One of the oldest imperatives of American electoral politics is to define your opponents before they can define themselves. So it was not surprising when, in the summer of 1963, Nelson Rockefeller, a centrist Republican governor from New York, launched a premptive attack against Barry Goldwater, a right-wing Arizona senator, as both men were preparing to run for the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party. But the nature of Rockefellers attack was noteworthy. If the G.O.P. embraced Goldwater, an opponent of civil-rights legislation, Rockefeller suggested that it would be pursuing a program based on racism and sectionalism. Such a turn toward the elements that Rockefeller saw as fantastically short-sighted would be potentially destructive to a party that had held the White House for eight years, owing to the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower, but had been languishing in the minority in Congress for the better part of three decades. Some moderates in the Republican Party thought that Rockefeller was overstating the threat, but he was hardly alone in his concern. Richard Nixon, the former Vice-President, who had received substantial Black support in his 1960 Presidential bid, against JohnF. Kennedy, told a reporter for Ebony that if Goldwater wins his fight, our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party. The Chicago Defender, the premier Black newspaper of the era, concurred, stating bluntly that the G.O.P. was en route to becoming a white mans party.
But, for all the anxiety among Republican leaders, Goldwater prevailed, securing the nomination at the Partys convention, in San Francisco. In his speech to the delegates, he made no pretense of his ideological intent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. (He delivered that famous line shortly after the delegates had defeated a platform plank on civil rights.) Goldwaters crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedys assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwaters ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.
The reason for the shift was clear. Many white Southern Democrats felt betrayed by Johnsons support of civil rights. The civil-rights movement had learned how to translate grassroots activism into political power. Among government leaders, L.B.J. was singularly important to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he stood firmly behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In both cases, he pressed on white Southern Democrats in Congress who had long supported the racist culture and strictures of Jim Crow. Until the mid-twentieth century, it was the Republican Party, founded a century earlier by Northerners enraged by the expansion of slaverythe party of Lincolnthat looked more favorably upon the rights of Black Americans. In 1957, it was a Republican President, Eisenhower, who deployed troops to intervene on behalf of Black students in the school-integration crisis in Little Rock. Goldwaters rise proved the catalyst for change. As the historian Ira Katznelson told me, Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act mainly for libertarian reasons: Nonetheless, it was a signal, and opened up possibilities for a major realignment.
Establishment leaders of the G.O.P. were concerned that Goldwater had opened up the Party, which had barely emerged from the shadow of McCarthyism, to fringe groups on the far right, such as the John Birch Societypeople whom Nixon referred to as kooks. (RobertH.W. Welch, Jr., the founder of the society, claimed that the goal of the civil-rights movement was to create a Soviet Negro Republic.) Marsha Barrett, a historian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who chronicles the evolving relationship between civil rights and the Republican Party in her forthcoming book, The Politics of Moderation: Nelson Rockefellers Failed Fight to Save the Party of Lincoln, notes that, before Rockefeller issued his broadside, GeorgeW. Lee, a Black civil-rights activist, businessman, and lifelong Republican, wrote to Robert Taft, Jr., the Ohio Republican who ran for Congress in 1962. Failing a significant intervention, Lee said, the Republican Party will be taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the Ku Kluxers, the John Birchers and other extreme rightwing reactionaries.
Yet, once it became clear that Goldwater could win the nomination, shock at his extremism on a number of issues, including the potential use of nuclear weapons, began to morph into compliance. Tafts behavior was typical of the trend. Although his family had long been a mainstay of the Republican Partyhis grandfather had been President; his father, a senatorhe endorsed Goldwater. Barrett told me that Goldwaters rise was facilitated by the fact that some moderate Republicans were simply trying to protect their own political prospects.
In the contemporary Republican Party, the resonance is obvious. Mitch McConnell, the Partys leader in the Senate, has long played this game, despising Donald Trump but knuckling under to the reality of his immense popularity among Republican voters. At Trumps second impeachment trial, McConnell voted to acquit but, after the vote, delivered an excoriating speech about Trumps incitement of the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol and the effort that day to reverse the results of the 2020 election. Days later, when asked whether he would support Trump if he was nominated by the G.O.P. in 2024, McConnell responded, Absolutely.
The most widely debated political question of the moment is: What is happening to the Republicans? One answer is that the Partys predicament might fairly be called the revenge of the kooks. In just four years, the G.O.P., a powerful, hundred-and-sixty-seven-year-old institution, has become the party of Donald Trump. He began his 2016 campaign by issuing racist and misogynistic salvos, and during his Presidency he gave cover to white supremacists, reactionary militia groups, and QAnon followers. Trumps seizure of the Partys leadership seemed a stunning achievement at first, but with time it seems more reasonable to ponder how he could possibly have failed. There were many prexisting conditions, and Trump took advantage of them. The combination of a base stoked by a sensationalist right-wing media and the emergence of kook-adjacent figures in the so-called Gingrich Revolution, of 1994, and the Tea Party, have redefined the Partys temper and its ideological boundaries. It is worth remembering that the first candidate to defeat Trump in a Republican primary in 2016 was Ted Cruz, who, by 2020, had long set aside his reservations about Trump, and was implicated in spurring the mob that attacked the Capitol.
