In two recent postings, here and here, Ross Douthat concludes that the Republican Party as we know it will soon no longer exist. “There is now no possibility that the Republican Party will survive its rendezvous with Donald Trump unbroken.” Which means that on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, there will be two Democratic presidents at the ceremony for the first time since the inauguration of James Buchanan in 1857.1 The difference is that Buchanan’s inauguration unwittingly symbolized the collapse of the Democratic Party, torn apart by the struggle over slavery. Hillary’s inauguration will wittingly symbolize the collapse of the Republican Party, torn apart by, well, what? Gay marriage?
That’s oversimplifying, of course, but it does point to the split between the Acela Republicans on the Northeast Corridor who have managed to control the party for decades despite not having won an electoral vote in twenty years and the pick-up truck Republicans from the South and West who cast all the votes but never seemed to share in the profits. The Acela mantra of tax cuts for the rich, free trade, liberal immigration policies, massive defense spending, an interventionist foreign policy, and cuts for entitlement programs (ever proposed, never delivered) somehow kept the hicks in the sticks mesmerized, until the Donald started running his mouth. Now that the masses have risen, what does the future portend?
Well, Ted Cruz, obviously. Over at Slate, Will Saletan lays out the Republican future. Cruz is smart, he’s made a name for himself this time around, he has superb outsider cred, and he can raise a ton of money, something very difficult for an outsider to do. Furthermore, 2020 will almost surely be a very winnable year for the Republicans. Winning four presidential elections in a row is almost impossible, unless your name is Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which case it seems almost easy.2 It will be very difficult for Hillary to make Hillary I much more than Obama III, and “Obama IV” really sounds like a stretch. In fact, for Hillary to win in 2020, she’ll need to be a better politician than her husband, and no one has ever accused her of that.
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This is a little cute but true. Buchanan succeeded fellow Democrat Franklin Pierce, so unpopular that he was denied re-nomination. The only two more recent Democratic presidents to succeed a fellow Democrat, Truman and Johnson, both took office after the death of their predecessors. For anything comparable to the Obama-Hillary handover, you have to go back to the Andy Jackson/Marty Van Buren affair in 1837. ↩︎
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Almost. To my mind, the odds are very, very good that without the catastrophe of World War II, FDR would have been retired, with very little regret, in 1940. ↩︎
