How A Republican Party That Believes In Nothing Writes A Platform

The GOP should write "Whatever Donald wants" and be done with it.

Excerpt from the GOP’s cult-of-personality platform statement in 2020.

Is today’s Republican party extremist or merely nihilist? I don’t see why it can’t be both. It is extremist in the sense that it will support any policy that advances its political goals: xenophobia, denial of a woman’s right to choose abortion, homophobia, tax cuts for the rich, an all-out assault on the administrative state. But it is nihilist in the sense that it has no ideology. It will jettison any of these positions in an instant if it threatens the pursuit of power. Its only non-negotiable principle is undying fealty to whatever, at any given moment, suits the convicted felon who is its standard-bearer.

I traced the erosion of conservative ideology a year and a half ago in a print piece for the New Republic (“How the GOP Lost Its Brain”), using as my model Daniel Bell’s 1960 book, The End of Ideology, which explained the decline and fall of Marxism (which predated Soviet communism’s fall by several decades). Just as Soviet communism limped along after the death of its underlying principles before finally giving up the ghost, so the Republican Party limps along. I think it’s going to die, too. I’ve recommended that conservatives prepare by reviving the Whig Party of the mid-19th century. But do they listen? In the meantime, it pretty much figures this week that the GOP won’t allow C-Span to cover its platform hearings as it irons inconvenient wrinkles out of the 2024 GOP platform. We’ll see if anything is left when they’re done. That’s the subject of my New Republic piece today. You can read it here.