Republicans this week will sign off on an extraordinary political experiment, the likes of which they haven’t tried in five decades.
Donald Trump’s impending nomination takes the GOP in a direction different from any it has taken in two generations. It’s a radical, even jarring, departure and could bring victory or disaster. We’ll know more in November. Given what a strange beast Trump’s candidacy has been so far, and the unusual weakness of his Democratic opponent, no one can be sure how the experiment will all turn out.
Trump, author of Crippled America, substantially alters the party in both substance and tone. The optimistic, free-trading, pro-immigration party shaped by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s has been put on the shelf this cycle. If Trump succeeds to the presidency, his model for winning the White House could mold GOP contenders for several cycles.
GOP candidates from past years, winners and losers, will serve as the control group as the party faithful test a new kind of Republicanism.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Republicans would try something so vastly different. They had to do something (although not necessarily this) given how poorly they fared in the last two presidential races.
Their repeated failure, with only two wins in the past six presidential elections, raised the same question once asked about Democrats during their one-in-six hit rate in the 1970s and 1980s: Are they capable of electing a president at all?
Will Trump shake things up enough to change that? Will his approach, which many pundits and polls suggest will alienate voters, really prove to be a stroke of marketing genius?
Trump appeals directly to the voters who shower after work rather than before. He proudly claims to be the candidate for the “poorly educated.” Is this the answer for a Republican Party that has won too few votes among lower-income and lower-educated people for too long? Are liberal union bosses right to fear that an unusually large share of their members will rally behind Trump?
Will he run up already-high levels of Republican support among white voters? Will he surprise everyone by outperforming other Republicans with non-white voters, as he has promised?
Trump’s candidacy will demonstrate whether conservatives have been misguided in demanding that their politicians pledge strict fidelity to specific ideological and constitutional principles.
Have they, through a myopic focus on ideas about limited government, lip-service to fiscal discipline and traditional values wandered down a losing path? Is a less clearly defined, more emotive and attitudinal movement like Trumpism capable of winning the White House?
Are there enough people who have previously been disengaged from politics who will now enter the fray because they love Trump’s message? The message is vague but discernable. It’s about national toughness, stricter limits on immigration, deep suspicion about the merits of free trade and a parallel dubiety about global interdependence.
Is this a once and future Republican message, or merely an obsolete relic from a century ago, as so many people assumed before Trump took it up and started to win?
Republicans should especially keep this last question in mind. The Washington Examiner is conservative in its principles and values, and supports policies that flow from those beliefs. We were among many who are right of center (more Republicans voted against Trump in the primary than voted for him) who did not want to go down this path.
Polls suggest many conservatives still don’t, and that they do not admire Trump’s personal volatility or rejection of traditional codes of rhetorical conduct (some call it political correctness).
But it’s a fact that the Republican Party has done a poor job of carrying forward conservative values since Reagan left office.
In debate between society’s haves and have-nots, Republicans have failed to show that conservative policies mean the GOP represents the latter, while Democratic corporatism and protection of incumbent interests stand for the former. Trump’s success this cycle reflects that Republican failure.
Those who chose Trump as their champion have delivered a message that the party needs to listen to, whether or not the experiment they began proves to be a wise one this year. And both Trump’s enthusiastic support base and those Republicans who refuse to back him to the end must draw the appropriate lessons from the decision voters make this fall.
