Opinion: What has happened to my party haunts me

Jul 30, 2024 12:50

With so much attention focused on the changes at the top of the Democratic ticket, we are not paying enough attention to the lack of change on the top of the Republican ticket. This month, Donald Trump won his party’s nomination for the third straight time. Whatever else we might say about him, he is a transformative figure.

This further confirmed, for me at least, the wisdom of my decision eight years ago to break with the Republican Party. In January 2016, I warned what were then my fellow Republicans that if they nominated Mr. Trump, he would constitute a grave threat to the nation. But I added that there was an additional reason to oppose him: Mr. Trump’s nomination would pose a profound danger to the Republican Party, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. “For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it,” I wrote. “But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.”

And so he has. Few figures in American history have overhauled a political party as quickly and as fundamentally as Mr. Trump has. To understand just how different it is, we need to go back briefly to what it was like in the pre-Trump era.

During the time I served in three Republican administrations (Reagan and both Bushes), the party was hawkish and unrelentingly critical of the Soviet Union and then Russia. It was supportive of NATO. It condemned anti-American dictators and authoritarian leaders. It was deeply committed to “the common task of strengthening democracy throughout the world,” as Reagan said in 1982. And it argued that it was in America’s interest to provide global leadership.

The Republican Party championed free trade and fiscal discipline, though in practice it often fell short. It was welcoming of legal immigrants and refugees. Republicans argued that reforming entitlement programs was vital. Many of its leading figures insisted that moral character was an essential trait for political leaders and especially for presidents. Republicans warned, too, that a cruel, squalid political culture undermined a decent society.

Today, the Republican Party has jettisoned every one of these commitments.

Even on abortion, things have changed. The Republican Party has been pro-life for decades, including in its party plank. But this month that plank was removed. Princeton’s Robert P. George, a significant figure in the pro-life movement, pointed out that that plank has been replaced by the claim that abortion policy is entirely the business of states, which may, if they wish, permit abortion up to birth. Mr. Trump succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, but now that the abortion issue is a political liability, he has thrown the “pro-life cause under the bus,” Mr. George wrote on Facebook. Mr. Trump has succeeded where liberal Republicans long failed.

So how should we understand what it means to be a Republican now?

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine. Unlike normally functioning parties and their political machines, like Tammany Hall, Mr. Rauch said, a personal political machine is dedicated to the interests of an individual and that individual’s family, loyalists and operatives. It accepts only one person as leader and requires submission to that person. Today, Mr. Trump is that person.

Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics. Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office. By contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.

“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”

Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me that as a practical matter, the Republican Party at this point should be understood as the anti-left party. “It understands itself defensively, as speaking for a coalition that is being abused, excluded, mistreated and pushed around by a left-leaning elite in American life,” he said. “Its sense of purpose is therefore fundamentally defensive. That means it is largely defined in opposition to its understanding of the left, more than it is defined by a specific policy vision of its own.”

“That opposition,” he added, “obviously gives shape to some assertive or constructive action, too, but the vision of America underlying that action is largely a function of Republicans think Democrats are trying to destroy.” JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s pick for vice president, told The American Conservative magazine in 2021, “I think our people hate the right people.” (Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator Vance, whatever its electoral wisdom, validates the critiques made by both Mr. Rauch and Mr. Levin.)

This reactionary version of the party is drawn to Mr. Trump because he defines himself by his enemies, and those enemies are in many cases the left-leaning elite. The left is contemptuous of Mr. Trump, and since the Republican Party has implicitly become a party that stands for what the left despises, it has been very difficult to separate Republican voters from Mr. Trump in the name of any more positive vision or ideal. Mr. Levin put it this way: “The left isn’t going to hate anyone more than they hate Mr. Trump, so Republicans aren’t going to love anyone more than they love Mr. Trump.”

A third way to understand today’s Republican Party, something that grows more obvious with every passing day, is that it has become a populist rather than a conservative party. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t conservative here and there, now and then. What it does mean is that when traditionally conservative views aren’t in alignment with populist views, it’s the traditionally conservative views that most often get jettisoned. The Republican Party’s move toward populism isn’t entirely new; even before Mr. Trump the Republican Party was trying to become more of a workers’ party and reorient the party toward the way people actually live their lives day to day. Nor did the embrace of populism need to be entirely bad.

Populism has its place. It can be an understandable response to enormous and rapid economic and social changes. It can alert elites to problems they may be out of touch with, including vast inequality, an indifference to beleaguered lives and shattered communities, and widespread institutional failure. As the political theorist Francis Fukuyama has written, “Populism is a very crude expression of public will that does not like institutional constraints.”

Mr. Trump tapped into the growing resentment of millions of voters. He was seen by them as their tribune. Unfortunately, he exploited their fears and did almost nothing to solve their problems. But that doesn’t seem to matter to them. It’s all about the posturing.

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

But the most worrisome feature that has defined the Republican Party during the Trump era is a relentless assault on reality, fused with lawlessness and the embrace of illiberalism.

The Republican Party once preached about the importance of standing for moral truths and standing against moral relativism; today it is, in important respects, nihilistic. The Republican Party once described itself as the party of “law and order”; it now worships a man who is a felon, who was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, and who portrays the violent mob that attacked the Capitol as a band of patriotic “J6 martyrs.” Republicans once proudly proclaimed their reverence for the Constitution; in Milwaukee, they crowned as their leader a man who attempted to subvert it.

It’s hard and haunting to know that the political party to which I devoted a significant part of my life has become the greatest political threat to the country I love.

Peter Wehner is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He is the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Opinion: What has happened to my party haunts me