The Future of the Republican Party
In 2016, Never Trumpers warned that Trump would hijack the party, drag it away from its conservative roots, fuse populism into Trump’s preexistent liberal ethos, and otherwise render the party unrecognizable.
These were people who were, by that point, inundated with neoconservative beliefs: that America is an ideal, that Afghanis who sodomized boys could be American if they just believed a few things differently, that Iraq could be a democracy despite decades, generations, of clan-based politics that was only held in check by the Baathist regime, and more importantly, that America was a set of axioms reducible to beliefs about power, self-determination, and the stock market.
The neocons who held power, who wrote for major press outlets like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or otherwise were presumably elected politicians, all operated within their own bubbles of neoliberal discourse. Those who read them, divorced from this bubble, assumed they spoke to a greater American ethos: that American identity can be shared with other people. That this ‘idea of’ America, this core belief, that people should be allowed to be left alone to do what they want and make their own decisions, was something that could be universally inflicted upon the world—this was what the average republican voter sort of believed. And they had believed it for a long time.
This belief is wrong. Self-governance is not an impossible idea, but it requires a milieu of cultural background and tradition that facilitates it. And it’s possible that America, circa the end of the eighteenth century, was on the verge of realizing this—and indeed it probably was given how America was made. But America was not made the same way that Iraq was, or that Afghanistan was, or, actually, how any other country in the world was. America is a unique case in the history of nations. It started off as a colony of Anglo-Saxons who imported some Irish and West Africans, and eventually, Italians, Germans, and various Eastern Europeans. It became a world power, to the detriment of its mother nation, in only three generations. And this despite the massive slaughter of its own people in the mean time.
One might even call such a nation exceptional.
Since the end of the Cold War, and even during its climactic end, American Exceptionalism has found dwindling to nonexistent support from the left. We are not a special nation, they argue. Not only are we not a special nation, we should be ashamed of our past and should retreat from the world stage, hide our flag, and hamstring our standard of life with various sorts of regulations, be they environmentally related or otherwise. The liberal elite who championed these positions were living so well that they could afford to view this idea within a sphere in which some amount of tasteful humility could be construed as appropriate self-depreciation, and not only was this allowed, it was expected.
Many of them did not want to realize that the people they were getting their talking points from were not speaking from places of humility, however, but rather places of genuine malice for the American project. Radicals. Communists. In some cases, open extremists. One would have expected that by 2016, they’d have started to realize the openly anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-white the base of the Democratic party’s policies and aesthetics had become. Some probably did and found it charming, the way disconnected old men are reminded of their college days. Some simply refused to believe it. But they were mobilized nonetheless because of the alternative to the neoliberal world order that happened to win the election that year.
Donald Trump
What the Never Trumpers believed in 2016 was harsh at the time, if only because Trump’s platform, regardless of his background, was decidedly not what the Democrats wanted. His subsequent four years as President, too, despite complaints, were also decidedly not what Democrats wanted. And they made that very clear by slandering him in the media, starting riots across the country, and sabotaging his policies whenever they could.
But what the Never Trumpers were right about was this: Trump did hijack the GOP from its party’s base up. And, unlike what they thought, that was good. The GOP was rotting where it sat in 2016, having no answer to Obama’s eight years in office and having grown comfortable, in terms of its leadership, of playing the part of an incompetent heel. Although the party suffered, the politicians themselves didn’t mind being cast as diligent conservatives immobilized by liberal actors and bureaucracy, as they retained access to the insider benefits that DC circles enjoy. Some of the party’s leaders were easily paid off, either by financial incentive or by simple social amelioration.
They believed the beltway narrative, and that meant that it was supposed to have been Her Turn: by any outward indication, Hillary Clinton was the obvious Next President of the United States. The GOP wasn’t supposed to field a candidate that could tackle her, because the GOP was supposed to field another Romney or McCain. Another loser.
