How it Happened. Why It Happened. And What We Need to Do Now

My summary of the Fall of the Shining City, the Collapse of the GOP. More to come.

In 1950, the American Political Science Association (APSA) published a famous report on America’s two-party system in which they argued that Democrats and Republicans were too much alike, and that what our system needed was more polarization and clearer choices for voters. Be careful what you wish for.

The APSA could make that case because it was true. Once the Republican Party became reconciled to the New Deal construct of a more active government, sometime between 1936 and 1940, the two parties were both essentially centrist, and committed to the principles of classical liberalism. Unlike other democracies, America was not threatened by socialist parties on the left, or populist/nationalist parties on the right.

That is no longer true. Tectonic changes in American culture and racial demographics over the past 40 years have destabilized the political system of the one indispensable nation in world affairs. Beginning late in President George W. Bush’s first term and culminating in the triumph of Donald Trump, the alt right movement drove the Republican Party away from the liberal center in favor of a dangerous form of culture war nationalism, trending towards authoritarianism. A political system with only two parties, in which one is an ever-present threat to democracy and the rule of law, cannot safely endure.

This phenomenon has been widely and frequently noted, but as someone who labored within the Republican party for 37 years as a candidate, a lawmaker, and State Party Chairman, I find that most of what I read about my former party is inaccurate or incomplete.

It is vitally important that we understand exactly what has happened to the Republican Party over time, why it has happened, and what must be done to safeguard democracy. Yes, if 2024 is to be a rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump, Never Trump current and former Republicans need to support Biden. But beyond the next election — no matter how difficult it will be — a new party needs to form in the Center-Right, or, more likely, a new faction needs to do battle to bring the GOP back towards Reaganite principles.

In 1983, the Republican Party joined other Center-Right parties to create the International Democratic Union and adopted a set of principles based on classical liberalism. And what are those principles? Personal freedom protected by the rule of law; the separation of church and state; a free market economy with a robust safety net of social programs for those who need assistance; free trade and a free exchange of ideas; and a global community organized to keep the peace. If this sounds familiar, it is because it reflects most of the key principles embodied by both the Republican and Democratic platforms between the Great Depression and the rise of Trump.

I acknowledge that few today agree with that assessment. Former Republican consultant, Stuart Stevens has sold a lot of books by telling liberals what they want to believe, namely that the last 50 years of conservatism “was all a lie.” Heather Cox Richardson, who has written what is considered by many the definitive modern history of the GOP, goes farther and argues that not only is Trump and Trumpism a natural extension of the conservative movement that took shape under Ronald Reagan, aside from brief periods under presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, the GOP’s natural tendencies have always been illiberal. I would argue that these assessments are driven by ideology and bias, not facts, and dangerously downplays the significance of the changes in recent years that have reshaped America and the Republican Party. An honest look at the history of the GOP confirms this.

The slavery crisis brought on by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision created the Republican Party in the 1850s. But even at its birth, the party was about more than opposition to slavery. It rejected the nativist extremism of the Know Nothings, and from Lincoln’s presidency through William McKinley’s, it was the Republican Party, not the Democrats, that pursued an activist government that would enhance opportunity for all. Republicans supported the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad, and land grant colleges. They supported sound money and protective tariffs to grow American industry. And Republicans fought to end slavery, destroy the Ku Klux Klan, and enact civil rights protections for Black Americans.

With the industrial transformation of the economy in the late nineteenth century, the key issues changed. The Republican Party led by Theodore Roosevelt — and to a lesser extent William Howard Taft and 1916 GOP presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes — met the moment by supporting a progressive reform agenda that addressed the social and political problems caused by urbanization and industrialization. Had Roosevelt lived, he likely would have been returned to the White House in 1920, the Republican Party would have remained a progressive force, and world history would have been altered.

Unfortunately, in 1920 the GOP turned towards reactionary policies and leaders. Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, whose terms in office coincided with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress for most of the decade, rejected American membership in the League of Nations, enacted massive tariff increases, and virtually shut down immigration. Roosevelt’s progressivism was replaced with isolationism, protectionism, and extreme nativism. Lincoln’s emphasis on using government to expand opportunity was replaced with slavish support for big business. Republican policies contributed to the global economic collapse of the Great Depression and the political collapse of the GOP in the 1930s, which gave Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt the supermajorities in Congress that allowed him to pass the legislation that created the New Deal.

Heather Cox Richardson argues that other than a brief interregnum during President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, the GOP has remained a right-wing illiberal party ever since, first dominated by the reactionary policies of Senator Robert Taft and his allies, then by extreme “movement conservatives” led William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Reagan — and now by Trump and his MAGA acolytes. This is a common view, but it ignores what actually happened in the Republican Party from the 1930s until today.

