Why Republicans do not learn from history
The Republican Party — of free markets and of individual achievement — has splintered the vote so dramatically that Trump has essentially already won the nomination.
It was the philosopher-essayist George Santayana who said once upon a time that those that do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it. And the 2024 Presidential race — on the Republican side — appears to be a re-run of the last one. Multiple candidates blind-drunk on their own Presidential ambitions are diluting the (not insignificant) anti-Trump vote. If 44% of the Republican electorate would prefer Trump not run, but 13 Republicans are running against him, does an anti-Trump vote really matter? The Republican Party — of free markets and of individual achievement — has splintered the vote so dramatically that Trump, an autocrat manqué with no discernable political philosophy other than aggrievement at the Establishment of which he is a part, has essentially already won the nomination.
Then, as now, there was so much “individual achievement” on the debate stage. And in their individual achievement, what did they actually achieve in 2016? That year, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson (RIP), Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker all ran in the top tier. Also running were: Texas governor Rick Perry, former businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, former New York governor George Pataki and former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore. And in the end the only ones left to challenge Trump were Ted Cruz, perhaps the least-liked Republican in the US Senate, and John Kasich, a classic Reagan conservative, now past his expiration date. On May 4, 2016, John Kasich, the last elected Republican in the race, dropped out, leaving the nomination to Trump.
There were, of course, rewards for supporting Trump, who promised to break the wheel. Kasich, a Reaganite, ultimately refused to vote for Trump in 2016. But almost all of the others fell in line. In time, the party learned subservience to Trump, white nationalism notwithstanding. “We find no evidence that members who supported Trump did better or worse in contested general election races,” PNAS found of Congressional Republicans supporting Trump’s spurious “Stop the Steal” lies in 2021. “However, Trump supporters were less likely to lose primary elections, more likely to run unopposed in the general election, more likely to run for higher office, and less likely to retire from politics.” So there’s that.
To recap — there was so much “individual achievement” on those debate stages in ‘15 and ‘16. But zero collective planning and cooperation against the greater authoritarian threat Donald Trump posed to our democracy. After he won the Presidency and remade the party into his graven image, the three F’s — Futurity, Fondness and Fear — kept Republicans in line.
So here we are in 2023. And, similarly, the vote once again is so fractured that Trump’s inevitability is all but conventional wisdom. The writing was on the wall then as it is now, but the will to change outcomes within the Republican party is lacking. In 2015, Trump won by fracturing the Establishment vote. Trump — or, Trumpism — is now the Establishment. And now the Ron DeSantis campaign, the darling of the donor class, appears to be imploding. Donors are data-driven creatures, so how long they remain with a losing commodity is anyone’s guess. Leaving, once again, the nomination to Trump. Because, as Santayana reminded us, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it …
It is ironic that Nikki Haley, who appeared to be running all summer for Vice President (or possibly SecState), is campaigning in earnest. Who would have predicted it? She has finally realized, despite the disadvantages of running in a crowded field for a sliver of the anti-Trump vote, that the only way to beat Trump is to go through Trump. And the former Governor of South Carolina got a modest bump out of the debate according to Emerson polling, if not a bump in the actual auditorium, for going hard against her former boss. David Faris observed in Slate:
So far only Haley, who at least isn’t despised by the voters she needs, has begun to make the kind of case against Trump that will work with Republicans. And that means facing this hard truth: GOP partisans are still largely in thrall to Trump, but they also want to win in 2024 after four years in the wilderness. And Haley’s tactical decision to refrain from substantive attacks on Trump in favor of arguments about his unpopularity with the American people and many liabilities as a candidate is probably the only way that she—or anyone—can really reach Republican voters without alienating them. She pointed out that a supermajority of Americans desperately want to avoid a Biden-Trump rematch. And Republicans, she said, “have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”
The bump, however modest, is worth further observation. Will Haley’s late August appeal to "electability” metastasize into actual primary votes? Or is it too late for her and for the never-Trump wing of the party. Haley, it should be noted, has said she will vote for Trump if he is the nominee. So there’s, unfortunately, that …
Also — the convictions are not visibly hurting Trump in the Republican primary. But they could hurt him in the general election. In fact, I believe they will, though only slightly. Michael Tomasky makes a good point here:
And make no mistake about this: Conventional wisdom also would hold that the more times Trump is convicted, the more it will hurt him. That might, on balance, prove to be true—the swing voters of Cobb and Gwinnett counties in Georgia and Bucks and Northampton counties in Pennsylvania will probably ditch him if he’s an actual convicted felon. But his devout followers will back him all the more ferociously with each conviction.
