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For its quadrennial convention this week, the Republican Party broke with precedent by declining to articulate a new vision for governing. Instead, the party opted to recycle its 2016 platform and declared that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration.”
Party platforms are largely symbolic documents, as my colleagues Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Annie Karni report, but the Republicans’ decision to forgo writing one this year nonetheless “illustrates the degree to which their identity is shaped more by Mr. Trump, and his critics, than by any set of policy proposals.”
Whether this strategy will prove electorally effective in November is anyone’s guess. But what does it mean for the future of the party’s political identity? Here’s what people are saying.
If Trump wins re-election
In Politico, Tim Alberta, who chronicled the history of the Republican Party over the past decade in his book “American Carnage,” writes that the absence of a platform this year underscores the extent to which the party has become a cult of personality that has given up on ideas. “With Election Day just a few months away, I was genuinely surprised, in the course of recent conversations with a great many Republicans, at their inability to articulate a purpose, a designation, a raison d’être for their party,” he writes. Filling the intellectual vacuum is Mr. Trump, first and foremost, as well as what Mr. Alberta calls a lazy, identity-based populism: “If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.”
In Mr. Alberta’s view, the party’s lack of a coherent governing vision has resulted in its political stagnation: Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for two years under Mr. Trump, but the Affordable Care Act is still unrepealed, the border wall remains largely unbuilt and the nation’s crumbling infrastructure has yet to be uncrumbled.
But not everyone accepts Mr. Alberta’s thesis that Republicans have sacrificed their political commitments at the altar of Donald Trump. The Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for example, argues that the Republican Party has thrown its weight behind the president precisely because he has advanced its ideological interests, at least to some degree. As Annie Lowrey notes in The Atlantic, the Trump administration has had great success at dismantling the regulatory state, cutting trillions in taxes and stacking the courts with conservative judges, who may block or impede progressive priorities like campaign-finance laws and climate-change legislation for decades to come. Through executive action and with the help of Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump has also worked doggedly to restrict immigration, legal and illegal, and to curtail the number of refugees and asylum-seekers the country will accept.
“If there’s no platform for the Republican National Convention,” Mr. Bouie writes, “if the party has agreed to simply support the president’s second-term agenda, it is because the basic arrangement between Trump and the Republican Party is still intact. Should he win a second term, we’ll see more of the same: an administration that pursues as much of the party’s agenda — redistribution to the wealthy, deep reductions in the state’s ability to solve problems for the general welfare — as possible, and a Republican Party that looks the other way as Trump turns the federal government into a patronage machine for himself, his family and his allies.”
As for the judiciary, Eric Posner writes in The Times that Mr. Trump would probably seek to appoint an even farther-right Supreme Court justice if a vacancy opened up. And on foreign policy, he might finally follow through on withdrawing from NATO.
At the same time, Mr. Posner writes, it seems likely that Mr. Trump would continue to come up against opposition from the lower courts and Congress. In Washington Monthly, Paul Gastris raises the possibility of Democrats’ taking back the Senate, which would further hamstring Republican lawmakers. While much of Mr. Trump’s base may continue to back him, Mr. Gastris predicts that his numbers would eventually start to slip.
This, he says, is what happened to George W. Bush after his re-election: In the wake of his failed attempt to privatize Social Security and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, his approval rating among Republicans plummeted 22 points. “Fox News drew more viewers during the 2004 Republican National Convention than any other TV network,” he writes. “In the end, it could not save Bush from the real-world consequences of his own actions.”
If Trump loses re-election
In the event of a Biden victory in November, the Times columnist Bret Stephens argues that the future of the Republican Party would depend on Mr. Trump’s margin of defeat. If he loses narrowly, the Trump family will do what it can to retain control of the party. As Adam Harris writes in The Atlantic, it is Donald Trump Jr., not Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, who currently seems the president’s most natural political heir.
But if Mr. Trump loses overwhelmingly, Mr. Stephens predicts a more profound schism will emerge within the Republican Party — “a cage match between Marco Rubio and Tucker Carlson for the soul of the G.O.P.” In Mr. Stephens’s view, one wing will seek a fresh, more sophisticated champion for the politics of Trumpism, while a more moderate wing will try to revert to a version of what the party was when Paul Ryan was leading it.
But others think that such a reversion is doubtful, at least for now. “The basic Trump worldview — on immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc. — will shape the G.O.P. for decades, the way the basic Reagan worldview did for decades,” the Times columnist David Brooks writes. “A thousand smarter conservatives will be building a new party after 2020, but one that builds from the framework Trump established.”
What might such a party look like? In The Wall Street Journal, Bobby Jindal, a former governor of Louisiana, predicts that Mr. Trump’s successors will follow his lead in rejecting conservative orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Whereas the Republican Party once supported the North American Free Trade Agreement and expanded commerce with China, Mr. Trump’s more aggressive posture over trade deficits and intellectual property theft has pushed politicians — including Joe Biden — to be more hawkish toward Beijing. Similarly, Mr. Jindal says, “Republicans who want to moderate the party on immigration are out of touch with voters who want the wall built and the border secured.”
But the Times columnist Ross Douthat doesn’t think the future of a post-Trump Republican Party is yet quite so clear. Rather, he imagines three paths the party might take:
In the first scenario, having concluded that its voters don’t particularly care about the conservative shibboleth of limited government, the party might adopt a populist agenda that prioritizes infrastructure spending, robust industrial policy and even universal health insurance. In this way, Mr. Douthat says, Republicans could escape their “demographic trap,” expanding their shrinking white base to become the party of a pan-ethnic middle class.
In the second scenario, the Republican Party might lean farther into anti-majoritarianism, rather than populism, to sustain its power. Expanding and strengthening voter-ID laws, excluding noncitizens from congressional apportionment and even trying to set up Electoral College-like systems for local elections are among the ways it might do so.
In the third scenario, the Republicans might become a purely reactionary party whose sole purpose would be keeping Democrats out of power and that would increasingly rely on spectacle, disinformation and conspiratorial thinking to conceal the absence of any substantive policy commitments. Mr. Douthat writes that glimpses of this future can already be seen in the infiltration of the QAnon conspiracy movement into national Republican politics.
[Related: “QAnon Is the Future of the Republican Party”]
Is there any scenario in which the Republican Party completely renounces Trumpism after losing this fall? Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks so, if only because the two-party system naturally encourages rapid shifts and renewal.
“I actually find it kind of reassuring,” he told Mr. Alberta. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE ON THE FUTURE OF THE G.O.P.
“The 2020 Election Doesn’t Really Matter to Republicans” [The New Republic]
“The enduring Trump mystery: What would Trump do in a second term?” [Politico]
“Is Donald Trump the Republican Party’s Future or Its Past?” [Vox]
“Three Tests for the Future of the Republican Party” [The Bulwark]
“Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020” [The New York Times]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: What’s behind the recent rise in shootings?
Rosemarie: “I often wonder why police chiefs and police unions are not leading the charge when it comes to ending easy access to firearms? … In my opinion, if the police departments across the country asked for stricter gun laws we would have them and we all would be safer — especially the cops.”
Scott: “I am a gun advocate. I carry. And I am well trained and am willing to be in a national database. My gut feeling is that we, as a nation, allow people to buy guns with no guidelines. No training, no responsibility, no means of determining whether an individual is capable of exercising proper discretion and care of a firearm. Until we begin to register and demand training and eventual licensing, the pool of firearms is way too big to effectively police, monitor, control, shape, choose your descriptor.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
