The Trouble With Never Trumpers

They won’t admit the GOP must serve a wealthy minority that’s used to getting its own way.

The Never Trumpers are an awfully nice bunch of people, but the ones who remain committed to reviving the Republican Party can’t face two difficulties.

1.) The Republican Party is anti-majoritarian. This didn’t start with Trump. For two decades Republicans have addressed their minority status by trying to limit the franchise, by trying to expand the power of the courts, and by defending the plainly indefensible Electoral College. You almost never hear Never Trumpers criticize these positions.

GOP efforts to impose barriers to voting typically go unmentioned by the Never Trumpers. I don’t think it’s because the Never Trumpers consider these efforts legitimate; if they did, they’d defend them. But neither do they wish to criticize them. So usually they just don’t talk about it. I suspect former President Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis, which he turned into a plea for expanding the franchise, which he rightly pointed out was the cause that made Lewis a national hero, made a lot of Never Trumpers uncomfortable.

As for the expansion of judicial power, Never Trumpers accept that simply as the way the game is played, given that Democrats want to expand judicial power, too. But except for wanting to regain a Supreme Court majority, Democrats don’t sweat this one nearly as much as Republicans do, because their future doesn’t depend on it to anything like the same extent.

As for the Electoral College, everybody has forgotten that as recently as the 1976 election there was, after the fact, bipartisan good-government worry the Electoral College vote nearly diverged from the popular vote (even though Jimmy Carter won the latter by a majority). Bob Dole, who as the Republican vice-presidential candidate would have benefited from a split, testified before Congress that that would have been a terrible outcome! Now Republicans praise the Electoral College, an absurd anti-Democratic relic of the Holy Roman Empire, because they think it favors Republicans, which it doesn’t. (The small-state bias favors Republicans, but winner-take-all awarding of electors favors Democrats, and the result is kind of a wash.)

2.) The Republican Party can’t survive as anything other than the party of the rich. That’s where its money comes from, and nearly all its clout. Donald Trump didn’t save factory jobs, and he didn’t build more than two or three miles of his promised border wall. You know what he did? He cut taxes and he threw a monkey wrench into the regulatory process, just as any other GOP primary contender would have done.

Visions of the GOP as a working class party, like those described today in David Brooks’s New York Times column, are a fantasy. Brooks writes:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodox[y] — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.

But that’s only partly true. Yes, Trump discarded entitlement reform and fiscal restraint, but those were principles that Republicans, starting with Ronald Reagan, embraced only intermittently, because they got in the way of tax-cutting. Anti-immigrationism was only somewhat new; recall that after its 2012 defeat the Republican Party issued a report resolving to embrace immigration reform because its anti-immigrant rhetoric was chasing Latino voters away. (One of then enduring puzzles of 2016 is why Trump, who went in the opposite direction, performed, depending on which data you select, about as well or better among Latinos than Mitt Romney.) Protectionism was a genuine departure from Republican orthodoxy, and it’s the part of the program that’s given Trump’s business supporters the most tsuris. They tolerate it because Trump cut their taxes and eased up on regulation.

The true orthodoxy of the Republican Party is serving the rich. Brooks concedes this, sort of, when he says that when Trump “tossed Bannon out and handed power to Jared Kushner and a bunch of old men locked in the Reagan paradigm” the result was “bigotry, incompetence and tax cuts for the wealthy.”

But it’s a fantasy to think that a Bannon-dominated White House, or any other Republican White House, would have been any different. Yes, Bannon wanted to raise taxes on the rich. No, it was never going to happen. Surely even Bannon knew that. And if Bannon swore off Trump after he lowered corporate taxes and wealthy individuals, I missed it.

Meanwhile, even Bannon regarded government regulators as the enemy, declaring war on the “administrative state.” If he ever found a way to reconcile that with his populist posturing, then I missed that, too.

Trump’s election shows you can win—just barely—by harnessing middle-class resentment, but that you can’t govern as a Republican without cutting taxes (especially on capital) and impairing government regulation. What Brooks derides as “anti-government zombie Reaganism” is the foundation of the Republican Party. Serving the rich is what the GOP has been all about for the past century, and for most of the past half-century Republicans have been extraordinarily good at it. This was bound sooner or later to create resentment of its own. It could be countered up to a point by appealing to racial prejudice and religious fundamentalism, but these tools aren’t as potent as they used to be, and we may well look back on 2016 as their last hurrah in presidential politics.