Instead, we got Trump. Whether he intended to or not, he tapped into the collective rage that most Americans, particularly white Americans, felt during Obama’s presidency. The race baiting, implementation of social justice programs into the HR departments of every corporate entity operating on American soil, the finance sector’s obfuscation of the 2008 economic and real estate crash, the negative impact that all of Obama’s policies had on the middle class and whites in particular—all of these primed an electorate desiring nothing more than revenge on a system that had totally failed them. And this in conjunction with the then-recently popularized narratives regarding the opiate crisis and the fact that immigration—and not the kind that was merely illegal—had wrought catastrophic damage across the working classes along America’s production belts.
If the media was to be believed, then white America got its revenge. But life for Americans only improved by increments, and even then, only for four years. We got to listen to the histrionics of a unanimously outraged media complex. We got to watch our prices at the gas pump and the supermarket checkout stabilize. We got to watch Trump appoint three justices to the Supreme Court—none of which were aces in the hole, from a genuinely conservative viewpoint, but they all seemed good enough at the time. And as a consequence of perhaps both of these, we got to watch major court decisions from the Warren era go the way of the Dodo. Roe v. Wade was one.
He has since dropped explicit pro-life support from the GOP’s platform, sublimating the position to the personal consciences of whatever pro-life politicians feel like defending it. It is very clear, now that the Trump team has totally solidified its grasp over the Republican party, that the pro-life caucus was only ever a means to an end: a group to be pacified and pandered to for so long as it was politically convenient. One might consider this politics as usual, but it’s quite a bit worse than that. And it’s well worth considering, despite the election.
Aesthetic of the Pro-Life Cause
It is wrong to say Trump did nothing for the pro-life cause, or that, with regard to the subject, the current party’s platform is indistinguishable from its opposition. Trump appointed two justices who were more conservative than their predecessors and replaced a well-entrenched liberal justice with one whose convictions were at the very least informed by conservative Catholicism. As a result, the court could overturn Roe v Wade; he delivered on an unsaid promise that many in the pro-life movement considered years if not decades off, with the presumption that more social de-engineering was necessary.
It is possible that their presumptions were largely true, however. Abortion remains a compelling policy for liberal women, especially as the Democratic party has leaned more heavily into the anti-natalist tendencies of suicidal generations. Now that the practice has been threatened and the sexual revolution has suffered a real defeat, they are more motivated than ever to see some sort of retaliation. In terms of policies, this would mean turning the election into one about abortion, which, although not impossible for single-issue voters, is a hard sell given the state of everything else going on in the country. Looking at the bigger picture, however, their more thorough retaliation is to take advantage of what overturning Roe actually means.
On the other hand, despite having set the stage to score the greatest pro-life victory in a generation, Trump managed also to scrub from the GOP’s platform any mention of abortion. It must be said, before considering this in more depth, that this is not the same as introducing support for radical pro-abortion policies. The difference has to be remembered. Democrats are not interested in simply preserving some imagined middle ground concession where some states have banned abortion while others permit extermination. They want extermination mandated by federal law; under Harris, enshrining abortion access in the national constitution is something already once attempted and will be attempted again. As that fails, they’ll continue to push for it in as many state constitutions as they can. They’re already doing this. The GOP’s decision to stop with overturning Roe is very obviously a poorly timed retreat in the face of a counteroffensive that they should be defending against rather than running away from.
This point gets at what’s at stake inside GOP politics. The party was not as committed to the pro-life cause as many active pro-life activists seem to realize. For many Americans, the modern GOP was recognizably two distinct and unrelated aesthetics: the evangelical social conservatives (or what remained of them after 2008), and the “fiscally-conservative” types who considered social values to be irrelevant in political discourse. As the Obama years lurched toward their conclusion, the latter dominated. Although Trump carried a massive swell of evangelical support in 2016, they have failed to maintain a consistent voting block in proportions comparable to the early 2000s. Some of this is because they aren’t getting any younger, and some of it is because their children went off to college to become liberals.
Pro-life advocacy will naturally have a greater affiliation with the social conservatives than with the fiscal types. And social conservatism, as it was aesthetically paired with evangelicals for so long, is aesthetically synonymous with rural-suburban conservatism rather than a stuffy, respectable, elite sort that Reaganites and Buckleyites dreamed of half a century ago. The latter wielded real political and social power, for a time. Now the most they’re capable of is financing a media company or two, and even then, they’re self-pronounced Classical Liberals who treat abortion as a troublesome rhetorical topic; they’d much rather discuss tax policies than an ongoing domestic extermination campaign.
