Timex – You’re talking about the elites of the party splitting from the base of the party. Which is fine–you’ll probably have a lot more reasonable people and a lot more consistent policy positions. You also won’t have anything resembling a winning coalition. You’ll be the Libertarian Party with fewer drugs and more foreign wars. The corporate donors will look at your party and say “Great ideas, but we’re not wasting our money.”
Now, you might be happier in the political wilderness with like-minded people and, sincerely, that’s cool. But if your party can’t figure out what it has to offer to working-class people–who came out of eight years of George Bush and Bill Frist and Tom Delay having been pretty much shit upon–then it’s going to be a long camping trip in that desert. Bring a lot of water.
I’m a conservative, but I have a very different view. The sundering that’s happening is a product of the common Republican orthodoxy being unable to actually help your average Joe. We can say that productivity is up and wages are up, but cost of living is too, and anyway it certainly feels that the prosperity some are gaining isn’t proportionately getting to everyone. Massive immigration hurts these people–it strikes at their livelihoods, that of their young adult children (even if it were true that “Americans won’t do some jobs” (it’s not), working-class parents will force their teenage kids to do those jobs, at least they would before they became known as immigrant jobs!). None of that’s the immigrants’ fault (they get hurt in the next generation), but it is the fault of those who can’t create a healthy immigration system, or refuse to, because a glut of workers means cheaper labor for bigger business.
The whole alliance of so-called conservatives with big business is the charade that is finally cracking. Globalism makes lovely charts and graphs that go up and to the right, but it hasn’t helped a lot of these Americans, it’s given them a bunch of cheap garbage to spend their money on (they can’t afford a family vacation, so may as well get a big old tv and an Android phone and some cheap takeout), and it has turned abject poverty into exploitation in the third world. There’s nothing conservative about big business or a global economy. Liberalism has made its peace with globalism and just wants to balance it out with governmental regulation. At least there’s some kind of balance there (although it ends in Hillaire Belloc’s Servile State). Republican style conservatism says let’s hollow out the formerly reliable structures of family and church and neighborhoods by promoting a mobile labor market… Can’t find a job? Pick up and move! Heaven forbid you learn to love the place you live, lay down roots, pass it along to your children and grandchildren for them to love. The corporation that trained you to do what it needs to profit is moving to Albuquerque, so I hope you like Albuquerque… or greeting at Wal-Mart. Not only is your livelihood threatened, but the support structures that used to help you maintain your pride and your sanity through hard times–the church, the knitting circle, the extended family–have been shredded by displacement.
Of course, there is more to the Republican orthodoxy than a globalized corporate economy. But wars in the middle east and the war on terror haven’t done much for the average Joe, either, just taken away kids’ fathers and mothers.
This party deserves to implode. I hope to hell it doesn’t take a president Trump to make it happen, because he’s a fraud who would do far more harm than good. But just because Trump is awful doesn’t mean his opponents are the ones who deserve to win out. Trump supporters have a real grievance. They may have been baited with racist explanations for their troubles; those should be repudiated. But it doesn’t help them to go back to capital gains tax breaks and free trade agreements, as if the only way to help the common American is by flushing corporations with cash to spend on their labor.
A conservative party needs a plan to stitch the social fabric back together. Help and promote families. Make small businesses more viable (which means kinking the big business’ hoses). Foster competent, serious local and state government bodies. Don’t fall for the liberal fetishization of federal power. Promote agriculture, by Americans and for Americans. Encourage workers’ ownership of firms. Stop shoving kids into college who don’t need or want it; let them become plumbers and craftsmen and housekeepers and home builders for their neighbors. Quit zoning sprawling suburbs and strip malls–people need to live someplace they can love, and you can’t love asphalt. Respect our soldiers and their families by employing them in our defense, not in the name of global economic stability. Don’t leave healthcare to big business OR big government; fund organizations close to the sources of need, since they’ll understand those needs better and better serve them.
Well, that’s my party, but admittedly they don’t exist and almost never have in the history of the country (a country built on basically liberal principles). They certainly aren’t Republicans. But sketching out what this party looks like at least reveals (in my opinion anyway) where the GOP has repeatedly failed. Communism, gun control advocates, terrorism… these have been the glue that’s held mostly white working-class people together with capitalist elites. It was bound to start coming apart sometime.
