Twardlow Loc: Arkansas

Already thoughts turn to trump’s absence and the remnants of the Republican that remain. There will be a long, painful period of shame—for the Party and the Nation—from which the Party may or may not survive. At a minimum, the Republican Party, if it survives, will endure a long period never to be forgotten of donald j. trump, his corruption, his incompetence, his failures.

There will be a terrible political penalty to pay.


GOP Will Spend Some Time in the Wilderness

by BooMan
Mon Dec 17th, 2018

One way in which some Republicans hope normalcy may one day return is that Trump will eventually exit the stage without leaving a successor. That’s certainly the unstated premise of Jim Geraghty’s latest musings at National Review [ https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trump-aftermath-trumpism-coalition-falling-apart/] :

Vice President Mike Pence is clearly a wildly different personality, and it is easy to picture some Trump supporters finding Pence too nice, too vanilla, too establishment and too boring to truly continue “Trumpism” as a political agenda…

…There is no natural ideological successor, which suggests that if or when Trump retires after two terms, is defeated after one, is impeached, or however he departs the stage, there will be no one who will be able to bring together the same factions in the same way. How much will Trumpism influence American politics after Trump’s presidency?

I have two distinct strains of thought on this.

The first is that when President Nixon went down, his electoral strategy did not. The Southern Strategy [In American politics, the Southern Strategy refers to a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans] was revived by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and has served as a template for Republican presidential contenders ever since. In other words, Nixon was discredited but his politics really weren’t. Using that example, we should expect future Republican candidates to continue efforts to hold together a barely adequate coalition based on white working class antiestablishmentatian grievance.

The second strain of thought is that the Watergate Era favored a continuation of Nixon’s politics in a way that our current environment does not. The establishment was temporarily vindicated, the media became heroes, and Congress embarked on a period of vibrant reform. But this hid that this was a period of deep decline for trust in our institutions. The lies of the Vietnam Era took a massive toll on how much trust people put in government. The exposure of the CIA’s family jewels [The Family Jewels is the informal name used to refer to a set of reports that detail activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Considered illegal or inappropriate, these actions were conducted over the span of decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. William Colby, who was the CIA director in the mid-1970s and helped in the compilation of the reports, dubbed them the "skeletons" in the CIA's closet. Most of the documents were publicly released on June 25, 2007, after more than three decades of secrecy. The non-governmental National Security Archive had filed a FOIA request fifteen years earlier] and the FBI’s Cointelpro [ COINTELPRO (Portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) (1956–1971) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the civil rights movement or Black Power movement (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr., Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), independence movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. The program also targeted white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and nationalist groups including Irish Republicans and Cuban exiles. The FBI also financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former members of the Minutemen anti-communist para-military organization, transforming it into a group called the Secret Army Organization that targeted groups, activists, and leaders involved in the Anti-War Movement, using both intimidation and violent acts. program and other abuses added to the public’s skepticism.]

Meanwhile, the 1970’s saw stagflation, two major oil crises, an end to the postwar economic boom, a decline in the power of organized labor, and finally a foreign policy crisis in Iran that made us look impotent. While the way Watergate was ultimately adjudicated initially looked like a giant win, those gains were ephemeral. That is why the country was ready to give Nixonian politics a second look even when offered by a thinly credentialed B-List actor.

But the Southern Strategy was then in its infancy. It is now facing demographic doom. In fact, it’s accurate to describe the whole phenomenon of Trumpism as a kind of collective panic attack about that demographic doom. One obvious way to visualize the difference between today and 1972 or 1980 is to look at the Electoral College maps over time. The Southern Strategy brought the Republicans resounding victories in every presidential election, excepting 1976, until Bill Clinton broke its spell. But the Republican victories in 2000, 2004 and 2016 have been among the narrowest ever recorded. Two of them involved popular vote losses, and the other turned on the single state of Ohio.

Clearly, the strategy is gasping for air and will soon slip below the waves for good.

That doesn’t augur well for future Republican presidential candidates who seek to replicate Trump’s electoral success. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily tell us what will happen. Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis did not make enough of a course correction to stave off their humiliating defeats in the 1980’s, and that’s in large part because the party base would not have tolerated it if they had made the attempt. Both were pushed to the left in the primaries, and neither of them was assured enough of winning the nomination to offer truly heterodox positions.

It may take a similar amount of time for the Republican base to come to terms with the fact that Nixon and Reagan’s politics are dead and will not be coming back.

Another factor here is that Trump is likely to be discredited in a different way than Nixon. Nixon was seen as a competent president who abused his power. When the Republicans suffered big losses in the 1974 midterms and went down to defeat in the 1976 presidential election, it wasn’t seen as a repudiation of Nixon’s policies so much as of his character. Jimmy Carter told the American people that he would never lie to them.

The electoral losses that the Republicans suffered in the 2018 midterms are already being blamed on Trump’s policies more than his character. His threat to pre-existing conditions coverage, environmental extremism, inaction of guns, child separation policies, and xenophobic campaign messaging are mostly in line with Republican orthodoxy and rhetoric, even if they may be more extreme than has typically been the case. Nonetheless, Trump is taking heat for leading the party out of the mainstream and costing them critical support with women, the college-educated, and suburbanites.

Another way of putting this is that in the 1970’s, the GOP could replace the scowling Nixon with the more genial Ronald Reagan and go on pursuing a racially polarized law and order platform with great success, but there’s little prospect that the GOP can get rid of Trump and keep his policies without suffering shattering defeats.

In some ways, Trump’s failings are masking conservatism’s failings. And this should be clearer if we stay focused on the fact that Trump let Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell largely define his legislative agenda during his first two years in office. His policies are unpopular because the Republicans’ policies are unpopular.

So, in answer to Geraghty, the future of the Republican Party without Trump is likely to be bleak. Just as with Nixon, the party will suffer a lot of splash damage that rightly or wrongly will bring them distrust and discredit with the American people. But, unlike with Nixon, they won’t be able to simply find a more agreeable messenger for an ascendant political movement. Conservatism is reaching the end of its life cycle, just as the FDR/Truman/JFK/LBJ Democratic Party reached its end cycle in the late 1960s.

It took the Democrats a very long time to find a path out of their wilderness, and I expect that the Republicans will take a similar amount of time to remake themselves.

The final irony is that the McGovern coalition that went down so hard in 1972 that it traumatized the left for generations is now pretty much the mainstream of American politics. There’s zero prospect that we will be saying the same about the current GOP forty-six years from now when the 2064 elections roll around.


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