The GOP Loses if Trump Wins

Buried beneath all the drama and ugliness of this election is a truth I don't think many people have examined: if Trump wins the election on Tuesday, it's going to be very bad for Republicans' prospects as a viable party long term. Whether they win or lose, fundamental realities of their fractured coalition will call that question eventually, but if Trump loses, the Party will hang together as an oppositional force against Hillary Clinton.

The malignancy of the Trump campaign did not seriously fracture Republican support of the candidate, because with Clinton members all had a common enemy. With a President Clinton, the Party can turn again to a common enemy. We'll see skirmishes for power in the House, but the ultimate endgame--gridlock, endless investigations, a potential impeachment--will paper over divisions. Republicans in the Senate will likely be a minority, and they'll turn to procedural rules to impede the body's function. Nothing rallies the base so fast as the prospect of a good impeachment.

During the Obama era, Republicans honed their skill at outrage and obstruction, the key pillars of any effective opposition party. With none of their actual policy goals at stake, it was easy to stay united. But if Trump wins, the GOP can't stay an oppositional Party. It would, in the event of a Trump win, almost certainly, hold all levers of government. Policy accomplishments now become the prize of power, and realizing them will expose the warring factions' differing goals. Once a strong coalition of a corporate donor class, religious conservatives, and neoconservatives, a post-Trump GOP would be guided by Trumpies (fueled by racial grievance, in favor of social welfare programs, and opposed to trade and foreign adventures). The voter base that supports these positions was drawn from the previous coalitions, leaving them all weaker--and in the case of the donor class and neoconservatives, in direct conflict with the base.

Since the Nixon era, the GOP has managed to use white resentment as a way of cementing power among these groups. Trump's campaign made the implicit explicit, and he ran on a platform of white supremacy. That demon, once loosed to the public, can't be quietly ignored while the GOP's usual business--tax cuts, a war on abortion, deregulation and promotion of corporate rights, war--come back to the fore. People want a wall, they want Muslims out of their communities, they want trade deals nullified, they want "illegals" deported. Most of these things are anathema to standard-issue Republicans.

There might be a few issues they could come together on, like guns, abortion, and coal, but these are mostly not the groups' top issues. Worse, issues like nullifying Obamacare are riven with danger, since the GOP's misinformation campaign has obscured all the benefits people have under its provisions. But it's more likely that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will push the issues they always have--massive tax cuts for the wealthy, new trade deals (it's high on the party platform), re-deregulate Wall Street, cutting future benefits to Social Security and Medicare, and radically slashing social programs. None of these things will be popular with the Trumpie base, and where will all that white resentment go if the GOP don't immediately pander to it?

Then there's the issue of Trump as president. It is frankly inconceivable to think of a non-catastrophic Trump administration. The best-case scenario is a shadow government headed by traditional GOP elites, perhaps lead by Mike Pence. Even in that scenario, it's impossible to imagine President Trump not saying things that embarrass the party and enrage allies. There are many scenarios of disaster--too many to speculate on.

After a year of in-fighting and bad leadership, the midterm elections would force the divisions wide open. Primary challengers will emerge both for and against the Trump loyalists. If Trump loses, the Party can forestall the reckoning. (Maybe.) But if he wins, the reckoning begins in a few weeks' time, as the coalitions gear up to seize power. No one is thinking about this now, but I don't see how any other outcome is possible. The Republican Party might survive a Trump candidacy; surviving a Trump presidency will be much, much harder.

The Quandry for the GOP

The Republican Party is in a shameful, embarrassing shambles. The leadership is divided between extremist Southerners in Congress, an ineffectual, hapless party leader, and celebrity fire-breathers like Rush Limbaugh, odious in their personal hypocrisy to most of the Americans the GOP would in other times be trying to woo.

It is an interesting paradox that, during times of political collapse, the rival party understands far more clearly how the collapsing party got there. They have spent years or decades in the political wilderness documenting the tiny oscillations in the political and world reality that might allow them the toehold they need to regain power. The erstwhile ruling party, meanwhile, has developed such a habit of setting the agenda that it has forgotten there is any daylight between its rhetoric and reality. Once the collapse comes, the fallen party has thrown away the very tools it requires to regain power--the ability to see political reality and understand the mood of the electorate, the intellectual chops to compete with the upstart party, humility, and moderation.

Of course, history doesn't repeat itself, it just rhymes. The current collapse is marked by circumstances only possible at this point in history. Let's review.

• Cognitive dysphasia. In their minds, Republicans are still the competent, freedom-loving, small government party of Reagan. They cannot--will not--reconcile this ideal with Bush's massive government bloat, torture, and economic collapse.
  