Worse, the aesthetic of social conservatism itself has faced a crisis with the coinage of the MAGA movement. That ethos that ran against urban sensibilities found a pairing with social conservatism and the evangelical bloc: one found camaraderie with a southern and predominately rural image, while the other associated with a free-wheeling Dukes of Hazard-styled American grit and glamour. The only problem is, American social conservatism tried to maintain guardrails where this grit and glamour looked to barrel through them. The sexual revolution was a good example.
MAGA, like Trump, values sexual excess as an expression of American freedom. MAGA is fine with homosexuals, be they the kind that drape their behavior in the wholesome trappings of fake wedding rings and infants purchased from surrogate mothers, or the kind who spray their degeneracy in your face by wearing layers of makeup, donning cabaret outfits dyed in red, white and blue, and putting ‘Lady’ in front of their stage name.
MAGA retains enough of a socially conservative undercurrent to recognize that we shouldn’t be pulling the dismembered limbs of children out of their mother’s wombs, so on that, it’s certainly not pro-abortion in the sense that the Democratic party has come to be. But it must be recognized, too, that MAGA is not a platform that is somehow ‘anti-degeneracy’; it encourages that by providing space for it, which marks its position on social ills to be superior to its opposition only by degrees. And in case the last two decades haven’t made it clear enough, marking superiority by only degrees is just sliding down the slope at a slower speed.
Politics of the Pro-Life Cause
On a state-by-state basis, as of this writing, twenty-two states have either ‘protected’ or expanded access to abortion laws as defined at the time of Dobbs, while twenty-six have either enacted restrictions or banned the practice entirely. Of the former, ten states have ratified abortion into their constitutions, making it very difficult to do away with and, in the wake of Dobbs, resulting in a surge of abortions nationwide.
Yet the narrative, backed up by stats from, for instance, Pew, insists that more Americans than ever support the legality of the practice and, more worrying still, are getting more abortions than they have since the 1990s. It is likely with this in mind, coupled with the Trump team’s general disposition toward sexual ‘freedom’, that the GOP quietly backed away from its support of the pro-life movement. In other words, the GOP got scared. They believe the stats that anti-abortion sentiment is in decline, which would make support for the pro-life cause an increasing political liability. Given that Roe really did get overturned, it seems more likely the case that it’s a political liability precisely because the pro-life cause won for once, and might go on to achieve more goals when it has some modicum of institutional support.
Those on the right who have seen the pro-life cause as a liability have let their view of politics in America be dictated by the left. They judge the reality to be that Americans, broadly speaking, desire to keep their access to child murder, and any stands against this are from a relatively sizable minority of squeaky wheels. The question to ask is how deeply that matters. Until the party’s platform erased its explicit support earlier this year, pro-lifers were, for the most part, amenable to various sorts of compromises in candidates so long as some element of their cause was respected, even if it was just the most basic of rehearsed lip service. Now we get to look forward to a GOP whose politicians and spokespeople will be accepted by the party even if they perform abortions in their spare time.
If there is a silver lining, perhaps the fact that they’re at least being honest about how fallen away the GOP really is from social conservatism in any sense of the word. Trump’s GOP is not the same establishmentarian GOP of ten years ago, as Never Trumpers lamented. But it is as far away from a genuinely conservative platform as the establishment feared it was going to be, particularly in light of his public denouncement of the rather tame Project 2025 plan. What the GOP feared in 2016 was that Trump would usher in a regime that carried genuine American values. Instead, Trump’s politics have turned out to be what they always were: 1980s New York Liberalism, but with a larger smattering of domestic labor support. Patriotic, to be sure, but patriotism is only presently a measure of conservatism because of how radically anti-American the self-identified liberal party has become.
