Republican (Party) Direction

What happens to the Republican Party after Trump?

A couple of thoughts:

1. As noted by Amy Walter, the % of GOP voters who identify more as supporters of Trump than of the Republican Party mirrors the % of congressional Rs who voted on objections to Biden's electoral college win (~55%). Does this represent a possible point of fracture within the GOP?

2. Nicolas Lemann wrote an article for the New Yorker before the election that identified three long-term scenarios for the party's future, which he calls the Remnant, Restoration, and Reversal scenarios.

*Remnant = the continuation of Trumpism under someone else (he mentions Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Tucker Carlson)

*Restoration = a return to the pre-Trump GOP (led, perhaps, by Nikki Haley?)

*Reversal = Republicans become the working-class party through a full embrace of economic populism (including appeals to non-white voters), as Democrats consolidate gains among more affluent college-educated voters and remain friendly to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Immediately after the election, when it became clear that Trump had made gains among Black and Latino voters, the Reversal scenario began to worry me. But now I feel like so much depends on what happens in the short term and how the party reckons with Trump.

1 and 2 are the only viable options. 3 won't fly.

The article posited that Marco Rubio could be the guy to promulgate #3, which...lol

Trumpism is about dangling the prospect of #3 but never actually delivering it

yup

I've mentioned this here before, but I find this a useful way of thinking about trump/gop dynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism

yeah I thought for a while that Hawley might sincerely be trying to work that #1 + #3 aisle, and it made me nervous.

After the last few weeks though - really since the election - I think it’s pretty clear he’s a flimflam artist m. All #1.

*Remnant = the continuation of Trumpism under someone else (he mentions Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Tucker Carlson)

*Restoration = a return to the pre-Trump GOP (led, perhaps, by Nikki Haley?)

*Reversal = Republicans become the working-class party through a full embrace of economic populism (including appeals to non-white voters), as Democrats consolidate gains among more affluent college-educated voters and remain friendly to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

I think the first two are going to happen, separate of each other.

- Trumpism will continue, but as more of a George Wallace movement than a real contender for full national power. There will not be enough Trumpoids in enough states that matter, electorally, to win a Republican presidential primary.

- There will be an attempt made, via mainstream media and Sunday morning talk shows and whatnot, to "restore" the Republican Party "of old". But it won't be Nikki Haley in the spotlight; she's photogenic, but the wind whistles right through her empty skull, and while just as many people hate her as tolerate her, nobody loves her. She's never given anyone a reason to. It'll be some white man, probably an old white man given the generally gerontocratic trends in US politics.

- The third option would require rethinking and long, difficult outreach to people the Republican Party has spent a century actively harming, and Republicans don't rethink or do outreach. The closest they get is "Come join us, you'll get rich (and maybe get to fuck over Those People Over There)". If they can manage to convince people (certain Latinos and/or South Asians) that if they join the team, they'll be declared honorary whites, it might work, but first they have to convince the actual whites they're already barely hanging on to to be nice to the new neighbors, and that is never gonna happen.

This essay by Timothy Snyder is relevant to this thread and worth reading.

while just as many people hate her as tolerate her, nobody loves her

I assure you this is not true

Provide evidence of the existence of a Nikki Haley cult. If there is one, I'm gonna be fascinated, because she's every bit as much an empty suit as Marco Rubio.

*Reversal = Republicans become the working-class party through a full embrace of economic populism (including appeals to non-white voters), as Democrats consolidate gains among more affluent college-educated voters and remain friendly to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The Nazbol Vortex

The economic populist angle doesn't appear to be feasible because, even more than Democrats, they're beholden to their donors. The Koch org and Mercers and multinational corporations aren't going to keep cutting checks if they start trying to institute white nationalist social democracy.

They'll continue to publicly own the libs as a raison d'etre, Republican voters have gotten a taste of the hard stuff for the last four years and won't go back to genteel bigotry and authoritarianism. They'll begin integrating the elected Q nuts at the margins (start with electoral fraud - that's been a popular one with Republicans for 50 years) as they've done with Birchers and far-right evangelicals and so on for our entire lives.

Whatever mass changes might come have less to do with the GOP or Trump or heirs and how bad shit gets in the country at large over the next 10-15 years.

Provide evidence of the existence of a Nikki Haley cult. If there is one, I'm gonna be fascinated, because she's every bit as much an empty suit as Marco Rubio.

oh this is purely anecdotal evidence of my own experience. I've encountered a couple "you know who's like, impressive and smart?" types in the wild (aka certain professional spaces I've briefly inhabited). they exist. conservative girlboss shit

Jamelle Bouie on what happens to the Republican Party if Trump loses:

A defeated Republican Party in November would not be in as dire straits as the Whig Party was 180 years ago. It would still control at least half the nation’s governor’s mansions and may well either the Senate or the House of Representatives. On the other side, the same structural advantages that would enable the party to weather a Trump defeat and exercise political power may make it all the more difficult for Republicans to pivot toward winning national majorities. If you can hold power through the counter-majoritarian structures and institutions of the American system, why would you work to build a broader coalition than the one you already have?

There is also the issue of Trump himself. He cares less for the fate of the Republican Party than he does for his personal and pecuniary interests. He has no reason to loosen his grip on the party and every reason to keep it in hand. The real question is whether there are Republicans who could pry it away from Trump. The failure of any Republican to successfully contest his leadership or offer a path away from his personal domination of the Republican Party is evidence enough that the answer is no.

The anticlimactic truth is that in the wake of a third Trump nomination and a second Trump defeat, the Republican Party would simply stumble along, stuck in his orbit and too weighed down by his gravitational pull to escape.

On the other side, the same structural advantages that would enable the party to weather a Trump defeat and exercise political power may make it all the more difficult for Republicans to pivot toward winning national majorities. If you can hold power through the counter-majoritarian structures and institutions of the American system, why would you work to build a broader coalition than the one you already have?

i.e. the Solid South a century ago.

Not a perfect analogy, I know, for cities had growing lib/Progressive power bases.