Reclaim the Party of Lincoln
By: Justin Stapley
Tags: US Politics, GOP, Trumpism, Republican Party, Conservatism

Reclaim the Party of Lincoln

The surest way to build a platform for principled conservatism is to lift the Republican Party from the ashes of Trumpism and chart a better course. Justin Stapley Follow Dec 16, 2020 · 6 min read

In the lead up to the 2018 mid-term elections, George F. Will made an intriguing plea to conservatives who remain hostile, or at least skeptical, to President Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party and his level of influence over the conservative movement.

In an opinion article for the Washington Post, Mr. Will encouraged them to vote for Democrats and help wrest control of Congress from the Republicans who had acquiesced to President Trump’s arguably undeserved dominance. His goal was to shock the foundations of President Trump’s “cult of victory,” hoping that a re-calibration upon traditional conservative principles could take place before the 2020 presidential contest.

It’s hard to say whether Mr. Will’s article aided the smaller-than-anticipated but still effective “blue wave” that won the House of Representatives for the Democratic Party. But it’s pretty clear that whatever recalibration Mr. Will had hoped for in the conservative movement and the Republican Party did not materialize.

Since 2018, Donald Trump’s iron grip over the minds of Republicans and conservatives has only been strengthened and tightened. Even in defeat, President Trump and the Republican Party gained a record number of votes in the 2020 presidential election.

There’s no other sobering conclusion to be drawn from all of this other than that the Republican Party isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Even when weighed down by Donald Trump and his enablers, the GOP remains a potent and viable political institution. It’s clear that hoping for a principled reset solely based on electoral defeat was a pipedream.

Additionally, supporting Democrats in hopes of precipitating such a principled recalibration has been self-defeating. The moderate Democrats who came into office in 2018 almost immediately faded away from the spotlight. Instead, the progressive darlings of the freshman class have been hard-left activists who won exclusively in progressive Democratic strongholds.

Blue dogs like Ben McAdams went relatively unknown, and many, including McAdams, were recently defeated (and no one seemed to care). Meanwhile, the national conversation has moved at the whim of firebrands like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

The counterintuitive trend of the Democratic Party has been one where center-left calls for normalcy successfully defeated many of Donald Trump’s Republican allies and edged out a victory against the President himself. Yet, the broader progressive movement has continued to double down on a socialistic vision that arguably set the stage for Donald Trump’s rise in the first place.

This trend was apparent in the Democratic field of 2020 candidates. Almost without exception, every candidate voiced support for the full gambit of progressive dream policies to one extent or another. While Joe Biden eventually received the nomination and put forward a “return to normal” candidacy, he failed to truly excite progressive hardliners.

Variously, their complaints are that he preaches an outdated brand of Democratic politics, he’s not sufficiently “woke,” or that his identity as an old, white Democrat fails to properly represent an identity-driven movement. Without Donald Trump to unify the Democratic Party and gravitate them towards the center, the Democratic Party is likely about to enter a period of internal civil war (and I’m not holding my breath that the firebrands will be defeated).

Additionally, the trends towards conspiracy and hysteria we’ve seen in a conservative movement still in thrall to Donald Trump have demonstrated that a “principled reset through sobering defeat” has not produced the results so many had hoped.

Every time Donald Trump has faced some sort of defeat, he merely turns it into another useful foil. When the Democrats took the House, it just gave Trump another enemy to rail against. When the impeachment was launched, it gave Trump another thing to point to as an unhinged effort against him. When he lost the election, he called it rigged. When the courts have rejected their asinine lawsuits, he’s called them robed co-conspirators in the Democratic plot.

The simple reality is, this notion of shock therapy through stunning defeat has simply not worked. Nor has the Democratic Party moderated itself enough to garner the cross-spectrum support necessary for a stunning rebuke.

In 2016, Republicans and conservatives unmoved by the anti-Trump hysteria simply decided that, when push came to shove, they didn’t want to see another Clinton in the White House. Similarly, in 2020, Republicans and conservatives who remained unmoved by the anti-Trump hysteria simply decided that, for however much they disliked so many things about Trump, they disliked the Democrats’ policies and direction more.

The underlying reality of the last four years is that the Republican Party was captured by a candidate who led it down a path of extremism and incendiary rhetoric but was met by a Democratic Party that refused to make more than token gestures towards the middle.

Democrats have vociferously refused to recognize the part they’ve played in laying the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump and have continued to use the rhetoric and policy positions that drove conservatives into Trump’s arms. This has kept Republicans in a siege mentality conducive to ensuring continued loyalty to his leadership.

Aided and abetted by Democrats who gain notoriety through mirroring the President’s bombastic Twitter-troll behavior, more and more conservatives have gravitated into Donald Trump’s sphere of influence.

It’s become eminently clear that anyone who would like to see a more principled conservative GOP with presidential candidates able to effectively communicate a center-right vision cannot simply vote for Democrats or third-party longshots and hope the Republican Party learns its lesson in defeat.

Voting for Democrats and hoping Republicans learn their lesson has simply precipitated the dumpster fire. It’s time to come to the practical determination that the only effective fight to be fought is within the Republican Party.

There is no gentle way to state the truth. The mass exodus of Trump-skeptical conservatives, libertarians, moderates, and centrists from the GOP has not played out well. The only consequence of this exodus has been a more rapid and more thorough dominance of the party by President Trump and his allies.

The Democrats, while willing to accept center-right and disillusioned conservative votes and voice sympathy for their political homelessness, nevertheless remain hostile to conservative values. Even in the face of Trump, Democrats have demonstrated that they will not stray very far from their socialistic path. Continuing to throw what little weight principled conservatives have towards supporting such a path would mean abandoning principles and proving no better than their many Trump-enamored counterparts.

The choice should be clear for anyone willing to step back from the politics of resentment and pride. In the next presidential election, the two options for this country will be either a Republican or a Democrat. Supporting Democrats while leaving an avenue open to the White House for nationalist interlopers would probably be the most self-defeating thing Trump-averse conservatives could do.

In the grand scheme of things, four years is not a great length of time. The Republican Party carries with it the legacies of great leaders like Lincoln, Coolidge, and Reagan. This heritage has not been undone by anything Donald Trump and his ilk have wrought. There is still much to salvage in the GOP. And, reclaiming it would be the surest way to build a platform for principled conservatism.

Now is the time to build, not tear down, to renew, and not simply to continue the anger, hostility, and resentment that continues to dear down political and social institutions. We should work to lift the Republican Party from the ashes of Trumpism and chart a better course.