Former Republican columnist Michael Gerson has a lament in the Washington Post that rings true to me. The thrust of the piece is the dumbing down and growing extreme racism of the GOP. The truly talented want nothing to do with top positions in the Trump/Pence regime, a regime filled with right wing extremists and those who proudly embrace ignorance - or who are grifters out to enrich themselves.The base of the GOP is even uglier and here in Virginia nominated neo-Confederate Corey Stewart (who thankfully lost by a large margin). How does it end? Personally, I believe the GOP needs to die and go the way of the Whigs. The lone positive is that the core GOP base is dying off only to be replaced by younger generations who are more racially diverse and less readily duped by toxic Christianity. Here are column highlights:
They wander the halls of public buildings and haunt receptions like the ghosts of the GOP past — the cohort of Republican senators and House members who will be leaving office with the arrival of the new Congress. Some chose retirement because they did not want to do what is necessary to keep office in President Trump’s party. Others were forcibly retired by the Democratic wave in the midterm elections.
The class of departing Republicans includes a few who won’t be missed. (Hint: One has a last name that begins with “Rohrabache-”.) But many of the House losses came in suburban districts that required outreach beyond the Trump-intoxicated base. . . . . This process is the reverse of natural selection — call it the survival of the witless.
Under typical circumstances, departing Republican officeholders would be obvious recruits for administration jobs. . . . . But as Trump’s party purifies itself, true talent becomes a waste product.
In an incomplete, unrepresentative survey, conducted at think-tank events and in buffet lines, departing members have told me a few things. They uniformly wonder why a president presiding over a lower than 4 percent unemployment rate made immigration — specifically, brown people invading the country who needed to be stopped by a deployment of the U.S. military — the substance of his midterm appeal. This strategy did nothing to answer the flood of Democratic attack ads on health care.
Departing GOP congressmen and senators also wonder why Trump nationalized a midterm election that could have been better fought on local issues and conditions.
It was once said of Theodore Roosevelt that he wanted to be “the bride at every wedding.” Trump seems compelled to be bride, groom, minister, wedding singer and drunken guy giving the off-color champagne toast.
And departing members report that the most active Republican partisans in their state believe there is nothing — absolutely nothing — wrong with a political party that lost 40 House seats in a time of relative peace and unprecedented prosperity. . . . the Republican base believes its party lost ground because it wasn’t true enough to Trump’s agenda. In this parallel political reality, building the border wall would have stopped the Democratic wave.
So where does this leave American politics headed into the 2020 presidential election? Trump’s party — predominantly based in rural, small-town and smaller-city America, as well as disproportionately older, male, less educated and white — is genuinely enthusiastic about its disruptive leader. Urban and (increasingly) suburban Americans — disproportionately younger, female, more educated and multicultural — are finally getting the picture that they are Trumpism’s foils. And measured by Democratic donations and turnout, they aren’t happy about it.
Trump is a politician famous for following his “gut” to some odd and sketchy places. But the political question of the 2020 election is quite practical: Can Trump keep Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania (he doesn’t need them all) while avoiding any defections in Sun Belt states such as Arizona? The answer: With a flawed enough Democratic candidate, yes he can.
Given the social and demographic trends of the country, it will soon be impossible to win a presidential election with an ethnonationalist appeal. But we aren’t there yet. Meanwhile, Trump commits political vampirism — sucking the last remaining life from a dying coalition.
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