Where Will the Republican Party Go From Here?
by John Lawrence
The Republican party is having an identity crisis. Will it be dedicated to the adulation of Donald Trump or will it be based on conservative principles? What are conservative principles? Is the US a Republic or a Democracy or an Autocracy? This whole situation comes about because of the shifting demographics of the US. Historically, the US has been based on rule by white European Americans who have been able to keep minorities including chiefly African Americans in check by various means including slavery, Jim Crow laws, domestic terrorism, red lining, exclusion from education opportunities, even unemployment which has been used by the Federal Reserve to control inflation. That is changing because now there are more educated minorities including immigrants from all over the world gaining positions of political and economic power. 216 companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children.
Is it any wonder then that poor and middle class whites want to tamp down immigration and keep black people in their place which they have always successfully been able to do until now. A lot of Trump supporters are effectively saying to hell with democracy if it means a multicultural society in which we have to tolerate multiple religions and multiple ethnicities and multiple shades of skin so it's not a question for them of having a democracy or a republic or any kind of society based on some version of popular rule. They want white European American rule like they've always had. There is also the added impetus that most of the once good paying manufacturing jobs have gone elsewhere which leads to even more insularity. So Trump supporters are the real conservatives in the respect that they want to conserve a way of life in which white people and European Americans have all the advantages. They abhor a democracy in which their lifestyle, their religion and their prerogatives are not paramount.
The Mitch McConnell conservatives overlap with the Trump conservatives, but the former stand for the privileges not of the white majority necessarily but of the white elite, of the white wealthy. They are even liberal enough to let wealthy people of different colors into their club while assuring less fortunate Americans that they too, if they work hard enough, may one day gain privileged positions of power and wealth. Basically, they represent rich people and abhor the white rabble. The problem is that this branch of the Republican party is increasingly irrelevant to the problems that America and the world faces. They stand for a strong defense which has morphed into endless wars which have gone nowhere and have only made matters worse in areas of the world in which the US has inserted itself. They stand for a bloated military-industrial-intelligence complex which has proven its incompetence in that it wasn't even able to predict an insurrection at the US Capitol, much less even defend against it once the attack was underway. They have proven to be focused on the wrong problems despite having been lavished with trillion dollar budgets.
What else do "principled" conservatives stand for? Low taxes but modern economic theory has proven that government spending need not be predicated on or limited by tax receipts. They stand for maximizing the private sector and minimizing the public sector at a time when dealing with climate change and even traditional infrastructure rebuilding demands the opposite. They stand for aiding and abetting the rich which has driven economic inequality to new heights. So what would be the role of a revamped and principled Republican party? Probably just to be a Democratic party lite or a party that criticizes Democratic programs. But that wouldn't assuage the interests of most power hungry politicians nor would it excite many members of their base who demand an entertaining leader who is focused by means of dog whistle diplomacy on white power.
The Trump party is similar to the Know Nothing movement, formally known as the Native American Party (at that time meaning descendants of colonists or settlers, rather than Indigenous Americans) before 1855 and the American Party after 1855. It was a nativist political party and movement in the United States, which operated nationwide in the mid-1850s, originally starting as a secret society. It was primarily an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-immigration, populist and xenophobic movement. So naturally they would resent an Irish Catholic President even though now there have been two of them. Adherents to the movement were to simply reply "I know nothing" when asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its common name. Qanon anyone? Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy was being planned to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States, and sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in what they described as a defense of their traditional religious and political values. Sure enough sounds like the Trump base to me.
The question is will the US become a full fledged democracy and live up to its vaunted principles finally even though it traditionally never has or will it revert to some version of white European American rule by electing another entertaining autocrat. That may not be Trump who has been deplatformed from Twitter, his chief propaganda tool, and faces mounting legal challenges, but there are others waiting in the wings who will offer bells and whistles instead of sound programs that really benefit the American people as a whole. But do Americans want government based on democratic principles or neverending campaign rallies with flags, banners and chants? As my Dad used to say, we shall see what we shall see.
