Rick Santorum has gone public with his condemnation of Republican politicians who are publicly speaking out against Trump. Santorum is saying regardless of how they feel about Trump as a person, they should feel obligated to back their party’s nominee. You also have Paul Ryan saying Republicans “need to come home” and vote for Trump.
On the other hand, you have John Kasich going public saying he didn’t vote for Trump. And there are rumors George W. Bush and Jeb Bush are also planning on voting against Trump. John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Cory Gardner, Gary Herbert, Robert Bentley, and many others have said they won’t vote for Trump.
Let’s assume current trends continue and Trump loses the election. Will Republicans be able to put this election behind them and move on? Or will there be lasting bitterness between those Republicans who stuck with Trump and those who didn’t?
I can picture a continuing divide between the wealthy Republicans and the burn-the-whole-system Republicans. Trump just benefited from the anger of the latter group, but they’ll forget about him as soon as he loses.
t’s actually easier to put it behind us if he loses. There will be recriminations, and the alt right will still exist, but they haven’t even begin to build an actual power base yet. The real question is what to do with all those angry white voters. Play the short game and just incorporate Trumpsim into the party enough to turn them out? Or leave them adrift and dare them to vote Democrat or not at all and work on remaking the GOP’s image?
The Guardian has a very informative article today about how the European alt right rebranded itself:
One thing that has been exposed by these far right parties is that as much as Europeans love their social democracy, many of them, perhaps even a majority in many countries, only want it for themselves. Puts how Europeans pat themselves on the back for their generosity compared to the selfish Americans in perspective, doesn’t it?
The only way I don’t see a continuing divide is if Trump somehow wins yet loses the Senate, which seems extremely unlikely.
If he loses there will be secondary acrimony over what could have been had the party been more united, and primary acrimony over the direction of the party (e.g. business GOP vs populists) If he wins the whole thing, he still won’t be able to do what he says he wants to do because the more outlandish schemes will be blocked by Congress: half his supporters will look around after four years and say “where’s my wall and my job?”
On the other hand, if the Democratic party takes back the Senate, the GOP voting public will have a common enemy to blame for not advancing their agenda, whatever that might be.
Well, the wall will get built, I don’t see any serious opposition there if the Republicans still control Congress, and even if Democrats do have slight control, a wall will still get built as long as Schumer doesn’t prevent the majority from voting to approve one.
Adaher, that quote from the Guardian article was instructive. Two differences with the US, though:
“Being descended from immigrants/recognizing the benefits of at least certain kinds of immigration” is a deep part of US self-identity, so it can’t be disentangled from nationalism (or even nativism) as easily as in the U.K.
The US simply doesn’t have as much of a welfare state to defend against unwelcome newcomers.
But the dangers of the “alt-right” increasing their appeal by getting hip to social/cultural changes (same-sex marriage, etc.) are real – indeed, I think it’s happening here. Luckily (?), the religious right (their numbers bolstered, perhaps, by some conservative Latinos!), will make sure this part of the Republican split continues here.
Trump is trying to walk a line and not alienate evangelicals, but his history is of being quite tolerant on social issues and he’s really deemphasized them in his campaign.
What you pointed out as a difference between the US and Europe is true, also we’re more religious so it’s harder for a right-wing party to find a niche by being liberal on social issues. Different immigrants too. There really isn’t much of an assimilation issue.
But there are ways to have a successful alt right movement in the US. Respect women and native minorities and portray the struggle as natives vs. immigrants. Deemphasize social issues. Be against free trade. Support more welfare spending and frame it as a choice between immigration and the welfare state. You can’t have both a generous safety net and liberal immigration policies, so getting Americans to feel they have to choose could realign things.
This is obviously not where I’d want to go. Populist right wing ideology is authoritarian by nature and an enemy of small government.
The republican party is becoming a party of right wing extremists – it’s the Grover Norquists who control the party now and it’s so toxic that even some extremist factions are fighting each other, with some in his own party, including Allen West, accusing Norquist of being a closet supporter of Muslim extremists (what the actual fuck?). They are the ones who control the party.
The only ones who have any nads to stand up to them are those who feel free to leave them, either because they’re at the end of their career or feel like they could switch parties. I am guessing that John Kasich will either retire from politics or leave the GOP, possibly as an independent (the former is more likely I assume). I could see John McCain leaving the GOP and becoming an independent. Maybe more are in the senate if we’re lucky.
It’s not that Mitch McConnell likes the extremists in the House, but he lives in a state where the party has gone full on alt-right and he’s not in a position to challenge them without ending his career, and I guess he likes his job.
