Everyone’s talking about the civil war in the Republican party. It seems more like a surrender to us.
The great bulk of elected Republicans have surrendered to the forces of Donald J. Trump. And they didn’t even put up much of a fight. Has a hostile takeover of a historic institution ever been accomplished with less resistance?
The flag of surrender went up before many blows were even landed.
A reporter for Politico recently asked John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, for his views on a potential bipartisan compromise extending cost-sharing payments under Obamacare. “I’m with the president,” Cornyn told Seung Min Kim. When she asked him where, exactly, Trump is on the plan, Cornyn threw his hands in the air. So Cornyn doesn’t know what Trump’s position is—but he knows that he shares it.
Perhaps such capitulation by the GOP establishment was to be expected. But movement conservatives who pride themselves on their obstinacy have also managed to go along in order to get along.
When Ted Cruz was asked the other day about the criticism of Trump by his Senate colleagues Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, the Texan unloaded. “It’s like you’re back in junior high. . . . We’ve got a job to do, dammit, and so all of this nonsense, I got nothing to say on it. Everyone shut up and do your job is my view.”
This is the same Ted Cruz who pointedly refused to shut up in 2016, declining to endorse Trump in his convention speech and making an impassioned plea for the defense of a party of principles, a party of conscience. “We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love,” he said from the rostrum in Cleveland. “That is the standard we should expect from everybody. And to those listening, please don’t stay home in November. If you love our country and love our children as much as you do, stand and speak, and vote your conscience.”
But now it’s 2017. The base is said to be unhappy with dissent. Breitbart.com will criticize you. Steve Bannon may fund a primary challenger. Dissent is so 2016.
It is much the same outside of government. A day after Trump addressed the Heritage Foundation, the think tank’s president, Ed Feulner, waxed rhapsodic in a pitch to donors. “This morning I woke up still in awe of what I heard last night. As you know, President Trump addressed a group of Heritage members. He confirmed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is on our side.”
Takeovers of political parties have happened before. The New Left started as a fringe movement sniping at the well-fortified bastions of the establishment Democratic party in the late 1960s. A decade later, the party had been transformed, and it had happened more by osmosis than direct challenge, as old liberals adjusted to the new dispensation and, incrementally, became more left-wing in numerous ways.
Bannon’s threats of primary challenges to Republican senators are largely beside the point. The GOP is being transformed because incumbents are accommodating their new masters before serious challengers are even on the horizon. The New Left didn’t defeat many old-fashioned liberals at the polls. But, because of retirements and individuals accommodating themselves to the new political reality, there were soon no more than a handful of pro-life Democrats or strongly anti-Communist Democrats or color-blind-civil-rights Democrats. The Walter Mondale who ran for president in 1984 was very different from the Walter Mondale who entered the Senate as a disciple of Hubert Humphrey in 1964.
In the case of the Democrats, the transformation was a reasonably clear—if unfortunate—ideological turn. The current transformation of the Republican party is more confusing. At times, it seems the GOP might be becoming a Bannonite nationalist party. At others, it seems more simply a Trumpian cult-of-personality. The result, right now, is a party that is simultaneously corrupted by Trump and disfigured by Bannonism.
Readers of this magazine won’t be surprised to find that we think going along to get along is not in the interest of Republicans, conservatives, or the country. Corker and Flake spoke up, but they’re retiring from the Senate. What’s wanted is for those with something more at stake to step up. Robert Frost famously described a liberal as someone unwilling to take his own side in a fight. Will that be what is said of conservatives and Republicans? That they stood on the sidelines and watched as the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan was destroyed?
