The pundits and political professionals of Washington, DC have never had a very good understanding of the Republican party. They hate its conservative and populist elements, and they only know how to evaluate the prospects of those elements using irrelevant criteria, like a chess club judging a basketball team – only it’s the political right that’s more cerebral than the dead center.
It doesn’t matter how many times the conventional opinion is dead wrong. The Republican right was supposed to be humiliated, broken and vanquished for good after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And then again after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace a decade later. Donald Trump, of course, was totally unelected in 2016. And after the way he left office in 2021, there was no chance he’d ever come back.
The story permanent Washington is telling itself now is that MAGA is over. Trump is a lame duck and the congressional GOP is headed for a wipeout in November. Trump’s coalition is shattered by the Iran war. J.D. Vance is obviously going to lose in 2028 –he probably won’t even win the Republican nomination. If the party had any brains, it would get behind Marco Rubio right now. He’d still have no chance in a general election, but at least Republicans would lose intelligently.
The GOP is much more unified and focused than the Democrats are, with a clearer sense of its agenda
Everybody says so – if the New York Times says it and George Will says it, what else is there to say? The verdict is unanimous.
The reality, of course, is that yes, Barry Goldwater did lose in 1964, and yes, Nixon did resign. But neither of those events did more than delay the Republican right’s march. Nor did the disappointing “red trickle” midterm results of 2022 presage the ascent of Ron DeSantis over Trump within the Republican party or the defeat of the GOP in the last presidential election.
If the worst comes to pass for Trump’s party this year, the story won’t be any different, just as the inability of centrists to perceive it won’t change. That’s because change is literally unthinkable to them – history has ended, after all, and we all know that market libertarianism and cultural liberalism are not only the right answers, they’re the only answers. Trump is an atavism, an aberration, one whose fixed term is coming to an end. And with his presidency ends his movement, which was only ever his movement, not a real political movement – not a new historical force.
Yet even as the obituaries for the right come pouring in again, the liberals writing them don’t seem altogether free from fear. Looking across an ocean, they’re astonished by what they see in Britain, where it seems the oiks supporting Reform didn’t get the message that populism is dead in Europe too, as Viktor Orbán’s downfall in Hungary was meant to have proved. (The fact Nigel Farage has little in common with Orbán is immaterial – they’re both “illiberal,” just like Trump.) European voters don’t appear to have learned that mass migration is good for them. Millions of Americans don’t grasp that Trump’s war on Iran means ICE should be defunded.
The stubbornness of American voters, and European voters too, is one reason why new and better voters have to be imported. The socialist dream of one world united by the most enlightened economic thought and scientific morality was ruined by the working class’s perverse nationalism. It would be criminal to allow the best economic science and “pluralistic” morality of the 21st century to be thwarted by the same populations. That barrier must be dismantled economically and demographically.
If Europe is one cause for worry, another is a sight as inexplicable in the eyes of anti-populists today as the nationalism of the 20th-century working class was in the view of that era’s socialists. Conservatives are meant to be the party of old men, yesterday’s news, yet the contenders to lead the Republican party after Trump are unnervingly young: Secretary Rubio is 54, Governor DeSantis is 47, Vice President Vance a mere 41. And while they’re meant to be hopelessly splintered by Trump’s foreign policy, unable to balance between an anti-war base and a President who’s bombing Iran, they are in fact all behaving like well-disciplined members of the same party. The right has its differences on foreign policy, but they’re not a source of disunion among leading Republicans inside or out of the administration.
The truth is that the GOP is much more unified and focused than the Democrats are, with a clearer sense of its agenda and a greater willingness to affirm it openly. Republicans are now the party of immigration restriction and know what it is they’re meant to conserve: America, not as a “proposition” but as a nation.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are torn over whether to downplay or boast of their support for transgenderism and “reverse” racial discrimination, and their divisions over Israel are playing out not only over social media but in a multitude of primary elections and party organizations. Only Thomas Massie has presented a similar scene on the Republican side.
This doesn’t mean Republicans will have an easy time when voters go to the polls in a few months. But the same blinders that led the pundit class to misjudge the results of 1964, 1974, and 2020 are still firmly in place. The right is much stronger than its foes dare admit.
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