Where is the Republican Party Going?

  

For a solid half-century, the Republican Party has housed what has always seemed to many to be a very uneasy marriage (the "Reagan Synthesis") between social conservatism and market liberalism. Now a major realignment is under way, and the outlines of the new Republican Party are becoming visible. The changes have produced some momentary excitement on the Right, but the bigger political picture seems to be a vindication of a half-century of criticism of the neoliberal/cultural conservative synthesis, coming largely from the Left.

According to its critics, the GOP has committed four deadly sins.

1. They have ruined the middle class. Since Nixon's time, Republicans have been following Friedrick Hayek and Milton Friedman, deregulating the domestic and global economy, attacking unions, undermining worker protections, giving tax breaks to the wealthy, and generally promoting an economic libertarianism that critics see as flattering the foolish and insecure while completely misunderstanding the basics realities of human sociality. 

2. They supervised the destruction of Creation. Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has also worked tirelessly to roll back what few environmental protections were accomplished in the 20th century and forestall any further progress by denying the reality of global warming and attacking anyone who dares try to preserve nature in the face of the despoliations of global corporations. 

3. They've embraced racists and homophobes. Since the civil rights movement, the GOP has been charged with playing to the worst xenophobic and culturally reactionary instincts of their most ignorant and fearful partisans instead of leading the nation toward the better angels of our nature. Indeed, at best the characterization of Fox News on The Simpsons is apt for the GOP itself: “Not racist, but #1 with racists!”

4. They are the worst kind of imperialists. Critics see the neo-liberal and neo-conservative wings of the Republican party as making stupid use of military force, projecting American power not to promote democracy as they have so often asserted, but rather to defend their blinkered ideology of economic libertarianism, deregulation, and global free trade, and to turn every people of the world into Walmart shoppers.

No-one would argue that the United States is now in the middle of a major political left turn. Many would argue quite the opposite. However, the late-twentieth century Republican Party project nevertheless appears to be fairly washed-up. Let’s look at just how the different planks of the GOP's platform have collapsed.

1. No one even bothers denying the reality of global warming any longer. It’s as obvious as the general environmental destruction that unfettered global corporations have wrought. The Republican Party has instead turned to pettifogging and foot-dragging when it comes to solutions. 
2. The ideological downfall of the neoliberal project of economic globalization began in earnest after the 2008 financial crisis. The failures of the “Washington Consensus” can be laid at the feet of some center-Leftists like Clinton and Blair as well as the Right. But it was the right-wing parties who dragged the center in their direction on economic policy, not least by enabling the capture of politics by Wall Street. 
3. Republicans may seem at this particular moment to be gaining political ground in their “war on woke,” but these supposed victories are mostly political theater, just as insubstantial as some of the policies they oppose. In the larger, decades-long fight against the old American order of ethnic hierarchy, the American Right has lost decisively. Their error was not that they have stood in the way of “Progress.” They’ve  stood in the way of something more like common decency. Apartheid societies are an affront to basic human nature. MLK was both morally correct and sociologically astute when he said that whites were also spiritually injured by a Jim Crow society. We are a tribal species, and it is our nature to include our familiars in a circle of equals, just as much as it is human nature to seek social power and distrust outsiders. The American pot was destined to melt and has melted. We are a multi-ethnic people, decisively on the path of creolization. Colorism will not vanish anytime soon, but the recent attempts by the “alt-right” to unmix American society or somehow define it as exclusively white have died a swift death. 
4. This year’s changes to the Republican Party position on marriage equality and abortion tell a similar story of moderation that nearly amounts to ideological capitulation. After eight years of homophobic dog whistling, Trump quietly erased “marriage is between a man and a woman” from the platform at the 2024 Convention. Instead of fighting marriage equality, it seems like the GOP will now be content to move on to the politically more fertile ground of transgender issues.  
5. And finally, after decades of strident opposition to abortion, Republicans finally overturned Roe v. Wade. But it now seems they have done so to rather disastrous political effect for the party. The rapidity with which once-strident pro-life politicians have moderated on abortion, now that they have responsibility for setting policy rather than simply demagoguing the issue, is astounding. In the meantime, some states have become truly unsafe for pregnant women and their doctors, but the bigger picture is that the longstanding GOP opposition to abortion and IVF has changed to “Yay IVF!” and “leave abortion up to the states.” The party is generally moving toward the comparatively moderate opposition to “late term” abortion. (Except in the case of exceptions… And the truth, of course, is that late term abortion has always been only for rare and dire medical situations.)

The Republican Party that will emerge after Trump dies (politically or literally) will be different from the party of Reagan and the Bushes. Based on current trends, one common thread will still be a culturally conservative nationalism, but now quite possibly divorced from the neoliberal agenda of global deregulation of trade and domestic economic austerity. In order to remain politically salable, this cultural conservatism will have to attach itself to a more inclusive vision of American identity and the American way of life. Does this mean it will no longer really be conservative? Not necessarily. The cultural content of conservatism shifts continuously throughout history. Consider the anti-Christian Romans (who were defending a pretty gay kind of paganism, by the way). They were the conservatives of their day. The forces arrayed against Calvin’s and Luther’s Protestant Revolution? Conservatives. The WASPs opposed to Catholic immigration in the United States? They were conservatives too. And now Catholics like Patrick Deneen and J.D. Vance (recently converted) are the vanguard of intellectual conservatism in the United States. What makes all of them conservatives, of course, is the instinct to resist cultural change.

