Is the Republican Party a lost cause?
Let me be definitive and unequivocal: I don’t know.
On the one hand, with embarrassingly few exceptions at every level, the Republican party is Donald Trump’s party. So in many ways it deserves to be a lost cause.
On the other hand, after November 3, the GOP may stop—more or less suddenly, and more or less convincingly—being Donald Trump’s party. It might even stop being the party of Trumpism.
On the third hand, it will still have been Donald Trump’s party. And that moral and political stain can’t, and shouldn’t, simply be wished away.
On the fourth hand: It would be good for the country if there were a conservative party that wasn’t a nativist / proto-authoritarian / nationalist-populist party. This would be the case for not giving up on the GOP, but rather fighting to save it.
But on the fifth hand, wishing for a sound conservative party won’t make it so. And even fighting for one may not make it so, either. It may be that American conservatism has been so damaged that a “new center”—whether as a party or some sort of cross-partisan coalition—is a better way to go than trying to save the GOP.
On the sixth hand (I know, we’re in octopus territory here): Maybe we should root for the GOP to be salvaged, while acknowledging it won’t be saved by us people like us. After all, if the GOP is to be rebuilt, it will likely have to be done by people who have been complicit in Trumpism. Because one thing that is certain is that the Republican apostates will never be forgiven by their erstwhile colleagues. Not because we were wrong about Trump, but because we were right.
So Never Trumpers will be personae non gratae. The only people who will be afforded the opportunity to save the GOP are the ones who helped wreck it. Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, of course. But it may suggest that the attempt is less likely to happen. And perhaps less likely to succeed.
Who knows? So many hands, so little clarity!
Such is politics sometimes; such is life sometimes. In these cases, often the best one can do is to stop planning for a triple-bankshot inside-straight at some point in the unspecified future, and instead simply to fight for an outcome that is right and just in the short term. While at the same time keeping an open mind for the medium and long term.
I will admit that my heart, today, is with “the Republican party is a lost cause” faction.
But then my still somewhat conservative mind remembers the admonition of T.S. Eliot:
“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”
On the other hand, maybe Pascal trumps Eliot: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
Heart or mind? Lost cause or worth trying to save? I don’t know.
Lost cause if you ask me. Start over.
That’s from Bill Kristol, the neocon, Iraq war cheerleader (among other awful things.)
I follow him on twitter and it’s interesting to watch him wrestle with this problem. And he actually is wrestling with it and not just in terms of Trump but in terms of conservative ideology itself:
I find that interesting. However, for all of his wrestling, I don’t think he’s fully grasped how his conservatism set the table for Trumpism. There is a reason the establishment Republican George W. Bush, who slithered into the presidency under very dubious circumstances, went from a 90% approval rating after 9/11 to 28% in the year he left office. The twin debacles of Iraq and Katrina had a lot to do with that. Something was very wrong long before Trump came along.
But hey, baby steps. There will always be some kind of conservative faction in America so I’m happy to see a re-evaluation of the one we’ve been dealing with. The ugliness has been escalating for a long time and the intellectuals among them turned a blind eye to it. Trump made it impossible to ignore so, in that sense, he did everyone a favor.
Whether these guys can resist the impulse to go back to their orthodoxy and comfort themselves with reflexive resistance to the left remains to be seen. But for now, they are looking inward in a new way and that’s something. It’s not easy to do that.