One of the most telling developments of the 2020 contest was rarely discussed: in August, the Republican National Convention convened without presenting a new Party platform. The Convention was centered almost solely on Trump; the events, all of which took place at the White House, validated an increasing suspicion that Trump himself was the Republican platform. Practically speaking, the refusal to articulate concrete positions spared the Party the embarrassment of watching the President contradict them. In 2016, religious conservatives succeeded in getting an anti-pornography plank into the platform, only to be confronted by news of Trumps extramarital affair with the adult-film performer Stormy Daniels. Now there would be no distinction between the Republican Party and the mendacity, bigotry, belligerence, misogyny, and narcissism of its singular representative.
Or consider the events of the past six months alone: during a Presidential debate, a sitting Commander-in-Chief gave a knowing shout-out to the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group; he also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and subsequently attempted to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into falsifying election returns; he and other Republican officials filed more than sixty lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results of the election; he incited the insurrectionists who overran the Capitol and demanded the lynching of, among others, the Republican Vice-President; and he was impeached, for the second time, then acquitted by Senate Republicans fearful of a base that remains in his thrall. The fact that behavior is commonplace does not mean it should be mistaken for behavior that is normal.
But the character of the current Republican Party can hardly be attributed to Trump alone. A hundred and thirty-nine House Republicans and eight senators voted against certifying some of the Electoral College votes, even after being forced to vacate their chambers just hours earlier, on January 6th. A week later, a hundred and ninety-seven House Republicans voted against Trumps impeachment, despite his having used one branch of government to foment violence against another. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, the most senior of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach, survived an effort to remove her from her post as chair of the House Republican Conference but was censured by her states party organization. In the House, more Republicans voted against Cheney than voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, the extremist Trump stalwart and QAnon promoter, from her committee posts. She lost those assignments, but only because the Democrats voted her out. Then, on February 13th, all but seven Republican senators voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial.
The Trump-era Republican Party does occupy a very different niche from the Party of 1964. When Trump was sworn into office, the G.O.P. held both houses of Congress. In 2018, the Democrats won back the House; the Senate is now a fifty-fifty split. But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships. In November, Trump, facing multiple, overlapping crises, all of them exacerbated by his ineptitude, won seventy-four million votes. Still, the Republican Party confronts a potentially existential crisis. Last year, Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Harvards Kennedy School of Government, argued in his book Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? that, over time, the Party has set a series of traps for itself that have eroded its ability to govern and acquire new sources of support. The modern Republican Party was built upon the Southern beachhead that Goldwater established more than half a century ago. Johnson rightly worried that his embrace of civil rights would lose the South for the Democrats for at least a generation. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the Presidency, employing the Southern Strategyan appeal to whites racial grievances. By 1980, the G.O.P. had become thoroughly dependent on the white South. In 2018, some seventy per cent of safe or likely Republican districts were in Southern states. Prior to last years election, Southerners composed forty-eight per cent of House Republicans and seventy-one per cent of the Partys ranking committee members. The South remains the nations most racially polarized region and also the most religioustwo dynamics that factor largely both in the Partys political culture and in its current problems. The South, Patterson writes, is a key reason why the GOPs future is at risk.
In addition, the G.O.P.s steady drift toward the right, from conservative to reactionary politics; its dependence on older, white voters; its reliance on right-wing media; its support for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; and its increasing disdain for democratic institutions and norms all portend increasing division and a diminishing pool of voters. Republicans, Patterson says, have been depending on a rear-guard strategy to resist the ticking clock of a changing America. Time may be running out for the Party, as its base ages and dwindles. Its loyal voters are declining in number and yet have locked the party in place, Patterson writes. It cannot reinvent itself without risking their support and, in any event, it cant reinvent itself in a convincing enough way for a quick turnaround. Republicans have traded the partys future for yesterdays America.
The marginalization of moderate Republicans has accelerated in the past decade, since the advent of the Tea Party. Moderates in Congress recognized that, if they hewed to a centrist position, they would face serious primary challenges. In 2010, conservatives revolted against the Obama Administrations bailout of the banks during the housing crisis. In theory, that uprising could have spawned a cross-partisan populist alliance of the anti-corporate left and fiscal conservatives, but it was quickly subsumed by paranoid, racist currents. The same year, as debates over the Affordable Care Act came to dominate American politics, Tea Party gatherings began to resemble proto-Trump rallies, at which the first Black President was sometimes lampooned as a monkey. That blend of populist rage and overt racism was the active ingredient in what eventually became the Trump movement. In the 2014 Republican primary in Virginia, when David Brat, with the support of state Tea Party activists, defeated Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, the G.O.P. took note that even the most powerful conservatives faced a threat from far-right upstarts.