In other words, the convictions help Trump solidify his base in the primaries, but probably kill his chances in Pennsylvania and Georgia, thus costing him the Presidency (again). I endeavored to show here that the Republicans have not learned from Santayana, have not learned from History. Have the Democrats?
Dan Pfeiffer reminds us how much work we all have to do before election day. Biden, according to Real Clear Polling, is up only 1.4% above Trump, despite the fact that Republican deaths from COVID in FL and OH are significantly greater than Democrat deaths (forgive the morbid note). “Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.5%,” Pfeiffer notes. “Given the strong Republican lean of the Electoral College, a Biden popular vote win of this size would likely mean that Trump ends up with 270 electoral votes.” Trump is also holding on to more of his voters than Biden, and Biden has work to do to bring back young, disgruntled voters and tired voters of color. There is quite some time to make those arguments. A lot of that will fall on Vice President Harris, as well it should. And maybe we got a taste of that this summer as Harris did a Commencement tour of American colleges. More of that, please. Pfeiffer is confident that it can be done if we all remain diligent to preserving our democracy.
Let’s get to it.
“Tennessee Republicans, with a supermajority in the House, have proposed new laws to expand gun rights, to promote guns in schools, to redefine mass shootings to a higher number and exclude domestic violence, and to silence dissent. In the Republican-controlled Senate committee members, in a single 30-second meeting, blocked nine moderate, commonsense gun control bills, including a measure that would have allowed schools to file an order of protection against a person who made threats against students and staff.” (Nina Burleigh/American Political Freakshow)
“It seems that it was particularly important to Mr. (Michael) Lewis to cast Mr. Oher as intellectually inferior. In an interview in 2007, Mr. Lewis said that Mr. Oher was on the dean’s list at Ole Miss, ‘which says a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss.’ He went on to say that big football schools take athletes, ‘many of whom are from the underclass or Black kids from ghettos around America,’ and put them in easy majors to ensure that they can keep their G.P.A.s up. At Ole Miss, he said, ‘all the poor Black football players are majoring in criminal justice.’ I don’t know if criminal justice is an easy major, but it did not seem to occur to Mr. Lewis that poor Black football players might be interested in it because young Black men are disproportionately targeted by a criminal justice system that is particularly brutal to poor people.” (Elizabeth Spiers/NYT)
“The Tuohys claim they legally could not adopt Oher as he was over the age of 18 when he came into their family and that their only option was a conservatorship if Oher wanted to play for Ole Miss … However, according to Tennessee law, the Tuohy family could have adopted Oher — as an adult.” (Paula Froelich/NewsNationNow)
“After Cody Bohanan, 24, was locked up on a charge related to possession of drug paraphernalia in 2021, he told the staff at Butler County Jail in Ohio that he was withdrawing from opioids. His cellmates saw him vomiting blood. They implored guards to intervene. But outside of having his vital signs purportedly checked a few times by paramedics, Mr. Bohanan received no medication or treatment for his withdrawal. He died five days into his jail sentence. Two months later, Diann Pink, a 58-year-old grandmother arrested on a charge of drug possession and driving under the influence, died in the same jail, from the same cause — complications of opioid withdrawal.” (Maia Szalavitz/ NYT)
“News organizations are in a cold war with OpenAI. While a shot has yet to be fired, some of the nation's largest newsrooms are actively taking defensive measures to safeguard their content from ChatGPT, the groundbreaking artificial intelligence chatbot that is seen as a potential aggressor to an already struggling news industry.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)