Which brings into focus the other question: are there enough women who could clearly sway an election if the GOP maintained its position on abortion? Probably, yes. It’s been argued that the 2018 midterms turned out the way they did in part because of Dobbs. But a more useful question to ask is this: how many more would turn out for that cause specifically compared to how many are turning out to vote against Donald Trump? The Democrat voter base is already radicalized enough thanks to eight years of anti-Trump rhetoric and unfounded fears that he’d end democracy—if not the world—should he be given power. Now they’re afraid of him carrying out tangible retaliation for how they’ve treated him. It seems unlikely that there would be any more women who would turn out to defend their abortion claims at the ballot box than there already are turning out thanks to Trump Derangement Syndrome.
There are those who claim the pro-life cause has gotten nothing done in the fifty years since Roe’s passage. They ignore, apparently, the monumental efforts in opening pregnancy care centers and operating charitable adoption services, often and in many places while legally attacked by state apparatuses who remain unfriendly to those who don’t support the liberal agenda. The Catholic Church is not least among these forces. We can complain as much as we want about the corruption in and around these institutions, but one cannot pretend that the cause is socially, morally, or even pragmatically bankrupt. Some in the movement may be, as recent debacles regarding particular high-profile figures indicate, but the cause itself is and will always be a just cause. Even for those on the right who do not share a consistent framework with which to define life, the extermination of one’s own people is not a practice that can be excused, explained away, or pardoned. It’s not merely political.
If only the pro-life movement, who is supposed to support and carry out the ends of this cause, could recognize this as well.
Lesser Evil
In 2023, the Biden administration wanted to send feds after small arms manufacturers because certain guns were used in certain specific shootings. The plan cited Harris as the one in charge of it. Maybe she was. So far, Harris hasn’t said anything about it.
Earlier this year, in 2024, the Biden administration, directly from Harris, addressed the immigration crisis of the past few years by speaking past it. “We’re a nation of immigrants.” “Congress must act.” Meanwhile, well. The extent of the immigration crisis now is so dire that no American can pretend it isn’t there without acting against his conscience.
That’s probably the point of it all, but that’s also the future, under Harris. No solution. No grand plan. Not even a road map. Unlike Hillary, Harris was never supposed to be president. Hillary had behind her a long and steady media campaign of messaging, going back into the 90s. For those that remember, Obama snatching the primary from her in 2008 was nothing short of remarkable. Of course she was supposed to be the first woman president of America. She was the most prolific and active First Lady in living memory. What better way to cap the new geopolitics of the post-Soviet era than have the American hegemon don a pantsuit?
And yet, the Bush era found itself conquered by the Chicago upstart: some senator who showed up for barely one third of the votes he was supposed to. The Clinton Foundation wasn’t strong enough to fight whatever was going on in the DNC at the time, and she so accepted a Secretary of State position—with insane, disastrous results—in order to bide time for 2016. Then 2016 came and the rest was history. Good riddance.
One can see some semblance of machination at work in Hillary’s rise. Her fall came from the fact that she was who she was: petty, unlikable, and riddled with a sordid political past that couldn’t be covered up with the Clinton charm—which at that point had been shed like discarded reptilian skin. But she wasn’t stupid, either. She knew the landscape, knew the players, knew how to get what she wanted, and she knew how to get things done. It wasn’t good enough, but she did have some goal in mind, even if it was something as petty as to simply remain in power.
Harris has none of this.
Harris doesn’t know what she wants, because Harris knows that she probably shouldn’t be where she is to begin with. Every instance that she appears before cameras reveals a woman terrified that she’ll be found out, or worse, terrified with the knowledge that she has already been found out and that the media apparatus just panders to her. It’s the playout of a bizarre schizophrenia witnessed in real time; others, however, will attribute her quirks—perhaps rightfully, it’s hard to tell—to drug or alcohol abuse.
It need not be said that there is no possible way that anyone of good conscience can support the Harris ticket. America has been stretching toward its breaking point for several administrations, and the tension is only getting more severe. Harris is the type of candidate to push it further. One can imagine Obama except a lot dumber, even more insufferable in mannerisms, and even more obviously a fraud. The only people who could tolerate such a figure are ones driven truly past the frontiers of madness by the media’s portrayal of Donald Trump.
