Column: How to save the Republican Party
This week in Milwaukee, the Republican Party will officially nominate for president a man of damnable firsts — first president to be impeached twice, first to deny his defeat, first to resist the peaceful transfer of power and first to be criminally convicted. Then the voters will decide.
For the party’s own good, Americans should vote against all of its candidates, from Donald Trump down to dogcatcher, and do so whether Joe Biden or someone else is atop the Democrats’ ticket. To save the once-Grand Old Party, voters must destroy it.
Call it the “burn it down” project, with apologies to longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens. Four years ago he said of his radicalized former party on CNN: “Just burn it down and start over.”
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Voters lit a match in 2020 and early 2021, ousting Trump from the White House and then Republicans from control of the Senate. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans did win a House majority but barely; the predicted red wave was a trickle, and Trump got the blame. In recent years, under Trump’s extremist MAGA banner — because of his banner — party candidates have lost numerous local and state elections they were favored to win.
Yet at every level of government, too many of Trump’s enablers remain in office. Republicans haven’t broken with Trumpism, and Trump himself has improbably emerged from the infamy of insurrection to become the party’s standard-bearer for a third time.
And his revival comes as he has been criminally indicted four times; convicted once (of 34 New York state felonies); found civilly liable for financial fraud, sexual abuse and defamation (twice); and fined nearly a half-billion dollars. None of it matters in a party turned personality cult, built on Trump’s grievances and his followers’. His legal woes just stoke the pity party.
As Democrats weigh Biden’s future, let’s remember that Trump already failed the presidential fitness test. If Republicans cared about democracy, they’d be scheming to push him aside.
So here we are, with a convicted felon and congenital liar bent on retribution trying to move back into the White House, and his pliant party trying to recapture the Senate and hold the House. The dissident Stevens, among others, has re-upped and expanded upon his call to beat ’em all.
“You know, pain is the best teacher in politics, arguably maybe the only teacher,” he said on PBS in April. “And what needs to happen is, Republicans need to lose, and they need to lose again and again. And then out of some sense of survival, you could see a sane party emerging.”
Historically, parties have responded to electoral repudiation by looking within, warring over new platforms and elevating fresh leaders. That’s what Republicans did after their Watergate-era wipeouts a half-century ago, and Democrats after their Reagan-era shellackings.
Non-MAGA America seethes at Trump’s lies, bluster and authoritarianism. But neither Biden nor any younger, healthier Democrat directly moves to shut down his appeal at its root — toxic whiteness.
Yet Trump defies political norms, and so far he’s defied the one that says parties won’t stand by losers. Clearly, more blowouts are needed to shake the party back to moderation, to sanity, from the grassroots up. As Stevens suggests, a party can’t survive repeated routs; it would have no choice but to reform.
Stevens doesn’t think a more traditional center-right Republican Party can come about before 2032. And it’s fantasy to think it will ever go back completely to what it was: a small-government rather than anti-government party that favors free trade, immigration and international engagement, opposes tyranny and is fiscally conservative but at peace with a government-administered safety net. Accommodations with the far right will have to be made.
That said, the nation needs a healthy conservative party for the good of our democracy. Today’s Republican Party is neither healthy nor conservative. It’s extremist.
As Stevens described it to me, the party whose candidates he helped to elect for decades has gone from being the nation’s “beating heart” of anti-communist opposition to being unabashedly “pro-Putin.” It’s “at war with the modern world. And losing.” He cited Republicans’ culture wars with U.S. corporations, iconic brands and celebrities, including Nike, Disney, NASCAR and Taylor Swift.
The vice president is a front-runner to replace President Biden on ballots if he ends his run. The California governor continues to vow not to run against her for president.
Republicans still claim to be the party of law and order, and yet, Stevens noted, their hostility to the FBI has supplanted their antagonism toward extremist left-wing groups, and they back Trump’s promise to pardon “thugs who attacked police officers defending the Capitol.” The party is so anti-government that it opposes mandatory vaccines in school, prompting Stevens to lament, “Are there really that many people out there who miss polio?”
Stevens isn’t alone among current and former Republicans in being driven to his burn-it-all-down position. George Will, long the favorite columnist of traditional Republicans, four years ago urged voters to reject the party across the board, from Trump to “his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.” Such rejection, Will wrote, would be “condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration.”
Republican senators have only become more puppy-like, slavering for Trump’s favor — and more deserving of defeat. The same goes for House Republicans, who’ve long been Trump’s lapdogs, and impediments to good governance.
How Trump does in Orange County will say a lot — not only about his hold on the GOP but also about the sentiments of voting blocs that have helped Democrats here in recent years.
Liz Cheney, once Republican Party royalty, began campaigning for its candidates’ defeats in 2022. “We can survive bad policy,” she’s said, to justify her support for Democrats, even those with whom she has strong disagreements. “We can’t survive a leader who’s going to torch the Constitution.”
Her Republican partner in courage on the House Jan. 6 committee, former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, last month joined another Republican, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, to announce their support for Biden. Kinzinger three years ago founded Country First to help defeat election-denying “toxic partisans.”
Big losses in 2024 — mainly Trump’s — would only be a start at compelling the Republican Party to rethink what it’s become, and to re-form. But it would be a big step.
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