The Last Republican?
This article is not about Donald Trump. It is about the party that nominated Trump as its candidate for U.S. President.
This article is not about Donald Trump. It is about the party that nominated Trump as its candidate for U.S. President.
It appears that almost anything that Trump says that is outrageous is news just because it is outrageous. And since he says a lot of outrageous things, there are a lot of articles, both news and commentary, about Donald Trump. I’m sick of reading about Donald Trump. People are too focused on outrageousness, and not on the underlying issues.
Donald Trump is a symptom, not the disease. (Although I would be reluctant to shake his hand without wearing latex gloves.) The disease infects the party that nominated him. The disease is bad enough that I’m beginning to think that Donald Trump will be the last Republican nominee for president — ever.
I already wrote a piece about how the Republican party replaced the Whig party, It Is Time For A New Political Party. I wrote that back when we could imagine Michael Bloomberg creating a new party to replace the Republican party, sort of a modern Abraham Lincoln (who was the first Republican president). Bloomberg decided not to run as either a Republican or as a third party candidate.
Since then, Trump was indeed nominated as the Republican candidate and until recently seemed to have a reasonable chance of actually becoming President of the United States. Now I’ve begun to think that the Republican Party has painted itself into the kind of corner that it needs to be replaced by a new party, and I keep trying out scenarios in my head for how that would actually happen .
That is exactly what the Whig Party did after 1856: Paint itself into a corner. I’m no historical scholar, so thank you, Politico, for telling me about the role Zachary Taylor, the Donald Trump of 1855, played in the demise of the Whig party in the 1850s. I’ve been wondering exactly how the Republican Party could implode and led to the establishment of a new party.
You could look at the Whig implosion as a literal template for what could happen: Trump gets elected as Taylor did. He is so unfit to lead, the government loses direction and... It’s a hard template to follow since Taylor actually died in office (from food poisoning, not because of “Second Amendment People”) less than a year after being elected, succeeded by his vice president, Millard Fillmore.
But that’s sort of beside the point, since it wasn’t Taylor or even Fillmore that caused the Whig party to implode. Instead, the central issue of the day which led to the demise of the Whigs and the incorporation of the Republicans was slavery. Well, the real issue was state’s rights, since different states had different rules about slavery and the issue was whether the Federal government had the authority to tell every state to abolish slavery. Slavery was a Really Big Issue, which ultimately also lead the country (independent of party affiliation) to engage in a civil war in which more than 600,000 Americans died.
Do we have a single issue that could trigger that kind of change? What could lead us to actually go to war? Many analysts think that the emergence of Donald Trump is a symptom of a deepening class war in the U.S. between haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor. But that’s not good enough.
Some people like to point to the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance as the an indicator that helps outline the core issue (in fact, I heard Hillary herself cite this book during a pre-rally briefing): What used to be the marginal poor are now the lower middle class, but feel like they are sliding back rather than continuing to make economic progress. It is clear that economics is the central issue that is driving large chunks of voters to look for really different voices and leaders than what we have had for the past 25–30 years; a lot of people, not just hillbillies or autoworkers, feel like they’ve been screwed by the existing establishment, which has allowed rich people to get really really rich without protecting the middle class, lower or upper.
I hope (fervently!) that there is no issue in our modern, confabulated society that could get us to take up arms against each other, aside from the odd nut job or religious wing nut who gets one or more guns and kills people randomly. Indeed, in the intervening 150 years, the Federal Government has absorbed many of the roles that states used to play and states rights is now a marginal issue debated by policy wonks. So it’s hard to imagine how any issue can upset the balance so much that the country divides and goes to war with itself.
I might be naive in this case, since this story from the NY Times — “Some Donald Trump Voters Warn of Revolution if Hillary Clinton Wins” — just came through my inbox.
Instead, look at an alternative scenario: Hillary Clinton wins the election, not just by a few hanging chads, but conclusively. Once the voters are presented with a choice between a misogynist bombast and an experienced politician and states-person, they will vote for the rational (if not preferred) choice. Indeed, I’ve been thinking for some time that Hillary will win by a landslide, maybe more than 70% in the popular vote and certainly in the electoral college. (Only four presidents have been elected with more than 60% of the popular vote, not including George Washington, who ran unopposed).
How does it play out from there? My issue with Hillary is that she will likely be Nixonian. Hillary will view a mandate as a license to do whatever she wants, particularly if the landslide also carries the Senate and even the House, and the government is all-Democrat. She may then decide to accelerate everything she really wants to do (single-payer healthcare, anyone?), and forget to take care of the economic divide that is really polarizing the country.
With the Republicans in disarray and fractured, you might finally see a coalition of conservative Democrats, Libertarians, Rockefeller (and even Goldwater) Republicans come together to form a new political party. The primary objective of this party would be to create a voting block that leaves the Tea Party & Religious Right on the margin, but still represents a vision for solving problems without legislation or executive orders — i.e. the private sector.
The job of a political party is to organize voters into a coherent force — in our system, two coherent forces that can debate issues and move the country slowly toward a better place to live. The advent of, first, television and mass media and, second, the Internet has replaced the organizing function that the parties used to play up to and through the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and even the Reagan Revolution.
Even the Democratic Party hasn’t really figured this out, but with Hillary in office for a likely eight years (as long as she doesn’t pull a Nixon and get impeached for violating the law) there will be a period of time for a new party to form around a new leader, one who can bind together the policy and theory into a new opposing force. Too bad Michael Bloomberg is 74 years old, since he can’t be the guy to lead this new party like Abraham Lincoln led the last new party. But maybe he can organize it and identify the leadership that will create this new political party.