… I would want to lose 2020 in a massive, monumental landslide. I would want the Democrats to win the Presidential race, take the Senate, increase their margin in the House, take over a good number of state legislatures and governorships, and dominate in local races everywhere in every state.
I would not wish for this landslide loss because I have much tolerance for the Democrats’ agenda, quite the opposite; I would want it because I would want to limit and restrict that agenda as much as possible in the long run by stopping the slow-motion suicide the Republican party has been committing over the past 30 years, accelerated on steroids in the past 12 years.
There was a time when each of the two political parties represented a diverse collection of ideologies and interests. Consequently, their respective centers of gravity hovered near the relative center of mainstream American thought — Republicans center-right, Democrats center-left — and each rejected their extremes, the John Birch Society and the KKK on the right, the Trotskyites and the communists on the left. This allowed both parties to remain competitive even as the center of American thought shifted back and forth from right to left as in the pre-FDR years, the post-FDR years, and the Reagan years.
Today, we see a vibrant Democratic party carrying on a healthy debate between its left and moderate wings, each of which is perfectly willing to live with the other in relative harmony should the other prevail. It is, by design, how democracies are supposed to work. By stark contrast, the Republican Party has expelled its moderate members or forced them into conversion by political inquisition while winking at white nationalists with not-so-subtle overtures for accommodation. What happened?
The short, conventional answer is Donald Trump happened. A recent New York Times piece entitled Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party makes the case that Trump commands such omnipotent political powers that the Republican elected class must demonstrate total fealty to him lest their political careers come to a screeching halt, as has already occurred for 40% of them who have not demonstrated unshakable loyalty. Bill Weld, the former Republican Massachusetts governor who is heroically but hopelessly opposing Trump in 2020 for the party’s presidential nomination has even alluded to a sort of Stockholm syndrome having taken over the party. To be sure, there is no question the President enjoys almost absolute power in the party, the question is why and how has he amassed this much power?
Trump’s power derives from his consistent approval rating in the polls of 90%+ within the Republican base. But closer scrutiny indicates this is a direct result of the evolutionary shrinking of the party in recent years that saw the exclusion of moderate elements — they were even given the acronym name of RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) — leaving behind mostly those who would support someone like Donald Trump. A Pew Research survey conducted in April 2015, approaching the end of the Obama presidency when Trump was pitching his birther conspiracy and preparing for his presidential run a year later, indicated that only 23% of Americans identified as Republicans. Another, more recent Pew Research survey, traces Trump’s support directly to the Tea Party movement that came into existence when Barak Obama was elected President. Trump’s ascent to the leadership of the GOP and its presidential nomination is a result of a decaying process the party has been undergoing in the form of the systematic purging or muting of moderate and progressive elements within the party that has taken place over the past 30 years and that made it ripe for the picking. Without the presence of these moderate and progressive elements to mitigate the excesses and extremes of the party, Trump just stepped in and helped himself.
And this decay did not simply occur naturally and organically; it was engineered brick by brick with full awareness — albeit myopic awareness, bordering on blindness — and with the active support and participation of many of those who today are lamenting the transformation of the party they helped transform. Had the old Republican establishment had the wisdom and foresight to exercise the necessary restraints to prevent the party from drifting out to the wilderness, they might have opposed the Gingrich revolution and its methods that arguably started the decaying process, they would have prevented the rise to power of figures such as Newt Gingrich, Tom “the Hammer” Delay and Dick Armey who viewed any loyal opposition as traitorous enemies, They would not have allowed the invention of the Hastert Rule that institutionalized rock-hard partisanship in the House, they might have impeded the weaponization of Gerrymandering to levels not seen since 1812 when the word was first coined, opposed the systematic campaign of voter suppression to exclude growing minority constituencies for short-term gains in favor of a quickly dying white male majority, and most importantly, they would have swiftly extinguished the Tea Party fire started 12 years ago, funded by the arsonists Koch Brothers and implemented by hard-right, flame-throwing elements in the Party. Consequently, had the party ship been kept on a relatively moderate course, the Fox News GOP media arm would have reflected it — after all, its primary mission is to be financially successful by catering to the Republican Party views and policy advocacies.
Instead, the Party was allowed to slowing drift into its slow suicidal tail spin for a series of short term gains, much with the active support and participation of many of those who today are lamenting the transformation of the party they helped transform, and who are now abandoning it in droves. These defectors were active supporters or participants in the evolution the party underwent from being a wide tent of diverse political persuasions to a monolithic, dogmatic, exclusionary party. They helped form it — either by active participation in the process or by enabling it by acquiescence — then came to deeply regret it when the resulting unintended consequences surfaced in the form of the monster they created.
Ironically, it is the aversion to unintended consequences that is the central driving force behind conservative thought in the first place.
The list of prominent conservatives who have recently run from the party like a fire in an ammunition dump is long and wide. It ranges from the intellectual class such as George Will, David Brooks, Brett Stevens, and David Frum, to the operative class such as Michael Steele, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, and Mike Murphy, and former elected officials such as Joe Scarborough, David Jolly, Jeff Flake, and Mark Sanford. And these are but a small handful of recognizable names among a multitude of others. Such a mass migration from a party is unprecedented in American History. Even in the troubled and polarized times leading up to the civil war, there were significant realignments but no such mass exodus occurred for any party.
Some of these party refugees have actually shared my sentiment of desiring a Republican electoral loss in 2020. A super PAC named The Lincoln Project was recently launched by a group of prominent conservatives, including attorney George Conway; former adviser to Sen. John McCain Steve Schmidt; former Ohio Gov. John Kasich adviser John Weaver; former New Hampshire Republican Party Chairwoman Jennifer Horn; and conservative pundit Rick Wilson. Dedicated to defeating Trump in 2020, they launched their PAC with the authoring of an op-ed in the New York Times detailing their intention.
But defeating Trump, if successful, would only cure the symptom and leave the decay in place. Confiscating the alcoholic’s bottle will not cure the illness. The patient must bottom out to have a non-guaranteed chance to begin the long recovery process to health. The GOP must receive a hefty dose of smelling salts in the form of a resounding defeat to come to its senses and begin taking steps to rectify its future, assuming it’s not too late. It is the only chance it has to prevent going the way of the Whigs within the next 10-16 years.
In 100 years, historians will identify this era as the period leading to the tectonic demographic shift in America from being a white-majority dominated society to a minority-majority dominated society. If we are not careful and judicious, this transition period may be less than peaceful. This American system, as designed by the framers, has been spectacularly resilient, able to withstand extraordinary stress with a very long fuse. Still, at the end of that fuse sits a powder keg, as we saw during the Civil War that claimed the lives of 620,000 among a population of 31 Million. Today’s U.S. population is ten times that. Draw your own degree of parallelism and do whatever math you find most realistic in extrapolation — I’m betting you’ll find alarming ugliness with whatever conclusion you may reach.
