Will the GOP Just Fade Away?

Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan had a provocative take on the future of the Republican Party in her piece last week. She suggested that, if Donald Trump wins a third nomination, the party will disintegrate. It won’t be the end of the Republican Party as we have known it, but the end of the party altogether.

Noonan’s theory is that suburban Republicans who have put up with Trump for two cycles will have finally had enough. They’ll either try to make peace with the Democrats, which are becoming more affluent and college-educated by the minute, or they’ll join some third party movement. Then blue collar populists will drift away to something else or to not participating at all because they’ll be tired of losing.

It’s an interesting idea, but I think she’s probably wrong because I just don’t see suburban Republicans becoming Democrats — especially after abortion recedes as an issue — or joining a third party. The gap on social issues, other than abortion rights, alone between traditional Republicans and Democrats is just too wide. And these are not the kind of people to take flyers on start-up new third party movements.

I think what’s more likely to happen in a post-Trump party is that it simply reverts to roughly what it was in 2012. This uneasy coalition between working class populists and traditional conservatives goes back at least as far as Barry Goldwater in 1964. Sixteen years later Ronald Reagan brilliantly fused those two movements into a powerful, and ideologically consistent, coalition: God loved the free market.

The hard-right movement in 1980 was dominated by evangelical Christians. They’re still a force, but the Tea Party movement that started around 2010 has largely superseded it. Still, it’s pretty similar: super patriotic in its own fashion, very socially conservation, xenophobic, suspicious if not hostile to government, academia and other institutions, and obsessed with an absolutist view of the Second Amendment.

What’s somewhat different is that the Reagan era evangelicals were also true believers in the free market whereas today’s blood and soil populists don’t like some aspects of it, free trade in particular. But that difference is less significant the more you think about it because today’s populists do not hate rich people. Like the evangelicals of old, they want to be them.

The folks they really resent are those just below them on the economic ladder who they believe are on that lower wrung because they don’t work hard enough. They don’t resent tax breaks for the wealthy so much as they resent welfare benefits going to those who they believe are undeserving. This is precisely the kind of thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren get wrong and it’s the reason that liberals are so frustrated when they think they’re supporting policies that benefit blue collar workers only to be snubbed by them. Folks like Sanders and Warren want people to resent up, when in fact they resent down.

The other point to keep in mind is that Trump is Trump. I just don’t think anybody else can pull off what he does. If Ron DeSantis shot someone on Miami Beach he’d be tried and convicted. Trump is a unique “talent” and what he is will die with him. Every other Republican in the field (and as of this week there will be seven candidates not named Trump) is just another variation on John McCain or Mitt Romney. Maybe a little edgier, a little more coarse, quicker to exploit cultural differences, but basically the same ideologically. They’ll be as socially conservative as they need to be in order to hold together a coalition that cuts taxes for country clubbers.

So, I’m more optimistic than Noonan with regard to the future of her party. Her basic point is correct, though. There needs to be some outlet for traditional free market, socially moderate conservatives. There’s every reason to believe they’ll still find a home with the Republicans in a post-Trump world, which for my money, cannot come fast enough.

But I would take a different tack. I would want to pick off as many disaffected, Never-Trump Republicans as I could for the Democrats. That would cement a stable, long-term centrist, maybe even center-left, governing majority. But in order to do that Democrats would have to become more like the party of Bill Clinton, circa 1996. We could, just for example, not go off the deep end when someone proposals even the most incremental expansion of work requirements in a couple of welfare programs.

Alas, that ain’t gonna happen. The GOP will survive Trump and the Democrats will squander the opening he created.