Some of the few remaining Republican centrists, such as Jeff Flake, of Arizona, Rob Portman, of Ohio, and Pat Toomey, of Pennsylvania, are leaving politics entirely. Last month, Reuters reported that dozens of Republicans who had served in government during the GeorgeW. Bush era were abandoning the Party. Jimmy Gurul, who was Under-Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said that the Republican Party he knew no longer exists, that what exists in its place is simply the cult of Trump. Trumps centrality has so far survived his loss to Joe Biden and the spectacle of the Capitol riot. In states across the country, local Republican officials are working against leaders whom they deem disloyal to the former President. The Arizona Party even censured Cindy McCain, the widow of the states six-term senator. The result is that the Party leadership sees no popular incentive to move toward the center, even as the warning signs of decline accumulate. Last year, for the first time, the number of registered Independents exceeded the number of registered Republicans. In the eight Presidential contests since 1988, Republicans have won the popular vote only once, in 2004.
The emergence of Trumpism as the Republican brand has also borne out the warning that the G.O.P. would become a white mans party. In a now famous autopsy of Mitt Romneys loss to Barack Obama, in 2012, analysts for the Republican National Committee argued that the Party had to expand its appeal to people of color if it hoped to be competitive in future national elections. Nothing happened, Patterson told me, speaking of the G.O.P.s response to the report. Right-wing media said, Youre going to ruin America if we take the advice of the Republican National Committee. Today, the Republican electorate is whiter and more male by far than its Democratic counterpart. By 2020, eighty-one per cent of Republican voters were white, and fifty per cent were male.
Last November, Trump made gains among some minorities, over 2016, particularly Latinos, although minority groups remain overwhelmingly supportive of the Democratic Party. The gender gap between voters for Biden and those for Trump was the most pronounced in recent history: fifty-seven per cent of women voted for Biden; forty-two per cent voted for Trump. The G.O.P. has also gained increasing shares of decreasing constituencies. White conservative Christians remain prominent in the Party, but they are a dwindling segment of the electorate: in 2007, thirty-nine states had white Christian majorities; today, fewer than half do. In 1996, non-Hispanic whites made up nearly eighty-five per cent of the electorate; by 2018, they were just sixty-seven per cent. In the six Presidential elections since 2000, Democrats have lost the white vote every time, but prevailed in half of them even without it. The day before the 2020 election, BenjaminL. Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, who represented the GeorgeW. Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that the Party could find itself a permanent minority.
The fraught discussions over the G.O.P.s future are really debates about whether the current Party is capable of adapting to modern circumstances againor whether it will turn into a more malign version of itself, one even more dependent on white status anxieties. As Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College and the author of To Make Men Free, a history of the Republican Party, told me, When you see the collapse of parties it is usually because you have some problem of the existing party system coming up against a major new change.
The Republican Party itself was built on the ruins of the Whigs, a party that broke apart in the tempests leading up to the Civil War. Marsha Barrett mentioned a passage to me from Herbert Hoovers address to the 1936 Republican Convention, four years after he had lost the White House to Franklin Roosevelt, in which he issued a warning about what becomes of parties that fail to navigate the critical issues and circumstances of their time. The Whig Party, Hoover said, temporized, compromised upon the issue of slavery for the Black man. That party disappeared. It deserved to disappear. Hoover was speaking in the midst of the Great Depression, but his larger point was that parties are not necessarily permanent political fixtures. Considering that history, its worth asking whether the party of Lincoln, now the party of Trump, is engaged in conflicts so intense that it will go the way of the Whigs.
The G.O.P.s travails echo a historical pattern. Despite the United States reputation as the most stable democracy in the world, most of the political parties born in this country, including major ones, have ceased to exist. The list of those that have collapsed includes, in addition to the Whigs, the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the American Party (also called the Know-Nothings), the Free-Soil Party, the Populist Party, the National Republicans, the Anti-Masonic Party, and three iterations of the Progressive Party. (The Socialist and the Communist Parties also briefly commanded public attention.) What we refer to as the two-party system has collapsed twice before. The Democratic and the Republican Parties have endured as long as they have because they have significantly altered their identities to remain viable; in a sense, each has come to represent what it once reviled.
Americas political parties and the party system are, in fact, accidents of history. The Founders were suspicious of factions, as parties were then called, fearing that powerful blocs would put their own regional or commercial interests above the common good, and endanger the fragile union of the new nation. But, as Richard Hofstadter wrote, in his 1969 book, The Idea of a Party System, the Founders primary paradox was that they did not believe in parties as such, scorned those that they were conscious of as historical models, had a keen terror of party spirit and its evil consequences, and yet, almost as soon as their national government was in operation, found it necessary to establish parties.
George Washington reluctantly ran for the Presidency in 1788. He remains the only Independent elected to that office. His farewell address, of September 19, 1796, provides the framework for the peaceful transfer of power. (It is read aloud in the Senate every year; this year, that event occurred a week after Trumps impeachment trial had concluded there.) In the address, Washington, like a father chiding his bickering children, advised his countrymen, no matter what their political passions, to consider the fundamental bonds that connected them as Americans. Political parties were useful to check the worst instincts of a monarch, he wrote, but, in a democracy, a party
agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
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What Is Happening to the Republicans? - The New Yorker