It will not easily be undone
“NEVER has a party abandoned, fled its principles and deeply held beliefs so quickly as my party did in the face of the nativist juggernaut,” Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, said in a speech in March. “We have become strangers to ourselves.” There is a lot of truth in this. The speed with which the Republican Party’s establishment accommodated itself to a candidate, and then a president, who spurned all manner of norms and broke many bounds of decency, as well as policy commitments, was indeed without any precedent.
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, went from refusing to campaign with Donald Trump (after a recording of him boasting about sexual assault became public) to failing quickly to condemn him (when, as president, he spoke of “very fine people on both sides” of confrontations between neo-Nazis and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia). It now appears that Mr Ryan cannot stomach his position—or, alternatively, that he thinks the voters will not provide the Republican House majority he would need to continue in it after this November’s mid-term elections. On April 11th he announced that he will not seek re-election. Like Mr Flake himself, and Bob Corker, a senator who memorably compared Mr Trump’s White House to an “adult day-care centre”, not to mention 40 other House Republicans—a record—he is leaving the field of battle.
However, Mr Flake’s analysis is also flawed. Mr Trump did not for the most part infect Republicans with new beliefs from beyond their ken. He connected, and continues to connect, with what a significant part of its base feels and with what it wants. In so doing, he turned the anti-elitism the party has long fostered in its supporters against its own leadership. In breaking taboo after taboo he did what many in the base had long wanted to see done and to hear said. He is like the “psychoplasmic” monsters in David Cronenberg’s horror film “The Brood”: the party’s id made flesh.
It’s good to be the king
This undoubted and persistent connection, coupled with a surprising amount of loyalty from elsewhere in the party, makes the president pretty much unassailable. Mr Trump, polls say, enjoys the support of 85% of Republicans, compared with 65% for Mr Ryan and 40% for Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. That does not mean he can get anything he wants. Congress has been tougher on Russia than he appears to have wished. His promise to repeal Obamacare has not been fulfilled. He has not (yet) pulled out of the Iran deal. His approach to trade goes against a lot of party history, but on gun control, something he has seemed to favour in the past, a tentative sally was nipped in the bud.
But it does mean that criticising him, or acting in a way that helps his critics—for example by seeking to illuminate the nature of his business dealings—is now almost impossible for a Republican who wants to go on functioning as such. As Mr Corker put it, Republican voters “don’t care about issues”. They just “want to know if you’re with Trump.”
Elected officials whose reservations about Mr Trump are not so strong that they want to spend more time with their families keep quiet, content just to vent when in trusted company. Some have rowed back from previous criticism. In 2016 Mitt Romney, a former governor and presidential nominee, denounced Mr Trump as a “fraud”. Earlier this year he called outbursts about African migrants the president was reported to have made “inconsistent with America’s history and antithetical to American values”. Now, seeking a Senate seat in Utah, he has accepted Mr Trump’s endorsement and salutes his “extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works to create jobs”—while claiming to be “more of a hawk on immigration than even the president.”
The takeover of the party’s institutions is largely complete. As is usual when a party’s candidate wins the presidency, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has become a subsidiary of the White House. In keeping with the tenor of its new ownership, it now has a website, LyinComey.com, dedicated to attacking the former head of the FBI (see Lexington). Ronna McDaniel, who became the RNC’s chair last year, previously chaired Mr Trump’s campaign in Michigan; Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, who is under criminal investigation, is one of the RNC’s deputy national finance chairs.
Primaries for the November elections will see hundreds of hopefuls competing to look as close to Mr Trump as possible. There will be no easy victories, if any victories at all, for his critics. The ideological campaign groups that Republicans had to please during Barack Obama’s presidency—the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, the Senate Conservatives Fund—might have been able to resist the trend. But they have decided, for the time being, that Mr Trump is the true conservative they wanted all along.
He is not. What he offers politics is not a conservative agenda. It is not an agenda, or an ideology, at all. It is a set of feelings—about patriotism, about who is a proper American and who is not, about foreigners, about elites, about sovereignty and about power. This fits what Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, has found out by trawling through survey data. People who identify as Republican are united by cultural issues rather than narrowly political ones. They tend to share respect for the flag and the English language, and negative feelings towards Muslims, immigrants, atheists, and gays and lesbians.
United in this, they are oddly divided on issues that have often defined the right in America and elsewhere—such as what the role of the state should be. Andrea Volkens of the Berlin Social Science Centre and her co-authors compared the manifestos of the Republican Party with those of parties elsewhere and concluded that Republicans sit closer to France’s National Front than to the Conservatives in Britain or Canada (see chart 1).
