Well, if Trump wins you can laugh, but I won’t hear you because I’ll be sobbing too hard. Since I’m not too excited about a Hillary win—go here for a few dozen reasons why—it’s a lot more fun to speculate on what’s going to happen to the Republican Party post-November.
For us Democrats, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun, because it’s easy to believe that post-Trump the party will never be able to get back together again. The obvious split is between the Trump base—surely no less than 70% of the people who vote Republican, and probably more—and the party’s erstwhile leaders, who now have very little in common with the people they profess to lead, and even care about.
As Republican intellectual—or “former Republican intellectual”—Avik Roy put it, “The Republican Party is the voice of white nationalism.” Most of the leadership simply can’t go there. What was, only a year ago, Republican orthodoxy—global capitalism, free trade, generous immigration laws, and an aggressive foreign policy—is now embraced in toto by only a few, notably the Wall Street Journal, Paul Ryan, and some aging neo-cons like Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as the “process, not policy” dudes like Karl Rove.1 These are the people, several eons ago, who wanted to “open up” the Republican Party to Hispanics and blacks.2 But now a significant chunk of the party intelligentsia—the National Review crowd in particular—have become vociferously anti-immigrant, accusing Trump of not being sufficiently anti-immigrant and sliding very quickly on that notoriously slippery slope towards white nationalism. It’s very hard to be furiously anti-immigrant and in favor of free trade and, if the Review isn’t careful, it’s very soon going to be forgetting all about Ronald Reagan.
Even worse—for the Review crowd, that is—by abandoning the generous immigration policies of the Reagan era, they’re splitting the elite, guaranteeing that they won’t have a chance against Trump and his merry pitchfork band and giving rise to the distinct possibility that they’ll lose control of the entire Republican agenda, including what is probably still most important to them, a continuation of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, built very largely around a complete subservience to Israel.
All of that is already falling apart. In 2012, Mitt Romney, when he wasn’t stepping on his own dick, talked about Israel and abortion. Since Trump won the nomination, how often has he talked about either? The old Wall Street Journal/National Review/Weekly Standard conservative elite is very likely facing extinction, to be replaced by the Breitbart elite, motivated very largely by an inchoate longing for “revenge”. Who’s going to suffer? That part isn’t so funny.
Afterwords
There are other factions to be heard from—or rather, wanting to be heard from—like Ross Douthat and the “Reformicons”, but those guys are simply too nice to be Republicans.
- Remember Karl? He used to be big. ↩︎
- Open it up at the same time that, at the state level, Republicans were making a big push to figure out way to prevent “those people” from voting, thanks in large part to those helpful “conservatives” on the Supreme Court, who just can’t seem to keep their hands off the ballot box. ↩︎