If we view conservatism thusly, in the abstract and at the greatest theoretical distance, it is possible to see the wisdom of a moderate position. Revolutionary cultural movements are destructive of cultural forms—norms, institutions, etc. This is the fundamental point of conservative intellectuals such as the late Roger Scruton. And Scruton is right when he adds that it is much easier to tear things down than to build them. Social power flows through all cultural forms and all of them are potentially oppressive. And yet we need them in some form. There is no purely natural, or purely rational, or purely “free” form of society that would be done with all that is culturally particular. Thinking that such a form of society is possible to achieve has been the error of some libertarians, neoliberals, Marxists, anarchists, progressives, primitivists, and other reformers. Radical cultural change is sometimes necessary, and too much cultural stasis is probably its own kind of pathology. But agents of cultural change should proceed with caution, weighing the gains against a clear understanding of the losses because traditional cultural forms are a kind of glue that holds communities and civil societies together.

For these reasons, there is wisdom in a moderate position with respect to the conservative-liberal spectrum at a general, transhistorical level. There is wisdom, likewise, in embracing a form of liberalism—like that advocated in Alex Lefebvre’s recent book, Liberalism as a Way of Life—which recognizes itself not as a framework for transcending cultures, but as its own assemblage of particular cultural forms. 

It is unlikely that the Republican Party will end up weaving this kind of moderation—we could even call it “moderate conservatism”—into an otherwise far-sighted "post-liberal" platform anytime soon. Instead, we are more likely in the coming decades to see a form of selective conservatism that resonates with the xenophobic and authoritarian instincts so prominent in Donald Trump’s movement. Post-liberal conservatism could mean conserving walkable communities, humanly-scaled agriculture and industry, democratic institutions, a stable climate, and a biodiverse world. Instead, what it appears to mean for many in the emerging Republican Party is conserving assault weapons, Old Testament Christianity, and internal combustion engines. Trump’s party has been called “far right,” but if it is, "right" it is increasingly untethered from actual conservatism. Some old-guard conservatives have jumped off the Trump Train for this reason.

Of course it is also the case that Trump’s coalition includes some (ex-)Democrats and even a few radical, anti-establishment Leftists and New-Age "conspiritualists." Theo Von--a popular comedian and podcaster in the Joe Rogan orbit--recently said he was hoping in 2016 for a Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders ticket. A synthesis of elements of the far left and far right is not impossible at this moment. Such a synthesis of "far left" (Sanders only counts as such in a U.S. context, of course…) and far right isn’t just for low-information, every-man types like Theo Von. Some left-leaning activists and self-styled intellectuals are part of this synthesis as well. It seems that economic populists on the Left have been so long accustomed to focusing their critiques on capitalism that they are feeling politically disoriented now that the Republican Party, like other right wing parties in the West, is not embracing global capitalism like it used to. Some business interests that previously donated to Republicans are now giving to the Democratic Party in an effort to stop Trump. In this context, some free-thinking anti-capitalists and critics of neoliberalism are bound to toy with the idea of cozying up to Donald Trump just to stick it to the Democratic establishment or "speed the revolution." Such anti-capitalists may suspect that the pro-immigrant and pro-“diversity” politics of the Democrats is a cynical cover for the capitalist desire to keep exploited labor fluid across national borders. Some might think that woke-ism has gone a bit too far anyway and a little cultural conservatism is at least not nearly so bad as systematic economic exploitation of the working class. 

In the medium to long term, the Republican Party may indeed move toward a more constructive, coherent, and politically successful ideological synthesis. But if so, it isn’t there yet. There are several reasons why leftist anti-capitalists, critics of neoliberalism, and even many cultural conservatives are likely to continue to reject the GOP in its current form.

First, the Republican Party’s turn toward economic populism remains remains only rhetorical. There are reasons why most unions are still in the Democrats' camp, and even the Teamsters will not endorse Trump. The old alliance between the GOP and wealthy interests has not been broken; it has only changed forms. For every never-Trump CEO mega-donor that has moved to the Dems, there are two crypto-bro tech-capitalist mega-donors that have red-pilled themselves for the lulz.  

Secondly, the GOP under Trump is housing a large, violent, authoritarian movement that is manifestly dangerous to civil society and to democracy. Maximizing personal power seems to be both Trump’s deepest desire and his sincerely held philosophy of life. Moreover, his success in pursuing political power thus far has depended largely on fostering and inciting violent, informal, paramilitary and vigilante groups--a strategy that most politicians consider off-limits for moral and patriotic reasons. Remember the Proud Boys? The Charlottesville Nazis? The Oath Keepers and the “boogaloo boys?” They are all still there. They are standing back and standing by, listening to Steve Bannon’s “War Room.” And whenever Trump faces a real reckoning—a lost election or a jail sentence—he will turn to them again. Whatever you think a post-capitalist, post-neoliberal, or post-liberal future might look like, it should not be one that bows and scrapes before a Dear Leader and empowers lawless vigilantes, blood-thirsty lynch mobs, and paramilitary goon squads.

Third, Trump’s GOP continues to actively and dogmatically resist any and all efforts to address global warming, which is the most serious existential threat to our society and our world. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists have been in apocalyptic agreement for half a century, and the 21st century is bearing out the frightening accuracy of their predictions. Given this fact, we are likely to see more and more people become single issue voters until both parties embrace global cooperation and aggressive domestic action on this front.