Beating Trump would be just the beginning. Democrats would still be confronted with a radical Republican Party.
www.nytimes.com
Basically Trump is what the GOP really is. He didn't change the party, he was what the based wanted all along. As I wrote yesterday, the wealthy and conservative apparatchiks blew the dog whistle for half a century, now the dogs are outside the doors, snarling, wanting to be fed. The owners are now scared to leave the house, prisoners in their own home because of the dogs.
What if Trumpism Is the G.O.P.’s Natural State?
Beating Trump would be just the beginning. Democrats would still be confronted with a radical Republican Party.
Buckle up, Democrats, because the time between now and Election Day will be a white-knuckled, cannonball run of doom-scrolling. Joe Biden holds a
lead in the polls, giving Democrats hope that President Trump will be soundly defeated in November.
That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: Beating President Trump is just the beginning. If Mr. Biden wins and if Mr. Trump leaves office peacefully — two big ifs — Democrats will be confronted with a more intractable problem: The Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump, and it is not likely to change.
If Mr. Biden wins, there will be a temptation to embrace a big lie: Mr. Trump was the problem, and with him gone, the Republican Party can return to normal. But today’s Republican Party won’t moderate itself, because Trumpism is its natural state. Democrats should avoid the temptation to expect Republican cooperation in governing this country.
Mr. Trump won the 2016 nomination because the party’s voters embraced him enthusiastically. At the time, the strength of that embrace was obscured by the high-profile ambivalence of Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, then the speaker of the House.
But Republican voters’ feelings about Mr. Trump were never particularly complicated. Within a month of entering the primary fight, Mr. Trump took a
polling lead and, beside a brief surge by Ben Carson, never lost it.
In 2016, Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he met it where it was. The party had been ready for him for years: In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute
wrote, “The G.O.P. has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.”
More recent
studies, including by Pippa Norris of Harvard, have
confirmed this assessment. In a brief
summary of her research — which compared the Republican Party with major parties in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development societies — she found the G.O.P. “near far-right European parties” that flirt with authoritarianism, like the Polish Law and Justice of Poland or the Turkish Justice and Development parties.
This is not a party poised to pivot toward moderation — even in the face of an electoral landslide loss. The inevitable calls for reform (like the party’s abandoned
“autopsy” report after the 2012 election) will yield to the inescapable gravitational pull of the party’s own voters and the larger forces dominating our politics.
Instead of moderates, Republicans may be more likely to turn to reactionary politicians like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. A first-term senator with few substantive legislative accomplishments, Mr. Cotton rocketed to fame through his provocative actions against Democrats.
In 2015, for example, he tried to sabotage President Barack Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, organizing an
open letter (signed by over 40 Republican senators) sent to Iran’s leaders declaring the American president’s commitments potentially null and void. If Mr. Trump loses, Mr. Cotton is
seen as a leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination.
If the forces shaping party politics provide the motive for Republicans to continue down Mr. Trump’s path, the Senate will provide the means. Because of how the Senate has evolved in recent decades, it takes a supermajority of 60 votes to pass most bills. A minority of 41 senators can throw a monkey wrench into most aspects of governance, from major bills to mundane business.
Republicans can muster those 41 seats using only states Mr. Trump won by an average of 24 percentage points in 2016. Even if Mr. Biden wins and Democrats take the Senate, Republicans will hold enough power to derail nearly everything the new president wants to do.
The way forward is to face the reality of what the Republican Party has become and prioritize delivering results for the American people over gauzy, pundit-pleasing fantasies. Sure, invite Republicans to participate constructively in the legislative process, but take away their ability to scuttle it.
To this end, it is encouraging to see Mr. Biden
shifting from his staunch opposition to reforming the filibuster, whose modern iteration is what has allowed Republicans to raise the bar for passing most bills in the Senate from the majority threshold the framers
set to the current 60-vote supermajority.
Mr. Biden knows the risks of spending valuable time and energy chasing members of a party whose incentive structure precludes cooperation. In the summer of 2009, Democrats spent nearly a year pursuing the votes of Senate Republicans like Chuck Grassley on health care. Meanwhile, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and his allies deployed every tool at their disposal to
prevent Republicans like Mr. Grassley from working with Democrats, and succeeded.
The Republican Party is now an even more hopeless tangle of pathologies than it was back then. If Republicans choose to take personal responsibility for unwinding themselves and contributing productively to intelligent solutions, they are welcome to do so. But Democrats cannot bet the future of the country on it.
www.thenation.com
