Preparing for the future

The post-Trump GOP will face feuding factions

What will the post-Trump Republican Party look like? Sure, there may be a last-minute upset when the votes are counted. But with all due respect to the electoral process, it’s not too soon to start thinking about what might happen if, as many polls indicate, Donald Trump loses the presidential election. Consider this exercise a thought experiment.

It’s a question that concerns more than merely Republicans. Even independents and Democrats have a rooting interest in a Republican Party that is a going concern; unchallenged one-party rule breeds corruption, cronyism and complacency.

One factor that will shape the Republican future is whether, and how, Trumpism survives Trump. That, in turn, will depend in part on whether Trump himself retreats offstage or instead transforms his email lists and campaign staff into a media company or an advocacy organization.

Trump’s policy agenda — the Mexican border wall, renegotiated trade agreements, a foreign policy more cautious about military interventions abroad — will itself face a post mortem. If Trump loses, were voters rejecting his message, or just the messenger? Would the same policy mix be more successful with a more disciplined, less bombastic candidate as its voice?

In figuring out the answers, Republicans will be pulled in different directions by various factions competing for power and influence.

The congressional wing of the party could emerge from a Trump loss with its majorities in both the Senate and the House either diminished or lost. The GOP’s congressional leaders and stars — Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Tom Price, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, Tom Cole, Tim Scott, Liz Cheney — would face the unenviable task of blocking the agenda and Borking the nominees of an incoming President Clinton. It’s an unenviable task precisely because no matter how immovable the congressional Republicans are, they’re likely to be insufficiently obstructionist to satisfy the base of grass-roots GOP activists and primary voters.

Republican governors in statehouses around the country are less tainted by Washington compromise. Many of them aren’t household names nationwide the way that Ted Cruz or Paul Ryan are. But even so, expect Republicans governors such as Rick Scott of Florida, Bruce Rauner of Illinois, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Bill Haslam of Tennessee, and Gregg Abbott of Texas to play a role in the future of their party. They can offer something of Trump’s outsider or businessman perspective, but without his lack of government experience.

If the party’s gubernatorial and congressional wings are in tension, so, too, are its donor class and its grassroots. The donor class — New York and Connecticut and Florida money managers, Texas oil men, Washington lobbyists — is drawn to candidates such as Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney who aren’t as good as Trump at sensing and conveying the anger and dismay of blue-collar or low-wage workers in the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Deep South. Rural, religious conservative voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina may be looking for something different in a presidential candidate than are their fellow Republicans in Palm Beach, Fla., or Greenwich, Conn.

Ordinarily, the task of crafting an ideology to unite these factions might fall to a party’s intellectuals. But here, too, Republicans face rifts between authors and policymakers who supported Trump and those who opposed him, with no shortage of grudges. If there’s hope to be found, it’s in the careers of those — Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Marine Corps veteran turned Silicon Valley investor J.D. Vance — whose upwardly mobile biographies bridge the Republican base and its elites.

Opposition to a Clinton presidency, like opposition to Obama and his policies, will fuel fundraising and congressional campaigns. But Republicans will be in better shape if by the next presidential election they have a credible candidate and a positive program.

The greatest moral claim of the political left is that they are for the masses in general and the poor in particular. That is also their greatest fraud. It even fools many leftists themselves.

One of the most recent efforts of the left is the spread of laws and policies that forbid employers from asking job applicants whether they have been arrested or imprisoned. This is said to help ex-cons get jobs after they have served their time, and ex-cons are often either poor or black, or both.

In the case of this ban on asking job applicants whether they have criminal backgrounds, the only criterion seems to be whether it sounds good or makes the left feel good about themselves.

Hard evidence as to what actual consequences to expect beforehand, or hard evidence as to its actual consequences afterwards, seems to have had very little role in this political crusade.

An empirical study some years ago examined the hiring practices of companies that did a background check on all the employees they hired. It found that such companies hired more blacks than companies which did not follow that unusual practice.

Why? This goes back to decisionmaking by human beings in general, with many kinds of decisions in general. Since we seldom have all the facts, we are often forced to rely on generalizing when making our decisions.

Many employers, aware of higher rates of imprisonment among blacks, are less likely to hire blacks whose individual backgrounds are unknown to them. But those particular employers who investigate everyone’s background before hiring them do not have to rely on such generalizations.

The fact that these latter kinds of employers hired more blacks suggests that racial animosity is not the key factor, since blacks are still blacks, whether they have a criminal past or not.

But the political left is so heavily invested in blaming racism that mere facts are unlikely to change their minds.

Moreover, the left is so invested in the idea that they are helping the disadvantaged that they seldom bother to check the actual consequences of what they are doing, whether that is something as specific as banning questions about criminal behavior or something as general as promoting the welfare state.

In the vision of the left, the welfare state is supposed to be a step forward, in the direction of “social justice.” Tons of painful evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, that the welfare state has in fact been a step backward toward barbarism — among low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States — does not make a dent in the beliefs of those on the left.

The left’s infatuation with minimum wage laws has likewise been impervious to factual evidence that the spread and escalation of minimum wages have been followed by far higher rates of unemployment among young blacks, to levels some multiple of what they were before — and to a racial gap in unemployment among the young that is likewise some multiple of what it was before.

Those who doubt this need only turn to the data on page 42 of “Race and Economics” by Walter Williams, or to the diagram on page 98 of “The Unheavenly City,” written by Edward Banfield back in 1968. The facts have been available for a long time.

Examining hard evidence would mean gambling a whole vision of the world — and of their own role in that world — on a single throw of the dice, which is what looking at hard evidence amounts to. The path of least resistance is to continue going through life feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.