Letter to a young Republican
These people are energized as never before and feel their whole lives have been preparation for the coming moral, intellectual and political struggle. This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually selfconfident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.
But is it your struggle? I guess I would ask myself two questions: Are you dedicated to the ideas that are at the heart of current conservatism: the need to hold off the China threat; the need to restrain the power of cultural elites and centralized government; the need to build an economy that functions for the working class. Second, are you attached to actual Republicans? The conservative movement left an opening for Trump because it didn’t understand what was on the mind of actual voters.
The party has the potential to be something truly good for America: a multiracial working-class coalition, a party that serves the interest of all those who don’t fit in with the definition of the good life that is promulgated by the meritocracy. It’s to be a champion for those who didn’t complete college, don’t want to leave their hometown for the big city, do have a set of traditional values centered around their faith.
To become that party, the GOP has to displace the cultural circus with actual policymaking. Trumpism is a media strategy, not a political philosophy; it’s a bid to win endless attention and stoke enmity.
Republicans will beat Trumpism not by confronting it directly but by focusing on policymaking, by becoming a regular party once again. As Senator Ben Sasse put it, it’s to make the Republican Party about more than one dude. You may have noticed that this week, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton are teaming up on an effort to raise the minimum wage and enforce immigration laws, two plans to boost working class wages. That’s what there needs to be more of.
Will this work? Is the Republican Party salvageable? Nobody knows. Right now Republicans are rallying around Trump because they believe Democrats and the media are going after him. It’s pie in the sky to ask rank-and-file Republicans to denounce the man they’ve clung to. But, as has been observed, we Americans don’t solve our problems, we just leave them behind.
Suppose new leaders, issues and movements arose? Suppose the shows that premiered in the coming years’ seasons made the shows that premiered in 2016 look tired and passé. The party that moved from Theodore Roosevelt to Calvin Coolidge to Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump is going to eventually move on once again. That future is waiting to be created.
It’s not my struggle, and maybe it’s not your struggle. But it is certainly a noble way for the right people to spend their lives.