Certainly, there were always dark, extreme, reactionary voices within the GOP, but they almost always lost interparty battles. Moderates led first by New York Governor (and two-time presidential nominee) Thomas Dewey, and then by President Eisenhower, dominated the Republican party in the ’40s and ’50s, not the supporters of Taft. Apart from Goldwater’s aberrant nomination in 1964, the GOP consistently nominated moderates and not extremists for president — until 2016, at least. Republicans built upon the social welfare safety net created by the New Deal and supported free trade, immigration reform, and American leadership around the world.

Reagan was much more of a movement conservative than his predecessors and made supply-side tax cuts Republican gospel. But he also was an ardent free trader and the champion of NATO, who raised taxes to stabilize Social Security and granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. He supported mandatory background checks to buy a handgun, and the 1994 assault weapons ban.

Many disagreed with Republican policies. And Republican Presidents made grievous mistakes while in office, including Watergate, Iran-Contra, and mismanagement of the conflicts with Afghanistan and Iraq. But in terms of ideology and policy, to draw a straight line between Ronald Reagan’s aspirational Shining City conservativism and Trump’s proto-fascist American carnage is absurd.

What happened? America changed, and those changes deformed the GOP.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, America was still 80% white and roughly 90% Christian. Today whites make up roughly 60% of the population, and we will soon be a majority-minority society. The percentage of Americans calling themselves Christian is now in the sixties and falling fast. Not long ago, same-sex marriage was considered a fringe political issue. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize it in 2003. By 2015 it was the law in all 50 states and is now widely accepted.

Although MAGA populists are delusional in believing (or claiming to believe) that the 2020 election was stolen, they are correct to feel that their communities and their country have been changing. America has become dramatically more diverse in terms of both race and culture. The political and cultural views of urban/coastal secular college educated Americans have become more liberal and less traditional. Many Americans celebrate this change, but for others it is threatening. We have always liked to think of ourselves as a multiethnic melting pot, but in fact most Americans were white and Protestant until very recently. In that considerably more homogeneous polity, debates centered on economics. Now, understandably, the debates are about race, culture, and religion.

Those who fear they are on the wrong side of these historical trends — particularly non-college-educated whites and white evangelicals — have flocked to the GOP and are now the party’s base. College-educated, secular whites have shifted from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, and they, along with large majorities of non-white voters, make up the base of that party. White voters who identify as evangelical or born-again Protestants comprised 28 percent of the electorate in 2020, and 76 percent of them voted for Trump; 62% of everyone else voted for Biden.

Politics is driven by real events. The Republican Party wasn’t transformed by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Facebook, or even Donald Trump. The GOP was remade by massive cultural and demographic changes which have realigned politics here, and in many other western democracies.

The effects of this new American reality first manifested in in the GOP in 2007 when populist-leaning Republicans in Congress thwarted President George W. Bush’s proposed immigration reform bill. The emerging new GOP base made it clear they would not tolerate giving immigrants a path to legality, the same policy enacted by President Reagan 20 years before. The Tea Party exploded into being in 2010. In 2015, House Republicans drove their own Speaker, John Boehner — an essentially Reaganite conservative — into retirement. But Republicans continued to nominate traditional moderates for the presidency, largely because no serious alt right populist candidates came forward — until Trump.

Trump was the candidate the new GOP base had been waiting for. Anti-establishment, anti-free trade, anti-immigration, hostile to the media and supportive of an “America First” foreign policy, he thrilled the base by being brash, rude, and saying what many had been thinking but were afraid to say in what used to be called “polite company.” But there was also substance to Trumpism. Unintentionally, perhaps, he recreated the isolationist, protectionist, hyper-nativist GOP of the 1920s. The party’s remaining Reaganites either left the party or bowed to the new populist agenda. Trump may or may not be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, but the GOP is not going to return to classical liberalism anytime soon.

Bad policy is one thing, but what makes the new Republican Party dangerous is its trend towards Christian nationalist authoritarianism. Trump should have been impeached and convicted many times over. His campaign collaborated with Russia, and he obstructed justice to cover that up. He withheld military aid in an attempt to force the president of Ukraine — in the face of a growing military threat from Russia — to do him political favors. He blatantly violated the appropriations and emoluments clauses in the Constitution. And he incited a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in power. The Republican base supports (or at least tolerates) all of this because whatever vague attachments they may retain to the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law are less important to them than preventing their alleged “replacement” by a non-white, non-Christian, and supposedly “socialist” new majority. The Republican base believes in party over country, and their own political tribe over everything the country used to stand for.