The DNC can still win with such an absurd candidate. Make no mistake. This election has been Trump’s to lose from the start, and Trump’s position on abortion, IVF, infanticide, et. al. is a perfect example of him taking the opportunity and lighting it on fire. He will not gain votes by going soft on abortion. So far, given the response by the pro-life lobby, he’s only likely to lose them. But the pro-life lobby has to remember that American democracy is a zero-sum game.
Voting is not a personal stamp of approval in the democratic game. It’s a mark of toleration and the exercise of what little choice in the matter we’re tossed by the ruling class. That someone would argue, and that someone else might believe, that we should hold our votes for the perfect candidate in 2024 is, frankly, absurd.
Conclusion
The sobering part of this ordeal is the recognition of America’s total decline. The GOP’s willingness to drop its pro-life platform, and Trump’s audacity to reframe the issue as considering pro-lifers to ‘have a seat at the table,’ to paraphrase Don Jr., shows that this isn’t something that will be remedied at the national level. Worse, it shows that the GOP hasn’t really been on board with the pro-life commitment in many years—decades, if one had to guess, though given their somewhat limp-wristed support even during the Bush era, one can only assume that it has been anything more than a political convenience for much longer.
One can dismiss this as simple political maneuvering, but the consequences paint a darker picture. Take a seemingly unrelated fad that sprouted up like a weed over the summer: a video of Hailey Welsh, random Knoxville citizen out for a night on the town, that went viral after she joked about fellatio. The common vulgarity of a drunk blonde, for some reason, spread like wildfire across social media; by the following week, she’d shared a stage with a country band and had camera crews out to interview her. Now she’s got a podcast sanctioned by Logan Paul, for some reason.
MAGA’s image is wedded to the sort that embraced this fad. They like being caricatured as redneck, truck-driving, gun-toting, homely country folk, and more importantly, sexually libertine, able to joke publicly about sexual adventures, and to mock beliefs about vice. Far from the urban liberal belief, MAGA’s image also backs homosexuality with an outdated ninety’s sensibility: a simultaneous decree that whatever two consenting adults do in the bedroom isn’t our business coupled with a tacit acknowledgment that homosexuals somehow have superior fashion or artistic sensibilities. The fact MAGA personalities who happen to be transsexuals still haven’t gone away, still have audiences tied to MAGA aesthetics, and worse, that these audiences have grown since 2016 only hammers the point home.
This is one of the main directions the GOP is going. These people celebrate sexual vice every bit as much as their political opponents do; they just dress it up in blue jeans and ten gallon hats instead of cabaret lingerie. The loss of the pro-life platform is one more indication of the nation’s slipping toward Gehenna. Pro-lifers at the grassroots could operate with the assumption that, even if they did not receive funding or direct support from the GOP, there were people in the party who supported their efforts and the party itself remained tied to that cause. Sometimes mere lip service can keep the ship on-course. Now the lip service is dropped and with it, any pretenses of a sensible voyage.
One might ague, as one must always argue, that politicians are means to ends, that damage can be reversed, that it’s not the end of the world. All true. One must then counter that enshrining anything that safeguards abortion under state constitutions is a loss until such time a federal ban can override them. These constitutional referendums will kill a lot of kids. That federal ban is the next ground to be fighting for, and the pro-life cause already knows this. Are they jumping the gun? When considered politically, probably. The opposition is worse, et cetera. But at least they don’t pretend that the GOP hasn’t lost something integral to the definition of conservatism: the conservation of the nation’s literal life.
And this is the only argument that stands up is that even in spite of all this, Trump will be less damaging than another four years of whatever we’ve been experiencing so far. A Trump win won’t be a victory. In 2016, it was a victory. It should have been one in 2020. But at this point, it’s a different choice of defeat. Victory must come from somewhere else. It will have to come with Trump but in spite of the platform he’s riding on in 2024.
Self Promotional Blurbs:
Subscribe to our mailing list:
Want to support our work? Consider buying us a few beers or, better yet, becoming a monthly subscriber at Ko-Fi. $5 or $10 a month grants access to exclusive content.