• Intellectual vacuity. It's not 1983. You wouldn't know it by hearing the unchanged rhetoric of the party. Socialism? Have the aging Reaganites forgotten that they "won" that war?
  
• Corruption. Both parties have enjoyed the thuggish corruption of men like Jack Abramoff (even if the GOP had a hell of a lot more of them over the past 10 years). The real corruption that the party needs to worry about--but of course, isn't--is represented by the perversion of the Justice Department.
  
• Incompetence. Sayeth Republicans: nothing to see here, la la la la la, keep moving on. See "cognitive dysphasia."
  
• Anti-intellectualism. The Republican Party managed to regain power almost exclusively through the support of Christian conservatives. Books have been written about this trend--which began reasonably enough as a reaction against "moral decay"--and metastasised into Joe the Plumber, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin. (Fantastic book: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips.)
  
• Regionalism. It wasn't only the GOP that was seduced by the power of Dixie--Dems were, too. But by linking their party to culture mores represented by people who disliked or were suspicious of urban-dwellers, non-whites, and the educated, the Party now finds itself led almost exclusively by people from the South.
  

Every one of these elements was either masked (incompetence) or held as a virtue (anti-intellectualism, regionalism) until even two years ago. The GOP, as is the case with all recently-fallen parties, is in denial. They either don't see the fault--few Republicans will cop to their party's corruption or incompetence--or think it's a messaging problem. Most Republicans still hang on to the idea that they're the ruling party and that all they need to do is find the proper message to regain the support of the people. Democrats suffered this confusion through the 80s and 90s. They were coming around to reality in the late 90s, but it took Bush to turn them into hard-boiled realists.

The Republicans are in a bad situation. Structurally, they're being led by the most extreme, most distasteful members of the party. It's no wonder that Fox News is seeing a spike in viewership--the only Republicans left are the true believers, and they're under a siege mentality. The politicians who still have support live in places where those extreme voters remain. They're being pressured to get more conservative. The media support comes only from the most radical, whose viewers are also on the fringe. While Limbaugh can remain one of the most powerful talk show hosts with 10 million viewers, a party that adopts his approach is absolutely doomed.

I've been listening to an evolving discussion among Republicans about where they go from here, and there are two camps. One is led by the fire-breathers. The second is led by people like David Frum and David Brooks (and Utah's Jon Huntsman, one of the few elected officials in this camp), who are trying to revitalize the party's intellectual and policy bona fides. The problem is that it's no longer in their hands. Limbaugh is right about one thing: the only way the GOP gets back into power anytime soon is if the Democrats implode as spectacularly as the Bush- and Delay-led Republicans. No wonder he's rooting for failure. This is the really brutal thing about being in the minority party; your success depends on things outside your control.

I'm my cursory reading of political history is a guide, what we can expect is a continued decline by the GOP, leading to a rival faction, more moderate, more willing to accept the terms of the debate as set by the Democrats. This faction will grow in authority within the party and create a bridge to a new generation of smart, principled, authentically conservative leaders who will start coming into power after the Obama era enters its second or third decade. The pendulum will slow, eventually stop, and these new conservatives will lead the charge as it heads the other direction.

For those of us watching from the other sideline, the GOP is doing everything right to prolong their time in the wilderness. We know that reality will play a forceful role in how things unfold, and the Obama years are going to be an accelerant in one direction or another. But the GOP needs to be able to step up if reality takes a break their way. As long as they're being led by the same old dinosaurs who are blind to the problems that led to the downfall, they're not ready to step up.

Causation, a Brief Tutorial

Last night's debate featured questions posted on YouTube from a representative sample of Republican voters. They were a motley crew who looked uneducated and unhinged--you know, the GOP base. So what does NRO think? CNN stacked the deck:

I was absolutely disgusted with what I saw tonight from CNN. Thousands of people submitted questions for this debate; yet, the questions they chose only served to reinforce the stereotype that the average Republican voter is a confederate-flag-waving, gun-toting, bible-brandishing conspiracy theorist! There were staggeringly few questions on National Security, and the few that were asked include some of the substanceless "gotcha" questions which were designed for no other purpose than to induce gaffes. What bothers me most is that CNN's embarassing performance was not out of malice; they genuinely believe that this is what Republicans are like and that these ridiculous questions are what Republican voters want to hear. A bad night for CNN and for the American media generally.

