I suggest they find someone who embodies conservative values but is also intelligent and educated, and who also is respected for having strong character.
I feel that Trump will refuse to accept his defeat if he loses. He won’t actually be able to stay in office; the Republicans won’t support a civil war. But he’ll declare the election was fraudulent and he really won. And then he’ll announce the start of his campaign to win a second term in 2024. This way he can keep collecting from his followers and keep control of his campaign funds.
The rest of the Republican party will hate this. They’ll see the reality that Trump lost and has no chance of winning in four years. But by trying to come back, he’ll be blocking any other Republican candidate and helping the Democrats.
I agree. I think the reality is that all of the sane Republicans have left the party and become Democrats. The Democratic party has taken up all of the reasonable positions that the Republicans once espoused.
Why would such a person want to jump into the middle of Republican politics?
I am afraid I share this outlook – these “establishment Republican” have not noticed that the note on their Faustian bargain came due and has been called, in full. They also seem to have one huge blind spot as to how the leaders of “establishment Republicanism” are themselves what the base has been told to despise: a privileged elite. Who will even listen to them, if they show up talking about being sensible and strategic and behaving properly in public?
Heck, say Trump loses and steps in front of a runaway bus before Thanksgiving. That will just be a signal for Miller, Bannon, Coulter, Cotton, etc. to compete for whose version of populist ultraright positions gets chosen by that mass “that only consumes far right media, that operates in the murky world of conspiracy theories and racial animus and extreme parnoia and fear”, as the bar for any upcoming GOP candidate to meet.
Thanks, Martin_Hyde, for an insightful post. I had assumed that the GOP would return to its traditional norms in the post-DJT era, but you’ve changed my mind. The Republican Party may well have become the Party of White Grievance from this point forward. I fear that they may well nominate someone who promotes conspiracy theories and white supremacy in 2024, and this person may not only be a terrible person but competent in being terrible. Perhaps we’re currently on Despot 1.0, and the next version will be even worse.
Because they appear to be all those things but are actually itching to be the first real RW dictator of the USA.
President Erdogan of Turkey started out pretty respectable by the standards of Turkish politics. Honest, pious, effective, respected. Now simply another Putin Lite president-for-life shoveling money into his families coffers.
No doubt there are many such within the Republicans today. If not at the Federal level then certainly in the various states.
So… A Democrat?
Where did the democrats go after 1984 when Reagan swept Mondale with a 49 state vote sweep?
There was no need for a drastic course correction after Mondale. He was a fine candidate, he just ran into a juggernaut. Mondale didn’t turn his party into the White Nationalist Party, if he had won he wouldn’t have been taking his orders from Brezhnev, he wouldn’t have undermined NATO nor sucked up to the current Kim in North Korea. There was no need to change the Democratic Party because of Mondale.
Turkey’s Erdogan is an excellent example of how democracy can go off the rails. Obviously, America’s democratic traditions are longer and the institutions supporting its democracy are stronger than those of Turkey. In fact Turkey has had what some would truly call a ‘deep state’ of bureaucrats who hold the real power. Still, it had a democracy that functioned for decades - until Erdogan’s toxic populism essentially destroyed it. They still refer to Turkey as a democracy. They still hold elections. But the Erdogan era has been one of vote rigging and ‘do-overs’ when his party loses.
Democracy dies gradually. It starts its death march when people knowingly vote into power people who don’t have a commitment to democratic principles, typically because they believe they share a value system that ranks higher than that of democracy and its tenets of fair play, cooperation, truth, and accepting democratic outcomes. When you have tens of millions of people who say that these rules and norms are actually not required but optional, democracy becomes infected.
And here’s the real point: you need a majority to get things done in a democracy, but you hardly need a majority of citizens to kill a democracy off. You probably just need 20-25% of the population that’s committed to living by other sets of rules. Nazi Germany needed just 32-37% of the people who showed up to vote, and we can assume that note every adult citizen voted of course.
I think it will be impossible for the GOP to put the Trump years behind them. They have been pandering to white supremacists for decades, but now they have entered a period of overt racism. I don’t see how anyone can win a GOP primary without pandering explicitly to white supremacists. The danger is that this will continue to push the GOP out of legitimate power and they will continue to act violently against inclusive democracy.
It comes down to the question of how you deprogram a segment of society once it has been radicalized? Some Mideast countries have had some success as ISIS has receded, but it is not easy.
Turkey’s Erdogan is an excellent example of how democracy can go off the rails.
So is
> Hungary’s Orbán
I think we will ultimately see the Republican party dissolve the way that the Whig party did in the 1850s. The Whigs showed what happens to a party that is amoral and exists simply for the sake of power. The footnote to that is that we had a massive civil war that nearly destroyed the Union in the years that followed, so we can expect pretty severe turbulence to complement the internal corrosion of the GOP.
I think that they will remain pretty much as they are now, a white nationalist party with a strong foothold in red state America and who will do their best to suppress minority voting wherever possible and to de-legitimize election results that they don’t agree with. I think that what we are seeing now is the new normal.
I tend to agree - diminished, demographically imperiled, but still a major party. And unless Trump snuffs it from a heart attack or COVID-19, he’s going to keep tweeting and will remain a kingmaker in the party for quite awhile yet. No one’s going to want to cross him.
And someone will move in to fill his role as leader of this movement. Our best hope is that his would be successors tear each other apart and splinter the movement.
This is a far greater concern down the road. Trump is a corrupt, toxic populist, but I worry about a charismatic ex military/national security type who has more expert knowledge of how to weaponize the tools of government and national security against people.
I don’t think that you can have a democracy when 40% of your population is hostile to democracy. Trump supporters have marched with nazis, they don’t just flip a switch and say “we’ll, that didn’t work!”
I’m sorry but this is extremely naive. Truth does not matter anymore, it will convince a grand total of zero people to change their stance.
Yeah, plenty of the truth is already out and plain to see yet Trump’s approval rating is about what it was four years ago. He hovers around 43%. The truth changes nothing.