This piece is an analysis of a David Roberts article in Vox from last Tuesday which is itself an analysis of a piece from the Niskanen Center’s Jerry Taylor, “Whither Never Trump?”
Roberts addresses the concept of “Never Trump Republicans” (whom he calls NTRs) who clearly do not have influence with the Republican Party in operation but are still there as free agents in the media and political culture. The question is what they’re supposed to do. Roberts brings up Taylor’s article, because Taylor concludes that launching a competitive third party is that much harder than “(scrubbing) the GOP clean of the toxins now surging through its base.” Roberts instead proposes a “pretty obvious” solution: NTRs should vote Democrat. “There are, for all intents and purposes, two parties contending in the American system. If you believe one of them is an existential threat to that system … you should vote for the other one. Because one of them is going to win.”
The obvious point here is that there are no NeverTrump conservatives. There are conservatives (meaning, Trump cultists) and NeverTrumpers (meaning, everybody else). But that NeverTrump group includes libertarians, mainstream liberals, “progressives” who thought Hillary Clinton was problematic or not leftist enough, and a few folks who would have been deemed conservative in the not-too-distant past before “conservatism” meant only blind loyalty to Donald Trump and his Know-Nothing psychology.
That in itself ought to reveal the problem with the argument: You can’t get all of those people into the same party. In the final analysis, Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 is a question of whether you can even get liberals and progressives into the same party.
The other issue with Roberts’ logic- that accepting one of the two parties as an “existential threat” necessarily means voting for the other one in a two-party system- is that it was no less valid in 2016. We didn’t know then what Trump would be like in office, but everybody already knew that Donald Trump was a loathsome, dysfunctional personality with no relevant experience and destructive ideas, and yet he got just enough people in just the right states to get the Electoral College. Now, the anti-charismatic Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot for the midterms and will not be on the ballot in 2020 (we only hope), and Republicans in Congress might have pissed off enough people to overcome right-wing loyalties to that party or hatred of liberals. Still, if your best case for voting Democratic is “the other party is like Satan, only racist”, well, we already knew that, and it still was not enough in itself. And then what?
This means that while non-leftists might need to sit out or vote for the Democrats this time, it does not address the long-term issue. Taylor writes: “Even if self-imposed exile were a comfortable option, it’s probably a self-defeating one for those alarmed about the direction of the Republican Party. Granted, a steady string of decisive electoral defeats would eventually force the GOP to change course or die (the fate of the party in California). But despite what some bullish progressives are beginning to think, a generation-long series of electoral beatings is unlikely. Donald Trump may lose in 2020, but if the party continues along its current path, he would simply be replaced by new and better “Trumps” on the horizon. If past is prologue (and we see no signs that it will be otherwise), Democratic overreach will trigger a Republican resurgence. Only two years after Richard Nixon resigned, after all, the GOP nearly held the White House in an electoral cliffhanger.” (This point by Taylor is conspicuously absent from Roberts’ analysis.)
Roberts also might not have considered that the Republicans he’s asking to just give up and vote Democratic could already be doing so, sotto voce. Several of them, notably Paul Ryan, have announced they’re not even running this year. That does not guarantee a Democratic victory for those seats, but the main thing that guarantees a Republican victory is an incumbent candidate. As for the various political columnists, “real” conservatives already think that anybody who isn’t with the cult is The Enemy, so right-wing pundits have already in effect declared their allegiance by taking pundit jobs with CNN (formerly nicknamed the Clinton News Network) and MSNBC (which is the Clinton News Network).
But Roberts moves on towards the conclusion of his thesis: “America’s dwindling white Protestant majority, facing off against an unwieldy coalition of challengers, increasingly driven to ‘authoritarian, blood and soil politics’ in defense of privilege. … That battle must play itself out. The GOP will only change when white-grievance politics is consistently rejected at the ballot box, as it is in California. Only if that happens will the party be open to change. And if the party wants to change, it will seek reformers willing to return home.