Let's see, the GOP has spent the past generation pandering to confederate-waving, gun-toting, Bible-branding conspiracy theorists for 30 years, but it's CNN's fault for selecting them to ask questions. Dammit, where are all the videos of post-docs asking sincere questions about the state of the economy? Oh right--they're Democrats.

Letting the GOP Handle It

I listened to a shocking conversation between Bob Wright and former White House speech-writer David Frum (he of the "axis of evil") a few minutes ago. The discussion was almost entirely an unpacking of the decision to invade Iraq. Before I get to the nature of the shock, let me also reference another conversation I heard (also via podcast) between George Stephanopoulos and Newt Gingrich. The experience was something like falling down when you have a bad back and finding, to your surprise, that vertebrae aligned. One talked about war, one talked about GOP strategies, and together, they revealed to me the unique madness of the Republican Party.

Frum's analysis comes down to a simple set of assumptions that, if agreed to, would in fact make you think invasion was the only solution. That they defy reason and reality is a matter that will become evident of its own accord:

1. Arabs hate us and nothing the US does changes this immutable fact. (Frum conflates Arabs and Muslims repeatedly, a fact which caused me little surprise.) They hate us so unyieldingly that acts as disparate as befriending Saudi Arabia or invading Iraq will be used to demonize us.
   
2. Certain leaders--Saddam chief among them--are inscrutable beyond comprehension. No matter what you do, they will commit acts of "mischief" (Frum's word) about which you should be irrationally panicked.
3. It is not possible to contain these leaders, and certainly not Saddam.
   
4. Since Europe is weak and foolish, the surest method--the only method, really--of heading off the irrational fury of Arab/Muslim madmen is for the US to take command of the situation.
   

Now, from this strangely beautiful logic, let us move to the wisdom of Newt Gingrich, shared yesterday on This Week With George Stephanopoulos. It echoes a lot of what you hear from the GOP these days, but was inimitably Newt and therefore the purest strain. Speaking commandingly about issues no one has mentioned in years, he exuded confidence rare among Republicans these days. For Newt, the GOP has always been correct on the issues (a national language, lowering taxes on corporations, the pledge of allegiance), the people have always been very ideologically conservative--just like the GOP!, and all the polarization in politics has been thanks to the nasty way in which Dems defy these truths.

So what does the GOP need to do to win in 2008? (Get ready, here's where the post finally comes together.) Since the Dems are weak and foolish, the surest method--the only method, really--of heading off the irrational fears of rich, Southern white men is for the GOP to take command of the situation.

For the GOP, the answer is always: give us control and we'll handle it. In fact, the "handling it" is actually just the exercise of power. Whereas some Americans may have a passing interest in health care and Iraq (issues Newt elided), these are secondary. So long as it's the GOP "handling it," and not the Dems, all will be fine.

Frum and Gingrich, specters from different pasts, were both given the opportunity to detail the ways in which they might govern differently if they were given another shot. Their logic was strangely mesmerizing, doubling back on itself until the method and the conclusion amounted to the same thing.

They have always used issues as window dressing for their leadership--issues were there to lend reality, fullness to the justification to vote GOP. But Republicans of recent vintage have rarely and only ever passingly been interested the issues. That has never been more evident than now, when the window dressing is so sparse and lends so little reality to any conversation. In the end, the argument really is "let us handle it." What else do they have?

The Latter-Day Saint

I lived for thirty-odd painful months in Salt Lake City, from November of my sophomore year until I came to Oregon to go to college. I roared at the oppressive, invasive culture, which is no place for a libertine non-Mormon. In those dark days (the 80s) and before, liquor laws prevented you from buying anything stronger than a 3.2% beer in a bar. You had to take your own bottle of wine to a restaurant and then pay an "uncorking fee" to drink it (a law intended to mark and punish non-believers). You even had to have membership at coffeeshops to get a cup of thin java. I actually engaged the religion a little more thoughtfully many years later, when
I returned and shot a documentary about the "Mormon Olympics."

I mention all of this because, despite his announcement in the very normal, very blue state of Michigan, Mitt Romney's bid to be president is going to raise the specter of his religion. It is strange, and its expression within the culture is strange, and unlike Joe Lieberman's Judaism, that's going to be a problem for Mitt--more so than Hillary's gender or Barack's skin color.

As a political bloc, Mormons have a lot in common with Evangelicals--they're socially conservative, agressively pro-market, family-oriented, and wear a lot sweatshirts and jeans. But this could be said of any fundamentalist faith, from Hinduism to Islam. Oregon's Senator Gordon Smith is mormon, as are Utah's elected officials. Utahns are reliable GOP votes, and when the issue is gay rights or abortion, Mormons and Christians stand shoulder to shoulder.

