Yesterday I wrote this post asking whether Trump’s lies were wishful thinking, deliberate lies, or pure lunacy. I wrote this:
I suspect that some (definitely not all) Never Trumpers want to return to the Republican Party as it was in 2015. So they harp on Trump’s mental unfitness because they want to see Trump as an aberration: Get rid of Trump and the Tea Party marches happily along.
A follower asked:
It’s not a matter of accepting or welcoming help. It’s a matter of people with different political views coming together with a common goal, in this case, we’re working together to oust an autocrat.
I was simply explaining why I shy away from too much emphasis on Trump’s individual psyche. My husband and his family lived through the Pinochet dictatorship. We can learn lessons from Chile about how to oust an autocrat. If you missed my earlier post about lessons we can learn from Chile, click here.
I will note that The Lincoln Project is not simply trying to get rid of Trump. They also want to get rid of any elected officials who have enabled Trump. For this, they have earned the anger of many GOP insiders. I’ve mentioned that we may be in for a party realignment.
The United States currently does not have a center-right party.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas recently said that if Washington D.C. becomes a state, the Democrats will get two more Senate seats “in perpetuity.” Given that whites are less than 50% of D.C.’s population, this is an obvious admission that Tom Cotton and his Republican colleagues look to a future in which African American communities will never vote Republican. In other words, they see the party—and the party’s future—as a minority “white power” party.
If the Republican Party digs in as a white power party, the GOP will become smaller, angrier, and more hateful.
Steven Levitsky says the GOP must learn to appeal to minority communities or face extinction. The problem is they can’t be pro-KKK and pro-BLM at the same time. They’ve made their choice. Choosing to be a minority party means they know they can’t win elections without cheating.
I believe we’re in for a party realignment in the next 10 years. The Republican Party as a white power, far right wing nationalist party is not sustainable as one of two national parties. United States demographics are changing, leaving white power / white supremacists too much in the minority.
I’m not quite sure how a party realignment will work. The Constitution was written for no parties, but there are parts that are unworkable with more than 2 parties. For example, if no presidential candidate wins a majority of electoral votes, the Constitution requires the president to be selected by the House of Representatives. The idea was that the President should have broad popular support, so if couldn’t muster a majority, he should be selected by the House, which (back in the days when the Senators were selected by state legislatures) was the more democratic house of Congress. I just can’t see that working out well.
We had an era with one dominant party. After Hamilton’s Federalist Party imploded, before the birth of the Republican Party, the party then called the Democratic Republicans was the only viable party.
We could go through another such era: The GOP becoming a fringe, right-wing white nationalistic party, and the Democratic Party dominating while another party struggles to be born.
We currently don’t have a center-right party. One way for the parties to realign is for those who we might call “true conservatives” to oust the KKK and other right wing authoritarians from the party, move the GOP toward the center, and appeal to those minority communities that would feel comfortable in a true conservative party, but are not comfortable in the GOP, which has turned into a fringe, right-wing white nationalist party.
For what I mean by “true conservatives” see this post, or listen to this Jonathan Haight (NYU professor) Ted Talk.
Asian communities in California and elsewhere, African American communities in the South are among the minorities that tend to lean conservative but are obviously shut out of a white nationalist party.
The problem for true conservatives will be to figure out how to achieve an electoral majority without appealing to right-wing nuts (I am using “nuts” as a recognized technical term :))
I’ve considered this possibility. The problem I see with this is that, even though they are close together on the graph, center left and center right are fundamentally different animals, as Jon Haight explains in the Ted Talk I mentioned earlier.
So conservative Never Trumpers and a life-long Democrat like me can work together, compromise, and share selected common goals, but we won’t comfortably remain in the same party. So the problem is where do the conservatives go?
For new followers, I’ll add that an important component of democracy is that it requires compromise and give and take. American democracy has gone off the rails partly because of the “never compromise” and “win at any cost” current GOP. A good book on how refusal to compromise leads to autocracy is:
Whenever, on Twitter, I mention the fact that America does not currently have a center-right party, someone comes along and says that the Democratic Party is a “center-right” party. I don’t believe anyone who has read the legislation the Democrats have drafted over the past two years can, with a straight face, call the Democratic Party “center-right.”
A major party in a two-party system will naturally pull in a diverse group. Big tents get messy.
