There has been much talk about the rupture, collapse, and/or abandonment of the Republican party as the result of Donald Trump’s rise. The most interesting and serious comment came from Senator Ben Sasse, who declared that if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, “conservatives will need to find a third option.” “Political parties are not families,” Sasse wrote in an open letter. “They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.”
The question, then, is whether Trump could make the GOP cease being useful. And the answer is: It depends.
What it depends on is the true origin of the Trump insurgency.
There are two opposing analyses of the roots of Trumpism. The first is that Trump is, like Barry Goldwater and George McGovern before him, waging a civil war for the soul of a party. In this view, Trump is channeling a previously dormant, but now growing, set of priorities and resentments from a segment of the Republican party. In time, his worldview will become the senior partner in the party’s coalition, replacing the conservatives who came before him. This interpretation of Trumpism holds it is just another phase in the natural evolution of a political party.
The other interpretation is that Trumpism is not the product of evolution, but rather the result of a perfect storm: Trumpism has resulted from a unique confluence of events. First, we had a historically contentious election in 2000 that polarized our politics. Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11, two wars, and a deep, prolonged recession. This was followed by the election of the most radical and authoritarian president since Woodrow Wilson. The problem with Barack Obama wasn’t just the nature of his policies, but the manner in which he broke the political compact by forcing them through—either on straight party lines or via executive action. In the winter of 2016, you could argue, America is facing, for the first time, a stretch of four presidential terms in which the country has grown continually worse off.
That’s the macro. At the micro level is a Republican primary with two subtle but uniquely disruptive features: (1) For the first time in the modern era, no candidate entered the race as the heir apparent. (2) The field was the largest in the modern era, with 17 candidates, at least 11 of whom were serious, viable contenders. These two facts provided an opening for an insurgent that has never before existed in a GOP primary.
Then there’s Jeb Bush. Although he saw himself as the natural heir, Bush had no real claim with voters in the way previous runners-up—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—did. Instead, he seems to have provoked an auto-immune response from Republican voters who were disconcerted by the idea of an unprecedented third president from the same family. Bush also distorted the financial aspect of the campaign. Normally, big-money donors are smart money, seeking out the candidate with the best chance of winning. In the case of Bush, the big-money donors seem to have been motivated more by loyalty to the Bush family than cold-eyed calculation.
The donor fealty deprived other would-be frontrunners of resources and armed one of the least-viable candidates with an enormous financial weapon. Bush and his affiliates then chose to use this Death Star not to target Trump—who led the race beginning in August—but Marco Rubio, who was bouncing around between third and sixth in the polls.
There are probably a dozen other major factors, including: the party elite’s decade-long attempt to circumvent the base on immigration; the total victory of identity politics and political correctness not just on the left, but in mainstream culture and the corporate world; the willingness of broadcast media to donate thousands of hours of airtime to Trump without challenging his assertions or asking critical questions; the psychological conception of the race as a series of “lanes,” which, while in some respects useful, paralyzed rival campaigns from targeting Trump until after Nevada.
In this second view of Trumpism, absent any one or two of these contributing factors, the rise of Trump is not replicable. Trumpism—the brew of immigration restrictionism, nationalism, and nascent authoritarianism—would not have arisen in 2016, or 2018, or 2020. You probably can’t say the same for conservatism and Goldwater in 1964 or liberalism and McGovern in 1972.
Which brings us to the question of the Republican party’s future. If Trump is like Goldwater or McGovern—that is, if he is at the head of a movement winning a civil war within the party—it makes sense for conservatives to begin planning to leave the GOP. It would signal that the party itself is changing in ways that conservatives cannot—or at least should not—countenance.
However, if Trump’s rise is more akin to a perfect storm—an unlikely convergence of forces, events, and personalities—then conservatives should not yet be ready to throw over the party. Instead, they should fight for it. Vigorously. In Florida. In Ohio. On the convention floor in Cleveland, if need be. Accidents of history can be reversed. Storms can be weathered. And the Republican party is not on an inexorable trajectory to becoming the property of Donald J. Trump.
At least not yet.
