Bring Back the Whigs

The GOP is dead. Long live its predecessor.

Is it too late for Henry Clay to enter the New Hampshire primary?

The Whigs were a political party in Great Britain that fought for expanded political rights in Parliament; their chief rivals were the monarchist Tories. The word is Scottish in origin (“whiggamore”) and made reference to Presbyterian rebels against the Church of England and also had something to do with driving female horses that I don’t have the patience to sort out. In the runup to the American Revolution, those who favored independence often called themselves Whigs to underscore their differences with King George III. After Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, his opponents in Congress, led by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, organized themselves under the banner Whigs because they thought Jackson was King George all over again. The American Whig Party (1833-1856) didn’t last long because the secession crisis split it into Northern anti-slavery and Southern pro-slavery factions. The Northern anti-slavery faction evolved into the Republican Party.

The Whig Party had a short run, but (apart from its fatal unwillingness to engage with the slavery debate) it stood for a plausible American conservatism: check executive power (none of this “unitary executive” nonsense); proceed cautiously on western expansion (Whigs were less keen than Jackson Democrats on killing Native Americans); get a fair price for the use of federal land; fund infrastructure like roads and canals; keep the Treasury solvent through tariffs (the equivalent in those days to federal taxes); and avoid foreign entanglements like the Mexican War. The Republican Party that replaced it was an improvement because it was anti-slavery, but it didn’t remain an improvement. Twenty years after Abraham Lincoln’s election it was already devolving into corruption. One hundred years after that, the GOP became, with Ronald Reagan’s election, a party committed maniacally to cutting taxes and dismantling government. Today it’s a party committed to absolutely nothing except its own perpetuation through the cult of the real estate developer, reality TV performer, and (incredibly) 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. (See my February 2022 essay, “How the GOP Lost Its Brain.”)

Which is to say the Republican Party is dead. Liz Cheney bravely said so this week on “The View,” and in my latest New Republic piece I propose that the next conservative party should be a reincarnation of the previous one, the Whigs. I’m not going to become a Whig myself, but it would be a party with which rational humans could converse. You can read my piece here.