Not exactly, Grover Norquist is pro-immigration. Gotta keep your factions straight. Norquist is in my faction, with a further subfaction that I’m not with, the classic supply siders.
The GOP base has hated her too much and too long to remain divided during her administration. Within a year, if Trump doesn’t continue to try and split the party, they’ll come together to hate Clinton just like they’ve been doing the last 30 years.
If Hillary wins, then the GOP will be able to unite against her as long as she’s President. Maybe some cracks will show during the battle for their 2020 Presidential nomination, but other than that, Hillary hatred will be the Grand Unifying Force of all right-of-center folk.
And if Hillary loses, the Congressional Republicans and Fox News and talk radio will all unite around passing Paul Ryan’s legislative program and picking the wingnuttiest Supreme Court Justice possible to replace Scalia.
Eventually when they’ve torn out the heart of everything from the New Deal to Obamacare and stomped on it, divisions will start to appear about what to do next. Especially when the GOP voters realize that none of the changes have done them a bit of good, even if Trump builds the wall, throws out all the furriners, and withdraws us from every trade deal ever.
But it’ll take some time for them to catch on to the fact that they’re even more screwed with total GOP control than they were when Obummer was President. Most of them are pretty slow learners.
You’d be totally onto something here if the US did not also have, in addition to the religion problem, the race problem.
To work in the style of, e.g. UKIP or the French FN, a US alt-right would have to support social democracy-style economics for the working class. Both the white and the black working class.
But as long as the white lower classes (= working class + dirt-poor class) see themselves as 90% working vs. 10% idle and also perceive the black lower classes as 10% working vs. 90% idle that’s not gonna fly with them.
We would need a lot more cultural and economic convergence for those perceptions to shift closer to reality. Which things won’t happen as long as the white lower class lives largely in far-edge suburbia or ruralia and the black lower class lives largely urban and older inner-ring suburban.
I see much of the divide and objection to Trump as directed at him personally, not his policies (if you can call them that). Secondarily, maybe some object to his overheated rhetoric, but don’t really object to the direction of his arguments (more dog-whistling, please, not SO overt!)
I see it as likely that future Republicans will adopt his major points (immigration, isolationism, strong nationalism) in order to address the concerns of his most fervent supporters. Someone who does that, and is not also an objectively objectionable person, stands a good chance of re-uniting the Republican party in short order.
Not necessarily. The growing European opposition towards foreign / immigrant communities (which I think is mostly a good thing, so we disagree on that) isn’t necessarily or entirely about welfare benefits, it’s at least as much about wanting to preserve the ethnic, racial and religious identity of their countries. I can’t speak for the median voter in any of these countries, but I personally think European countries should spend more on foreign aid and development aid to Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries as an alternative to welcoming people from those countries into Europe.
I think that welfare states / high progressive taxes / big government are good things, and that mass immigration to Europe is a bad thing: there is no particular contradiction among them. I also agree with some of the other commenters that the United States is in a somewhat different position than Europe, here.
I wasn’t talking so much about an ideological divide over the future of the Republican Party. I was thinking more about throwing blame around. One group saying “You guys are to blame for Clinton being President. Trump could have won if you had supported him.” and the other group saying “You guys are to blame for us losing Congress. Trump was going to lose either way but the rest of us didn’t have to lose with him.”
But every election year whichever party doesn’t win hosts a battle between the centrists and the extremists over why they lost and which way they ought to move to get their mojo back next time. The divide over backing or not of Trump pretty well breaks down along those same traditional fault lines.
Since about 2000 the Republicans have had a much bigger divide than the Ds or than either party has historically had. Ideologically speaking their adherents today look more like a bathtub curve than a bell curve. So their battles are noisier than we’ve recently seen at the (relatively) more bell-curved and cohesive Ds.
But I feel this election is different. In past elections, it’s generally been arguments that some people didn’t offer enough support. But in this election, there are a number of Republicans who are openly opposing their nominee.
There have always been a few Zell Millers but offhand I can’t think of another election when a nominee has had this much open opposition from within his own party.
I have to disagree with this as well. I think the problem the Republican Party is having is due to it placing all of its eggs in one basket. Ideologically, every Republican candidate in this election was a conservative, with the possible exception of Pataki. And the Republican base has been reduced to straight white male Christians. The Republicans have been reduced to offering the one type of candidate to the one group of voters and hoping it will work.
Sure, the Republican candidates argued among themselves. But they needed to have loud arguments to cover up the reality that they were all essentially putting forth the same ideas. It’s the equivalent of Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 vs Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.
Norquist is in my faction, with a further subfaction that I’m not with, the classic supply siders.