After last week’s election in Wisconsin, many once-gloomy Republicans are hopeful that they can prevent Donald Trump from winning the party’s presidential nomination. If they do, their reaction had better be more than, “Whew, glad that’s over.” They cannot go back to business as usual.
All is not well in the GOP. Party leaders need to recognize that although Trump is the wrong messenger, the message he carries from his supporters is one to which Republican bigwigs must pay attention. Trump is a symptom of the party’s failure to address real voter concerns and make a compelling case that Republican and conservative policies can meet them. If they don’t do so, the country is headed toward a long period of Democratic dominance.
To be sure, some of the Trump problem is beyond the control of the average Republican. Some of his supporters simply like his disparaging comments about other ethnic or religious groups, and share his view that “those people” cause all America’s problems.
But it would be a grave mistake to paint all of Trump’s supporters, or even anything close to a majority of them, with this broad brush. In large part, Trump is the price Republicans pay for their failure, over many years, to make a proper appeal to what Pat Buchanan once called “conservatives of the heart.” The GOP has failed to develop a healthy relationship with working-class voters who have conservative leanings.
Republicans have seemed preoccupied with wars and big business rather than the struggle that families face living on today’s stagnant median wage. The Bush era’s broken promise on border security and immigrant felons, a flaw Trump exploits most readily, represents just one failure to act on matters that concern many millions of potential Republican voters.
Republicans and conservatives have also failed to love these voters and respect their intelligence enough to guide them when their concerns are misplaced, as they sometimes are. It is much easier for a politician to promise the moon than to explain to a voter that he is wrong or that his expectations are unrealistic.
But politicians should be real leaders. Over the years, Republican politicians have created a voter base increasingly unsatisfied with reality and ready to follow Trump, whose prescriptions are no more realistic but who simply seems strong.
Instead of educating blue-collar voters on how conservative issues and principles can improve their lives, party candidates and operatives, and many conservatives in media, have often either stuck robotically to party doctrine or else stoked passions rather than stimulating thought. This, as much as anything, conditioned Trump’s voters to follow him.
Mitt Romney’s infamous complaint about the “47 percent” is now the go-to example of Republican contempt for working people. After the election, Romney compounded it by attributing his defeat to Democrats’ promises of “free stuff.” There is some truth in this, so far as it descibes Democrats’ cynicism. But it does not accurately depict the nation.
And Romney, who belatedly recognizes the threat Trump poses, cannot be singled out for blame. Republican rhetoric about “makers and takers,” and related proposals to heap more taxes upon the poor so they have more “skin in the game,” predate Romney and continue to plague the GOP today. Nothing could be further removed from the optimistic conservative vision that guided the Reagan Revolution and the subsequent era of shared prosperity that produced the party’s electoral success.
As Speaker Paul Ryan admitted recently, Republicans have at times lost focus on the overarching aim of restoring people’s dignity by giving back their personal freedom and helping them become self-sufficient. Until the party regains it, and until it finds leaders who can appeal to Trump-sympathetic voters without xenophobia and demagoguery, and show them how freedom gives them the chance to prosper, they cannot hope to be again the natural party of government.
