A long piece in The New Yorker magazine by Nicholas Lemann gives a deep dive into the Grand ole’ Party’s identity , names three movements that come after ‘Trumpism’ for the Republicans going forward and points to those who are already seeking to lead the party heading into the future with Donald Trump off the media political stage…
Trump will not be President forever—he may be in the role for only a few more months. It’s hard to imagine that the Republican Party could come close to replicating him with another Presidential candidate, unless it’s Donald Trump, Jr. But is there a future in Trumpism? This is a live question for both parties. The major political development of the past decade, all over the world, has been a series of reactions against economic insecurity and inequality powerful enough to blow apart the boundaries of conventional politics. …
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But is it possible to address it without opening a Pandora’s box of virulent rage and racism? Lisa McGirr, a historian at Harvard who often writes about conservatism, told me, “The component of both parties that did not grapple with the insecurity of many Americans—that created the opportunity for exclusionary politics. It’s not Trump. It’s an opportunity that Trump seized.”
The Republican Party has long had a significant nativist, isolationist element. In the Party’s collective memory, this faction was kept in check by “fusionism,” a grand entente between this element and the Party’s business establishment….
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Fusionism brought these views together into what seemed for a long time, at least from the outside, to be a relatively workable political coalition. Philip Zelikow, a veteran Republican foreign-policy official and one of hundreds of prominent members of the Party who vigorously opposed Trump in 2016, said, “World War II, followed by nearly World War III, brought the United States into an unprecedented world role. And a vocal minority didn’t accept it. They don’t like foreigners. They think they’re playing us for suckers. There were a lot of Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theories that we’ve forgotten about. This group concentrates overwhelmingly in the Republican Party.” For a long time, it was kept in check. Now, in Zelikow’s view, it has grown in prominence and become less deferential to the business wing of the Republican establishment, and is “close to being the most influential element in the Party.”
The Cold War made fusionism possible. In the name of helping capitalism defeat Communism, the movement allied Republicans who adored McCarthy with those who despised him, on the basis of a shared commitment to an aggressive American military stance and a super-empowerment of private business. But the isolationist impulse has deep roots in American political culture. It was clearly present during the red scare after the First World War, the repudiation of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and the passage of the 1924 law that severely restricted immigration. As Zelikow put it, “The isolationists believed the U.S. should be bristling with weapons. Foreigners are a viral pathology. The whole point is to keep foreigners away from us.”…
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“The Party today is more populist than conservative,” he told me. “It’s the populism of a growing percentage of Americans who feel shut out. It’s younger, blue-collar voters—a coalition of grievance. They’re not conservative or liberal. They have grievances against the élite.” Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, agreed with this assessment: “In 2016, people wanted somebody to throw a brick through a plate-glass window.”
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Trump’s key insight in 2016 was that the Republican establishment could be ignored, and his primary campaign pitched only to the Republican base, which no longer believed in the free-market gospel, if it ever had. There would be no penalty for violating any ironclad rule of traditional Republicanism….
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He was ‘politically incorrect’—critical of Obama in crude terms. There was definitely a racial subtext.” He went on, “He was very George Wallace. And then there was the strongman thing: Juan Perón in an orange fright wig. He spoke to a fifty-two-year-old shoe salesman in a dying mall in Parma, Ohio. He has those voters in his head.”…
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Donald Trump is far too bizarre to be precisely replicable as a model for the generic Republican of the future. That raises the question of where the Republican Party will go after he leaves office. The jockeying for the 2024 Republican nomination is already well under way. Did Trump’s ascension represent a significant change in the Party’s orientation, and, if so, will the change be temporary or lasting?
Among the Republicans I spoke to, some of whom will vote for Trump and some of whom won’t, there are three competing predictions about the future of the Party over the coming years. Let’s call them the Remnant, Restoration, and Reversal scenarios…
An interesting article .
However, I would describe it as an “over analysis.”
The idea that Marco Rubio is somehow going to lead the Republican Party into an era of “Neo socialism “ was a little much.
In my view, if Trump loses ,the Republican Party future will be much less wallowing in some kind of increasingly weird revolutionary ferment than this article describes.
There will be a simple struggle between the Republican establishment as it existed prior to Trumps appearance on the scene ,and a motley collection of “new Trumpists “ for control.
And this is in some ways, a continuation or repetition of post-1945 struggles: McCarthy vs Margaret Chase Smith, Nixon vs Lodge, Goldwater vs Rockefeller, Reagan vs Ford.
Main Street and Country Club Republicans (not being huge fraction of the electorate) have to work with a very different crowd of enthusiastic populist reactionaries (or else a mob of frenzied bigots), sometimes led by a house-burning demagogue like Tail-gunner Joe or the Donald.