Electing a president is another matter. Chris Cillizza does a good job of breaking down the barriers of a general audience:

Digging slight deeper into the Gallup numbers, more skepticism becomes apparent. Of those 66 percent of Republicans who said they would cast a vote for a qualified Mormon, 54 percent said they would be "completely comfortable" with that decision while 12 percent expressed "some reservations" with that choice.

Combine those two questions and here's what you get: 54 percent of Republicans in the Gallup poll would vote for a qualified Mormon without a second thought; 42 percent would either not vote for a Mormon or would do so with some level of doubt.

Worse, a lot of those 54% are answering the question in the dark. When CBS asked people what they knew about the religion, only 10% knew a great deal, while 57% knew nothing at all. And only 25% had a favorable impression of it (second worse to Islam). For non-believers, the religion is pretty bizarre--so bizarre that it's mainly disguised behind a tapestry of benign Biblical beliefs. The facts--which surely will emerge--are less benign. (Below, I'll include a largely accurate, but enormously irreverant South Park that details how Joseph Smith founded the religion).

They'll learn about the strange cultural elements of the faith--men as the absolute head of the family, basements full of canned peaches for judgment day, the sphere of heaven being based on the number of kids families produce (!), the secretive weddings that happen privately in Mormon temples, the funny underwear Mormons wear--the list is long.

Mormonism's history, famous for polygamy, less so for its overt racism, poses difficult problems. (The faith believes that the Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel who "had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations." Utah Mormons actively tried to adopt Native American children to bring them into the light. It wasn't until 1978 that Mormons allowed blacks ordination. And so on.)

Ironically, it will probably be Romney's own party who launches the viscious attacks I anticipate. Because, while Evangelicals are happy to join with Mormons as a voting bloc, they seem less willing to elect them president. All of this dirty laundry is going to come out, and I suspect many of the fringe leaders will attack Romney. More importantly, he will lose a sizeable percentage of Evangelical base voters, and the ones he keeps won't be the kinds of voters who put Dubya on their shoulders in 2000 and 2004. Romney's campaign will be a non-starter, and I'm willing to go so far as to predict* he'll withdraw before Super Tuesday next spring.

Okay, enough of the analysis, here's the entertainment portion of our post:

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*Record, including sports predictions, through 2007: 9.2% accuracy. A word to the wise.

Dangerous Dark Horse: Chuck Hagel

"I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: 'Thou shall not speak ill of a fellow Republican.' But it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved."
_______- Dick Cheney, January 2007

Yesterday I argued that the GOP was dead in the water in 2008. I should have included an asterisk for Chuck Hagel. He's not on anyone's radar now, but he has the most upside and almost zero downside (we're talking Republican politics here).

Let's start with his resume: a decorated Vietnam vet, corporate star, maverick senator. He's often compared to John McCain, one of his best friends in the Senate. His politics are old-school GOP--pro gun and anti-tax. He's a hawk and would expand the military and anti-terror spending. He'd defund the arts and drill for oil in ANWR. He's against abortion. On the other hand, he's not a radical--he'd also increase funding for alternative fuels, expand services to the poor, increase funding for health care, and get rid of the trade embargo on Cuba (among other things).

But his biggest strength is that he has never been a fan of Bush, was an early critic of Rumsfeld, and was the first and most outspoken Republican to oppose the White House on the way it's conducting the war. Unlike McCain, whose straight talk is reserved for moments when it's not controversial, Hagel has taken stands.

Of all the candidates, he's the only one who has the chance of reuniting the core constituents of the GOP coalition: hawks, fiscal conservatives, Evangelicals, and libertarians. Of the candidates who appeal to cultural conservatives, he is the only one who won't wig out the rest of the country.

So far, he hasn't said he's running. Let's hope he doesn't.

The Republicans in 2008

As it stands now, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, or Mitt Romney are going to be the GOP candidate in 2008. That's very good for the Dems and very bad for the GOP. Candidate by candidate analysis in a minute, but first, let's set the stage.

