators. Their leader expects banana republic parades,
coddles the Kremlin, protects violent men in positions of
responsibility, and overlooks child molestation. The rank-and-file GOP
members who once claimed that liberals were creating a tyrannical
monarchy in the Oval Office now applaud the expansion of the presidency
into a gigantic cult of personality.
So, am I still a Republican?
I
get asked this question a lot since coming out as a Never Trump
Republican during the 2016 campaign. When it comes from Democrats, it’s
almost always a question asked in bad faith, as they want me either to
quit my party or to answer for all of its current (and past) sins. When
asked “how could you stay in your party” by people whose party has
plenty to answer for itself, including the nomination of Hillary
Clinton, it’s not a productive conversation.
However,
Republicans themselves (and not just the Never Trump variety) are
having the same conversations, privately and publicly. Is President
Trump now the avatar of the Republican Party, and if he is, how can
anyone who once believed in the party of Lincoln and Reagan stay in it?
For
a time, I actually dropped my GOP voter registration after the
disgusting spectacle of the 2012 primaries, where Newt Gingrich was
taken seriously as a possible president while extremists in a debate
audience shocked even Ron Paul by yelling "Yeah!" when he was asked
about an uninsured young man in a coma and whether "society should just let him die.”
It
didn’t feel right. I am a conservative who joined the GOP in 1978; I
had worked for a Republican in the Senate; I was still voting for Mitt
Romney; I wanted the GOP to make gains in Congress in 2014. I may have
been disgusted by the behavior of some Republican voters, but I was
still attached to the Republican Party. I was, in a strange way, an
Independent In Name Only.
As the likelihood of a
Trump victory grew, I felt even more strongly attached to the
Republicans because I wanted to prevent my party from being hijacked by a
callous and vulgar life-long Democrat
for whom party politics were just an extension of his own strange
emotional needs, and who cared nothing for conservative ideas or values.
When
Trump won, I stayed, because I believed that his victory was an
aberration, a bizarre outcome that resulted from several factors,
including Clinton’s impossibly inept campaign. There would come a day
when Trump was gone, and reasonable conservatives would have to pick up
the pieces and recreate the GOP as a functioning center-right party
rather than as a vehicle for an ongoing series of inane populist
keggers.
But for now, I really am a Republican In
Name Only, because I actively want to see the Republicans defeated —
soundly — in 2018 (and in 2020, if the president is not primaried out of
his seat). Where I was once unaffiliated but quietly cheering on
conservatives, I am now a member of a party I want to see cast into the
political wilderness for a few years — or longer, if that’s what it
takes to break the fever.
In terms of party
loyalty, that makes me a pretty lousy Republican. On the other hand, I
might argue that I am in fact a better Republican than the opportunists
on the White House staff and Capitol Hill who have left the party but
refuse to give up the name.
The same could be said
for “Republican” voters. Do they really represent the party, or are they
The Coalition of the Incoherent? Like the president himself, they have
no political compass, no policy preferences, and no attachment to
anything that cannot be expressed in a bumper sticker. Indeed, what
seems to unite Trump voters is a generic hostility to immigrants and a
demand that government resources and transfers not be shrunk but
redirected — to themselves.
Many of them, of
course, actually voted for Back Obama. (If these Obama-to-Trump voters
are “Republicans,” then the term has no meaning at all.) I have argued
that these voters are better understood not as “Republicans,” but more
generally as “white welfare-statists” whose party affiliation is up for
bids every four years.
I’m also taking a gamble
based on history. Populism looks powerful from the outside, but it
rarely succeeds in holding power. It is not a belief but a reflex, one
that fades away once the hard work of governing looms. It’s a great
vessel for expressing anger. It’s not very good at keeping the lights on
and delivering the mail.
With all of that said,
what could finally drive me from the party? If going to the wall for
deficits, wife-beaters, mall creepers and Vladimir Putin isn’t enough,
what is? And how much longer can this go on before the Trump
administration damages the words “Republican” and “conservative”
permanently?
My answer is to see whether enough of
my fellow conservatives agree with me in 2018 to accept that the party
needs to be purged of the New Know-Nothings. Perhaps Republicans like me
need a new name: I am not a “Never Trumper” so much as I am a
“Republican in exile,” as I wait for an end to the occupation of the
party by people who never cared about its history or beliefs.
Of
course, no one should underestimate the ability of the Democrats to
screw up an election, and it’s possible that the midterms and the 2020
election will end up breaking for Trump’s GOP. If that happens, the
Republican Party has no future. I and many others, including younger
people, will leave, and the GOP will become largely a regional party,
confined to islands of older white voters in the South, the Rust
Belt and the mountain states who will be gone in 30 years and who will
take the GOP with them.
At that point, some other
party — not a “third way” but a new conservative party — will have to
take the GOP’s place. That process will take decades, and I will not
live to see it. And so I’d prefer to revive the GOP after it is forced
back into the minority, when we can have a real fight within the party
about what it stands for and who it should support by reforming the
Republican National Committee, the primary process and the platform.
The
GOP needs to be returned to its foundations in conservative ideas
instead of left to drift in mindless rage and willful ignorance. It does
not need to be abandoned, nor does it need to be burned to the ground.
But it definitely needs to be temporarily evacuated and fumigated.
And
so, for the near future, the GOP losing is the only way to win. I’ll
stay for now, because I believe in a loyal opposition — even if it has
to be within my own party.
Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, is the author of The
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