David Frum - Dems Need to Open Their Doors to Old-School Republicans

 

They have only themselves to blame but there's no point dwelling on that. 

Old School or what I call patrician Republicans are realizing that, even with Trump gone, the GOP they once knew is over.

In 2017, the longtime conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted: “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

A camp divided against itself - forever?

Maybe the future pro-Trump Republican was always slightly more sympathetic to authoritarianism, maybe slightly more tolerant of corruption than the future anti-Trump Republican. Then Trump shoved authoritarianism and corruption into the political debate—and suddenly people who liked Trump were forced into positions they had never planned to take.

The price they paid.

They found themselves political exiles, banished or self-banished from the political home of a lifetime. This was a metaphorical exile only, not the shattering disaster of physical exile. For most anti-Trump conservatives, the losses of political exile have been emotional, cultural, and spiritual rather than material. Yet these losses were unnerving enough in their own way. Human beings are group animals, and they are frightened and stressed when expelled from the groups to which they have belonged. Our political attachments often matter much more to us than our political ideas—which is why, when forced to choose, so many Republicans and conservatives discarded their former ideas in order to preserve their former attachments.

A new coalition.

The Democrats cannot win with a base-first strategy. Their base is not cohesive or big enough, and does not live in the places favored by the rules of U.S. politics.

Yet this disparity is not ultimately a disadvantage. The comparative weakness of the Democratic base obliges Democrats to build broad national coalitions of a kind that Republicans have not achieved since the days of the Chrysler K-Car. And those broader coalitions in turn deliver better government than would or could be delivered by a narrower ideological faction.

What Republicans-in-Exile can do for/to the Democrats.

A person who votes even once to protest against cruelty and in favor of empathy will be changed enduringly by that single action. We often act first and then develop the explanations for our actions later—and those new explanations may force us to reconsider previous prejudices.

The pro-Trump Republicans and conservatives got one thing right about their anti-Trump former comrades: Never Trump was not fundamentally a political movement. It was a moral reflex. Will that reflex now be integrated into normal politics in the post-Trump era? If it can, it will transform American politics—and very possibly save the country from the forces of polarization, extremism, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

Comments

  1. rumleyfipsSeptember 13, 2021 at 11:56 AM

    Frump hasn't changed. He still thinks it's up to Democrats to change their beliefs to be more like Republicans.

    ReplyDelete
  2. rumleyfipsSeptember 13, 2021 at 12:55 PM

    It was Crystal but he and Frump seem unable to think that Democrats need to change to Republican thinking to have any legitimacy. And this id the ' brains trust '.

    ReplyDelete

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