America is both a narrowly and deeply divided nation. For the past several presidential elections, small numbers of Electoral College votes in a handful of states have determined the outcomes. The next election is also likely be close, and there is a real possibility that Trump (or someone much like him) could reach the White House in 2025. If that happens, the threat to democracy, the Constitution — not to mention classical liberal policies — would be enormous. Our current two-party system has created a game of Russian roulette in which we are one election away from catastrophe.

How can we avert this disaster? There are really only three possible scenarios. One, Democrats need to win such overwhelming majorities that Republicans are forced to abandon populist-authoritarianism — but Democrats won’t ever gain such majorities as long as they are saddled with the unpopular views of their leftist base. Two, moderate and conservative Republicans overcome the populist-authoritarians within the GOP and return the party to classical liberalism. Or three, a new Center-Right party draws off enough support from the Republican Party that the GOP either becomes a rump minority or splits.

The swing voters who now decide national elections are the small number of moderate, mostly suburban, true independents and soft Republicans in a few states who don’t like Trump, but don’t want to vote for Democrats. Biden attracted enough of them to win a narrow victory, but the margin is too close for comfort. If the Republican party can be brought back towards the center, or if a viable new Center-Right party is formed, the MAGA extremists would be denied those crucial votes, restoring balance and stability to our political system. Achieving either of these outcomes will be incredibly difficult, but the effort must be made.

So, form a new party, or a new faction to do battle within the Republican party. Easy to say; extremely difficult to do. But not impossible.

American political parties have long been wracked by factional divisions, and in the nineteenth century it was common for them to split and for new parties to form. Interparty battles are normal and healthy. But what happened after 2016 is that an entire generation of Republican leaders chose not to fight, but instead to retire, find something else to do, gloss over what happened to the GOP, or bend the knee to Trump.

Still, there is a substantial, loosely organized community of Never Trump Republicans and former Republicans, consisting of dozens of leaders, multiple PACs and organizations, media messengers, and potentially millions of voters, of which I am honored to be a participant. We have discussed the new party/new faction question more than once but have never pulled the trigger on either option.

Legally you can’t just create a new federal party, so if the Center-Right were to choose the new party option we would need to form a national PAC, but call it a party, recruit candidates who will run under our new label, and build out a national committee and 50 state parties. The advantage of this approach is you would be able to appeal to voters, particularly in blue states, who would never consider supporting any Republican. But ballot access is a major problem in many states, and it would take several elections to brand the new party and make voters aware of what it believes in.

No new durable parties have been created in the United States since the formation of the Republican party in 1854. It has been so long that most people can’t imagine it happening. But the creation of factions to compete within the two major parties has been common, in fact it is happening today in both parties. It is frankly surprising that Never Trump leaders haven’t already made this natural and obvious choice.

Parties are only transformed via a struggle. I watched, and helped defeat, numerous pre-Trump attempts by the far right to take over the Republican party. In the 1980s and ’90s, Bill Clinton, Britain’s Tony Blair and other moderates battled to move their respective leftist parties towards the center, calling themselves “New Democrats,” and “New Labour.” A cadre of politicians on the left are fighting a vigorous battle now to move the Democratic party towards their values, while another group is doing battle to move the GOP even farther to the right. Both have formed caucuses in the U.S. House — the Progressive Caucus, and the Freedom Caucus -and both have launched PACs to help elect candidates.

We homeless legacy Reaganite Republicans need to launch a similar crusade designed to elect Republicans who support liberal democratic values and retake control of the GOP. Functionally it would not be difficult. This community should be able to launch and fundraise for a PAC, recruit candidates to fight primary elections, and advocate for liberal democratic principles at national and state Republican conventions. The challenge, of course, will be achieving any short-term success in the TrumpGOP. The Republican base is actively hostile to returning to pre-Trump policies and ideas.

Nevertheless, if well-known leaders, such as Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, Larry Hogan, John Kascich, and others, were to stand in front of a bank of cameras and announce that they are launching a new party, or, more likely, a new faction within the GOP, they would be joined by a community ready to march but looking for leadership. It would be transformative.

The effort must be made, because doing nothing other than helping to elect Democrats is too dangerous. Again, in the short term — 2024 — the focus must be on defeating Donald Trump and others from his authoritarian wing of the GOP, which is now the majority in the GOP. But simply hoping that the Democrats, with all their flaws, can continue to save us, even as they drift to the left, is not a reliable long-term strategy. America needs a principles-based, Center-Right party to avoid an eventual Hobson’s choice between socialism and fascism.

The Never Trump, Principled Conservative, Center-Right is still out here, waiting to be mobilized. It is time for leaders to stand up and get back in the fight.