That battle could take years, even decades. But by Taylor’s own reckoning, if the blood-and-soil contingent wins, American democracy could be lost. There is only one alternative to that outcome: the other side winning. Like it or not, there are only two parties that matter in the US. For a Trumpist GOP to lose, the Democratic Party must win. ‘Tis math. So Taylor should suck it up and vote for Democrats — not because he likes their policies, but because the alternative is an existential threat.”
Wrong.
This is exactly the wrong tack to take with people who couldn’t stand your party even when Republicans were sane. For a Democratic partisan to look at the current situation and say that the only solution is to vote for the party that he likes is a bit… convenient.
What isn’t being considered is that perhaps the Democratic Party is the less ugly side of the existential threat. I have said this to liberals many times already, and I’m gonna keep saying it til they finally listen: The problem is that your candidates suck and nobody likes them, including a lot of people on the Left. We can see how awful Republicans are. And in the last election Democrats made the stakes very clear. And they still couldn’t get enough people to vote for them in the right states. Which should have only brought home the point that since the start of the Obama Administration, Democrats lost a record number of state and Congressional races where the Electoral College was not a factor. You’ve established that the Republicans are an existential threat, Democrats. And you lost anyway. And then what?
Blame the rest of the country for not listening to you instead of the other way around?
Yeah, that makes sense.
In dealing with Republican “conservatives”, it has become painfully clear to me that the truth will not penetrate some people’s skulls even if you wrapped it in barbed wire and called it Lucille. But it’s also become clear that even the superficially reasonable liberals aren’t capable of learning from experience. Telling the rest of us to “suck it up” and be good little robots is exactly why the Democrats are not able to take advantage of Republicans’ self-created hell, even if (especially if) everyone already knows that there are only two parties that are worth voting for. But what if neither is worth voting for and the best you can offer is not being an existential threat?
Then what?
The fact that the two-party system was broken even before Trump showed up, and will remain so after he’s gone, is why voting for Democrats or getting rid of Trump isn’t nearly enough (which is a point at the heart of another Vox article from last Monday).
As much as I rag on Roberts, he’s only half wrong. Which is to say he’s half right. But so is Taylor. Roberts is correct to say that in the short term, this broken system can only correct by tilting back towards the Democrats. He is incorrect to imply that that will be enough in the long term (or that the long term doesn’t matter). That is because Taylor is right when he says you cannot depend on the rest of the country to stay with the Democrats for anything but the most imperative reasons (and in the last election, not even then). But Taylor is wrong to say that the vehicle of opposition must be the Republican Party.
As I said last time, anybody who wants something besides the Democratic Party either needs to invest in the Libertarian Party, invest in a whole new right-wing party, or somehow get the Republicans to pull out of the Abyss. Well, we already have a Libertarian Party, and its organization, however small, is still greater than a party that has to be created out of whole cloth. As for the Republicans, you wouldn’t even have a Libertarian Party if people like me thought that the Republicans could be saved. We tried reforming it from within. Gary Johnson tried. Charlie Sykes tried. Jeff Flake tried. They don’t want us. And the various people who don’t like the Democrats but are getting more and more offended by the Party of Trump are asking themselves whether it’s still worth voting for. Just as 2016 was not as much a case of Trump winning as Clinton losing, Democratic coups in states like Alabama and Pennsylvania add up to a growing case of Trump fatigue. And Trump gets as far as he does because he’s actually less repellent to the average voter than congressional Republicans. Support for Republicans among those under 30 is lower than it’s ever been. How are we supposed to claim that this is the Party of Lincoln when they would rather be the Party of Trump? Exactly how damaged and blasted is the party supposed to get before they finally conclude that neo-Confederate authoritarianism won’t pay off? And will they be in any better shape than the Libertarians by that point? The Republican Party is already shrinking. We really ought to let it die.
It can’t die, of course, because we’re effectively allowed only two parties. Someone is always going to prop up this zombie, no matter how many brains it eats, because without the Republicans, we’ll only get to vote for Democrats.
For that to be the long-term solution, the liberal apologists proposing it must assume that the rest of the country will accept the implication that “the only rational choice” is the only choice that they deserve to have. In a democracy.
It might just be the case that the rest of the country will not accept that proposition.
And then what?