This is not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party. But then, as Reagan knew, parties reinvent themselves. The Republicans have done so more than once since their party was founded in 1854 as an appendage to the anti-slavery movement. After the civil war it was in the ascendancy, providing 11 of the 15 presidents from the death of Lincoln until the Depression. This was the party of the union, northern cities, industrialists and protestants, run by classical liberals who believed in a nightwatchman state, content to pick up a colony or two but leery of foreign wars. It came crashing down along with Wall Street in 1929—at a time when Democrats already had southern whites, northern immigrants and Catholics in their camp. With the Depression and the New Deal scrambling politics, the Democrats came into the ascendant. Republicans lost all but two of the nine presidential elections between Herbert Hoover’s win in 1928 and Richard Nixon’s in 1968; they held the House for just four of the 60 years between 1935 and 1995.
The passage of civil-rights legislation in the 1960s and the nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964 brought about a new transformation. Goldwater promised a return to the party’s small-government roots, railing against the Great Society notion that every problem needed a government programme and thus setting the tone for Reagan. Civil rights—also seen by some as a small-government issue—delivered lots of white southerners. “As much as I hate to admit it, George Wallace can’t be nominated. Ronald Reagan can. He’s right on the issues,” ran an advert for Reagan in 1976, winking at the governor of Alabama’s past offer of “segregation forever”.
The common clay of the New West
When Reagan was elected four years later his party was balanced on three legs. Economic conservatives wanted government to spend less and tax less; social conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, wanted the government to ban more and permit less; and national-security hawks wanted the government to wield enormous power overseas. This coalition ran the gamut from the libertarian to the deeply illiberal, but its factions had enough in common for the top brass to keep things moving along. The economic conservatives and national-security hawks, all well represented among party activists, elected officials and big donors, were allowed to run things, so long as they paid sufficient regard to the social conservatives. Part of the deal was they would not actually carry out their oft-stated aim to reduce government spending radically: more popular in theory than in practice. Tax cuts, on the other hand, were fine with all but the most dour deficit hawks—the more the merrier.
But within this odd, successful alliance there was already a significant constituency that wanted just what Mr Trump would later offer. Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon, ran in the 1992 and 1996 primaries on a platform of opposition to immigration, free trade, gay rights and multiculturalism. The second time round he won four states and about a third as many votes as the winner, Bob Dole.
In the early 2000s, with America attacked by terrorists and mounting foreign invasions, many of these people rallied to the president: internal dissent in the party turned to the matter of taxes—the key issue, early on, for the activists known as the Tea Party. The culturally populist position re-emerged in 2008, when the party no longer needed to support a sitting president and some became smitten with the vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, an Alaskan governor who compensated for not knowing things by making Republican voters feel feisty.
This form of Republicanism attracted a number of former Democrats. John Sides of George Washington University says this migration of working-class whites to the Republicans “mainly occurred from 2009 to 2015. It was not a consequence of the 2016 campaign” (see chart 2). Mr Bartels concurs: “I find remarkably little change in partisanship between 2015, when Trump was first emerging as a national political figure, and late 2017,” he wrote recently. Many of Mr Trump’s supporters joined the party before he did so himself.
Mrs Palin was the harbinger in 2008. In 2012 it was Herman Cain, a black fast-food restaurateur, lobbyist and Tea Partier who had never held elected office and wished to cut the income-tax rate to 9%. He was leading the Republican field when he was accused of sexual harassment by several women—something which, in those innocent days, was enough to sink a candidacy.
Mr Cain was not the only recipient of the base’s wayward affections: it was clearly reluctant to settle down with Mr Romney. In the end it did. But his campaign showed that the party was changing. After Mr Ryan, his vice-presidential candidate, talked like a regular fiscal conservative about tackling the deficit with cuts to social security and Medicare, the campaign whisked him into a witness protection programme. Never again was he allowed to trouble elderly Republican voters who wanted to keep the government’s hands off their Medicare. Spending cuts were not for the party faithful: they were for other, less worthy people—a position that helpfully allied prejudice to prudence.
Vice-presidential candidates could then still be controlled by party machinery. Non-candidates could not be. Fox News, which came to dominate cable news in the 2000s, happily provided a platform for populist conservative politicians, including Mr Buchanan, Mrs Palin, Mr Cain and many more, as well as for popular, partisan and peculiar hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. It both articulated and enforced a new and often increasingly extreme post-Tea Party orthodoxy to which party higher-ups had to pay heed.
Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign might, in other circumstances, have fallen foul of this—not least because he was clear about wanting to keep spending on Medicare and social security. But Fox is an entertainment channel built on righteous indignation as well as a political operation, and in Mr Trump it faced for the first time a politician whose star power outgunned it. The prime-time audience for Fox News is around 2.4m. In its pomp “The Apprentice”, Mr Trump’s reality show, was sometimes watched by ten times that many. The disparity allowed Mr Trump to dictate terms like the star he is. When Megyn Kelly, a Fox News anchor, asked Mr Trump some mildly prosecutorial questions while moderating a primary debate, Mr Trump threatened to boycott the network. Ms Kelly was not removed, but Fox came firmly on to team Trump.
Don’t be stupid, be a smarty
What happened between 2009 and 2015 to bring about the shift in non-college white voters Mr Trump profited from? The great recession which followed the financial crisis of 2008 might suggest an economic cause; the presidency of Barack Obama suggests a racial one. Neither explanation is wholly satisfactory.
The Obama presidency began with credit shrinking, factories closing and homes being repossessed. But these conditions hit Democratic-voting minorities the hardest. Frustration at stagnant incomes could be to blame, but Mr Reagan and both Bushes were elected while median wages were growing only slowly. It is hard to see why a continuation of the same conditions should result in victory for Mr Trump. And data released after the election showed that blue-collar wages had in fact been growing at their strongest pace in years.
Among the Republican Party’s opponents on the left, it is widely held that Mr Obama’s election drew out racial prejudices of the sort Republicans have used since Nixon’s “southern strategy”. There is truth in this, though also some oversimplification. The most comprehensive recent survey of the influence of racial attitudes on voting, “Us Against Them” by Donald Kinder of the University of Michigan and Cindy Kam of Vanderbilt, finds that voters who espouse racial stereotypes (“black people are lazy”) are indeed more likely to be found in the Republican Party. But it finds that to be mainly because more white people vote Republican. White Democrats are pretty much as likely to hold such views as white Republicans are, and most of them voted for Mr Obama. A majority of whites who voted for both parties in 2016 said that it was important for whites to work together to change laws that are unfair to whites.
There was also something broader going on. The rise of social media allowed people to talk about politics in an unmediated way, reading and saying things that would never have been seen on broadcast television or read in newspapers. Fox understood, to some extent, how this new unfettered and often fact-free discourse worked. Mr Trump knew it in his bones. He could, and did, speak the language of vulgar resentment like a pro. For many of his supporters, the more this was disapproved of, the more valid and admirable it seemed.
Party of one
How long can his dominance persist? The American right has an abiding characteristic that elsewhere is mostly found among left-wing revolutionaries: it eats its children. Before Mr Trump came along, the cycle usually played out like this: a challenger would win a Republican primary by accusing his opponent of being a Washington insider who had betrayed the conservative cause. He would then head off to Washington to rail against business as usual for a few election cycles before being attacked in his turn as a representative of the hated establishment.
At the moment this dynamic appears to be working in Mr Trump’s favour, silencing opponents and rewarding loyalists. At some point, though, the cycle will turn. Today’s saviours will be tomorrow’s traitors.
Political parties centred on a single personality fall apart after the leader goes. Silvio Berlusconi founded two parties in Italy, Forza Italia and People of Freedom. Both proved fissiparous in his absence. But this is an unlikely fate for the post-Trump Republicans. It is hard for a party to collapse completely in a two-party system. It is also rare for one to become again what once it was. Because the party was becoming Trumpian long before Mr Trump took over, it will no more go back to the 1980s in his absence than to the 1880s. Mr Trump will not bequeath a set of political ideas as Reagan did those he had inherited from Goldwater and others. But the attitudes he has ridden to office will still outlive him.
If Trumpism is to define the Republican Party for the next decade or more, there are three ways it could develop. The most worrying would see the party choose another leader who, like Mr Trump, does not care for the separation of powers, judicial independence or a free press, but unlike Mr Trump goes about undermining them effectively. A second possibility is that the party loses power and becomes the elected wing of an anti-government movement, its default setting when the Democrats hold power.
There is a third possibility. Trumpian attitudes could lead to matching policies, ones aimed at fashioning a new New Deal, as Geoffrey Kabaservice of the Niskanen Centre, a think-tank, puts it. A national project America’s right could support might ease the rigidity of a movement some of which borders on anarchism in its hostility to government and much of which equates compromise with treachery. But if based on white resentment, and thus intent on excluding some Americans from its promise, it could entrench as many problems as it solved.