Republicans enter the campaign with a president with a 30% approval rating. They have held the presidency 28 of the last 40 years, and have won seven of the last ten elections. They have cobbled together a coalition of disparate parts--fiscal conservatives, libertarians, evangelicals, and hawks--and dictated government policy since 1980. They have managed to implement a numbero their major reforms, from tax cuts to invasions, and have very little else to offer voters and keep the coalition together. With the collapse of Iraq, the coalition shattered, and the only way to beat the Dems in '08 is to somehow reconstitute that coalition. Each one of the major GOP candidates thinks he knows how to do it, but the odds are extremely long: the GOP has spent a generation building a vicious, aggressive political machine, and now it's turning on itself

John McCain
After his defeat in 2000, McCain has tried to add Evangelical chops to his image of a principled moderate. He has waffled about gay marriage, paid fealty to Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, and for his trouble, remains distinctly distasteful to the Christian right. His jump to the right has eroded his "straight talk" cred. Equally as bad, he has kowtowed for Bush and is strongly associated as a supporter of the war. Finally, he has long argued for a troop escalation, and although Bush's "surge" didn't meet the numbers McCain has said were needed, he'll go down with any failures the surge results in. One further barrier, and a rather serious one, is McCain's age: he'll be 72 at the time of the election--and would be the oldest president elected (Reagan was 69).

In the primaries, McCain will be savaged by the Evangelical right and caricatured as a Bush stooge. His own base will be attracted by Giuliani and is less supportive of the "straight talker" in any case. McCain is in serious trouble.

Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani is the other "straight talker" in the election, and he will find a base of support among the old school New England GOP--those who don't care about social issues. Giuliani clearly hopes the glamour of his 9/11 moment will carry Evangelicals along, but there are a couple problems. His New York background (failed marriages, infidelity, living with gay men) will be too distasteful for a lot of Dixie voters who would have trouble voting for anyone named "Giuliani" in any case; add these infractions, and he'll get killed in the primaries. It's also not clear that being a stand-up mensch during 9/11 will translate as adequate experience. He has had no national political experience. I suspect Rudy would make a decent foe for a Democrat in the general--particularly if it were a novice like Obama or Edwards--but he'll never get that far. The social conservatives will bury him in the primaries.

Mitt Romney
Two years ago, Romney wouldn't have thrilled Evangelicals--he's good on social issues, but his Mormonism would have been a problem. (In private, Christians would admit that he's headed the same place as godless Taxachussets liberals.) But the landscape has changed, and he may be the best of a bad lot. For me, the x-factor is whether Evangelicals are going to stay politically active. They'll vote in 2008, but with the failures of Bush to implement bedrock goals (abolishing abortion and gay marriage) and the loss of Congress, this is the most enervated faction of the GOP coalition. That's bad news for the GOP in general: they were also the most energetic political activists. Can Mitt rally them for one more campaign? My guess is no. In his early Massachussets campaigns, he was notably liberal with regard to social issues. That's going to be a major problem down the road. He also doesn't have a great deal of foreign policy credibility. He will be looking for some of the fiscal conservative vote and hoping to get the majority of the Evangelical vote. It probably won't be enough in the primaries, but, if it is, it definitely won't be enough to defeat the Dem.

Newt Gingrich
I have a hard time thinking Newt will actually throw his hat in the ring, but it would be entertaining if he did. Gingrich now believes his own hagiography: he was a principled conservative and clear-eyed intellectual who used reason to spark a populist revolt against corruption. Now he sees himself mounting the white horse to sanitize his own party. What he and his supporters seem to forget is that he was a nasty man whose populism never extended beyond his home district, and that he was the intial cause of the very corruption he now claims to want to address (he was an autocrat and a notorious pork barreler). In the primaries, he would mainly polarize the South against the other Northern and Western candidates, inject a flood of bile into the race, and remind moderates and independents why they want Dems to have a shot. He doesn't have any chance of winning in the primaries, and if he enters, he could seriously damage the campaign of the man who ultimately defeats him.

I don't know that this is a widely-shared view among Democrats and liberals, but the GOP don't really have much of a shot in 2008. They have to hope for a very weak candidate to emerge from the Democratic primaries and then pray for scandal. Anything else, and it's hard to imagine a scenario in which the White House stays in Republican control.

Pelosi in Power; Righties Squeal in Impotent Outrage

How are the newly-ousted righties handling their banishment from the halls of power? With their usual class and grace:

As the sun rises on the United States, the Democrats take over both houses of Congress -- aided in the Senate by an unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders, and numerous ideological socialists in the House who run on the Democrat banner....

But at RedState, we intend to fight. We will fight against government largesse, we will fight against Democrats intent on doing to Iraq what they did to Vietnam, and we will fight our own if our own choose to ignore the obvious lessons of 2006.

To the Democrats, we bid you welcome to the majority. And here at RedState, we fight on against you and your socialist cohorts. Oh, and now that you've got one branch of government, we dare you to try to use it without consulting the GOP.

Yes, no doubt consultation with the people who slander them is the first order of Democratic business.