I was in New England for a few days last week and found myself at breakfast one morning with a group of Armenian academics, born in Lebanon but now settled permanently in and around Boston. By any measure, they were a distinguished group—historians, physicians, political scientists—and for them, of course, the Big Story of the moment was the sudden resignation of the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri.
On that subject I had nothing to tell them that they didn’t already know. What they wanted from me, however, was some insight—any explanation, really—into what they considered the Big Story of American politics: division within the Republican party.
In four-and-a-half decades of writing on American politics, this was not the first time I had been asked that question. But the answer last week was my stock response: The Republican party is sorely divided, but how could it be otherwise? We are a nation of 325 million people, and there are two—count ’em, two—political parties of any significance. The interludes when unity prevails in the GOP are briefer than the long days of discord. For that matter, comparisons between Lebanese democracy and ours only dramatize the differences; fractious Lebanon, a nation of just 6 million torn by civil war, has (by my rough count) over 35 political parties loosely connected into rival alliances. What sort of “division” would you prefer?
So the Republican party has lately been shaken and to some degree destabilized by the rise of Donald Trump. But Trump’s peculiar gift is to have shaken and stirred the Democrats as well. And therein lies a tale.
Most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking: Pundits see what they want to see, exaggerate and minimize for effect, and generally relate what their audience wants to hear. Best of all, few readers hold writers to account. Since most political journalists in America tend to be “left-leaning”—to use the polite phraseology—inevitable differences in Republican ranks are not just magnified but, in my experience, almost exclusively noticed.
At the present time, there is no question that the Trump wing of the party—if it’s a wing, and if it can be called Republican—has little good to say about conventional Republicans such as Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or George W. Bush. But to draw a more accurate picture of the national battle-lines you would need to ask an admirer of, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren what he thinks about Debbie Wasserman Schultz or either Clinton. The Democratic party is united in its contempt for Trump, but the GOP was uniformly disdainful of Barack Obama. In politics, offense is easier than defense.
In fact, it is possible to argue that internal disunity—factions and tendencies within a single party—is far more commonplace, surely a more natural instinct, than harmony in American political history. This was certainly true in the 19th century, which featured (among other things) the demise of the Federalists, the rise and fall of the Whigs, a secession movement, and Civil War, and is equally true within living memory. Democrats look backward to the Roosevelt coalition, which dominated politics for two generations, with awe—and no wonder. Beginning in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt presided over a disparate alliance of Midwestern union members, rural Southern segregationists, and urban Catholics and Jews in the North, which only fell apart in the late 1960s.
But while the press tends to dwell on right-wing realignment—whatever happened to liberal Republicans? how dangerous is the Tea Party?—the left-wing version of the story is politely ignored. The Roosevelt coalition was finally broken by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, but Reagan’s legislative triumphs in the subsequent decade were made possible by the shifting allegiance of Democrats, who still dominated the House. There are fewer liberal Republicans than there used to be, yet no one seems to wonder what became of conservative Democrats. When, in 2003, Howard Dean boasted that he represented the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party,” he was rebuking his own crowd, not the other side.
Indeed, the capture of the Republican party—the “party of Lincoln”—by its right wing has been a perennial story since the Eisenhower years because it fits a convenient, though largely fictitious, narrative. There is always a golden age of high-minded moderation and good behavior supplanted by subversive extremism. That was the explanation for Barry Goldwater’s insurgency in 1964, for Richard Nixon’s opportunism in 1968, and for Reagan’s radicalism in 1980. Now, in the age of Trump, the press is pleased to look back respectfully at Reagan, Nixon, and Goldwater—and both Bushes, John McCain, Bob Dole, and Mitt Romney—but that was scarcely its perspective in their time.
So blinkered, in fact, is the folklore of the radical GOP that the modern evolution of the Democratic party has been lost in translation. Division, after all, takes many forms. The party that had prosecuted the Second World War, and laid the foundations for the anti-Soviet alliance, produced a presidential nominee, in 1972, whose clarion call was “Come Home, America.” The party that enshrined colorblindness in law (1964) now busily divides the electorate by genetics. And instead of wondering why Southerners, or evangelicals, or blue-collar voters might be prompted to switch parties, Democrats choose to insult their beliefs and condemn their character.
None of this is meant to draw attention away from the obvious fractures in Republican ranks. The coalition that propelled Donald Trump into the White House may be a harbinger of the party’s future, or it might have been a symptom of his opponent’s weakness. Trump’s success might be a premonition of national crisis, or it might be a reminder that leaders—FDR, Ike, Reagan, Clinton—count for more than we care to acknowledge in democracy.
Division within the Republican party, like division within the Democratic party, is neither unusual nor necessarily unhealthy. And there is such a thing as irony: The Goldwater conservatives who supplanted the Nixon-Ford liberals in the 1970s are among the louder voices decrying Trumpism. All of which is a reminder that unity bears a certain resemblance to complacency, and the only permanent condition of politics is impermanence.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
