Don’t count on a Republican reckoning
Don’t count on a Republican reckoning
Plus: religious young men, CT on the campus left in 1968, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.
A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Don’t count on a Republican reckoning
If he doesn’t win the election this year, former President Donald Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday, he won’t run again in 2028. “No, I think that that will be it,” he mused. “I don’t see that at all.”
In the final stretch of a campaign slog that will be just 10 days shy of two years long come November 5—and at 78 years old, and subsisting on beef, bread, and a little iceberg lettuce—I can believe he believes that. But I do not believe it. Or, at least, I would be wholly unsurprised if a twice-defeated Trump mustered another run in 2028. (After all, he said the same thing about 2024 in 2020.)
Yet for the sake of argument, let’s say Trump does lose and does retire from candidacy. What happens then? Whither the Republican Party? Whither the American right?
Already anticipation is rising among Trump’s conservative critics. “Last month, I wrote a column endorsing Kamala Harris for the presidency, in large part because I believe that a Harris victory gives Republicans ‘a chance to build something decent’ from the ruins of a Trump defeat,” David French said in a recent New York Times column. Since then, French continued, he’s “hardening” his view: “Trump loses now or the Republicans are lost for a generation. Maybe more.”
Now here I must pause and note that French wrote the foreword for my last book and has been extremely gracious to me. On the basis of the slimmest of internet acquaintances, he kindly gave my work a boost and joined me at multiple speaking events linked to the book’s release. He also knows we have some political differences, foreign policy high among them.
We differ on this too. French is correct to worry that the GOP will be “lost for a generation” in terms of his concerns about personal integrity and Reaganite conservatism. Where I think he’s wrong—and in good company, from what I’ve seen, but wrong nonetheless—is in thinking that loss may be averted if Harris wins, in having any expectation of a Republican reckoning if Trump fails.
Why would there be a reckoning? Who would start it? Who with any power in the Republican Party would want to continue it? The chair of the Republican National Committee is Trump’s daughter-in-law. He has five children, three of whom have shown interest in becoming political figures themselves. Even if his literal heirs don’t succeed him, there are many elected Republicans who’ve formed themselves in a Trumpian mold and will willingly prolong his moment.
And why wouldn’t they? His favorability among Republicans reliably hovers between 80 and 90 percent. He’s an evocative speaker and effective salesman who has pioneered a whole new style of Republican politics. For many GOP voters, he has become the unconsidered default, and rarely do we reckon with that.
I understand, of course, why French and others want a Trump loss to force the Republican Party to change—perhaps even reverse—its course. And I recognize that the GOP will eventually evolve anew, developing aesthetics, rhetoric, and policies different from those it has now. Yet I don’t see a Trump loss in this cycle (or the next one) effecting that change. It’ll have consequences, yes. But a near-term reckoning, with the admission of error that would entail?
Hope for it, maybe. Don’t count on it.
Intake
“In a first among Christians, young men are more religious than young women,” by Ruth Graham for The New York Times
“We’ve never seen it before,”
, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip. Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip. […]For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, [Derek] Rishmawy said. “We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’” […]
Ms. Clark has occasionally attended a more progressive Baptist church. But she is realizing that churchgoing is simply no longer a priority for her. She is busy, and her friends are doing other things.
“The case for having lots of kids,” by Emma Green for The New Yorker. An interesting read! The author Green profiles, Catherine Pakaluk, is right about the inefficacy of family policy for increasing birthrates and the value of church community for would-be parents. Not so her sweeping declaration that “[w]orking while raising a young child makes motherhood less pleasant, not more.” That is undoubtedly true for many women; after five years as a working mother of young children myself, I can tell you it’s entirely false for me. And that line suggests to me that the book, Hannah’s Children, takes a maximalist approach which won’t be widely persuasive for many of those on the fence about having children. Still, I should get around to reading it.
“The rationale of the student left,” by Christianity Today staff in 1968. I was struck by this section, and how neatly it describes prevailing winds on the right today (cf. Ross Douthat; emphases mine).
The low-key social pessimism of the late C. Wright Mills does, we are persuaded, underlie much of the mentality of the campus left. Professing a commitment to reason and freedom, Mills nevertheless has sown down the academic world with views of society rooted in romanticism. His volume The Power Elite seems to many a visceral response to a frustrating experience. He holds that the power structure in our national life is an impenetrable and sinister force, completely out of reach of any influence by the citizenry.
Essential to this thesis is the view that the determining decisions in our nation are made by a three-headed “power elite”—the military, the business community, and government. He holds that big hierarchies keep the rank and file voiceless and helpless, while the elite are supported in their Kafkaesque remoteness by the glamor of the professional celebrities.
Mills’ assertion, further, is that “the American elite is composed not of representative men whose conduct and character constitute models for American imitation and aspiration” (p. 360) but of a “fraternity of the successful” whose characters are controversial and ambiguous and whose morals are only those of accomplishment. The end-result is that “the top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless.…”
Output
New work:
Rethinking received opinion | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
A vision for repair | Christianity Today (my September-October print piece, which I’ll likely reshare when it’s promoted on the CT homepage next month)
Newly relevant work:
Speaking of the post-Trump GOP, I wrote about this for The Week back in October of 2020, sketching five intra-party factions I then expected would jostle for power:
The first and weakest faction is whatever libertarian-leaners and Tea Party leftovers are still hanging on in the Republican Party. […]
The next faction is the old-school establishment/fusionist GOP—people like former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and many congressional backbenchers who are still in basically the same policy space as when George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney were their party’s standard-bearers. […]
[Third is] the old GOP with a populist, nationalist, and nativist veneer. Think Vice President Mike Pence, who is the 2024 GOP primary favorite. […]
Fourth is a literal Trump dynasty, in which Trump bequeaths his cult of personality to one of his children (most likely, Donald Trump Jr.) or even attempts to stay personally in charge of the GOP until death does them part. (If Grover Cleveland can serve a non-consecutive second term, why not Trump? He’ll be 78 on Election Day 2024, yes, but that’s a decade younger than the average life expectancy for American men in his wealth cohort.) How feasible this is remains to be seen: I’m not sure Jr. can effectively replicate his father’s appeal to voters, and the Republican establishment may not be terribly interested in continuing to grovel before a demonstrated loser. […]
Lastly, there’s the ideological Trump dynasty, which could take two forms. The fringier version would have the cult pass to people like Laura Loomer, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida who calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” and supports the QAnon conspiracy movement. Alternatively, someone smarter and more conventionally appropriate than the president—say, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), or Fox News host Tucker Carlson—could pick up the banner of ideological Trumpism and run with it to far more competent effect.
With the hindsight of four years, a few thoughts:
So much verve! Pep! Truly, I was in my youth.
I think I basically called it on Haley, whose group I said would “happily get back to normal insofar as that's possible: cutting taxes and praising free trade; reveling in ‘global leadership’ and prolonging the war on terror”
Mike Pence, a 2024 frontrunner! 🤪
It’s interesting to see how much I felt the need to defend imagining Trump running this year. Was that really so unexpected then? And obviously I would not write that caveat about GOP disinterest in a “demonstrated loser” now.
The ideological Trump dynasty now seems mostly right, though I didn’t name JD Vance as a member, and my skepticism of a contemporaneous prediction by David Brooks of this faction’s dominance was in retrospect too strong.
"Where I think he’s wrong—and in good company, from what I’ve seen, but wrong nonetheless—is in thinking that loss may be averted if Harris wins, in having any expectation of a Republican reckoning if Trump fails."
I've had much the same thought as you. I admire his optimism. I do not share it.
Loved your self-analysis of the 2020 piece!