When Donald Trump rides back up that escalator (figuratively at least) he will leave behind a political party that did not welcome him, never accepted him, and – I strongly suspect – is glad to see him leave and get out of their hair. He was never the head, or leader, or whatever, of the Republican Party (not that I am at all certain who was), and now that he's leaving the Republicans can settle back into their accustomed torpor, where every day is a lazy day in the steaming tropics and all that is needed is a hammock and a cold drink garnished with a rice paper umbrella. But is this the action of any sort of political party? Trump's program was their program, whether they liked it or not – and with him gone they are back to being program-less and free of ideas. How long can they survive under those conditions?
The Republicans do have a future, but just not on the national level. They will continue to be players in various redoubts across the fruited plain – not including the coasts, of course, nor various liberal enclaves in flyover country (cities controlled by Democrats plus university towns). They will enjoy dominance in some state legislatures and may be elected governors – although how much good it will do is questionable, since judges everywhere seem committed to reinforcing the “progressive” agenda at all costs (not to mention, the last gasp of state autonomy will be the upcoming elimination of the Electoral College). And they will, of course, be active at the county, small city, town, and village level. But on the national level I consider them the walking dead, and here's why.
But first a comment. Now and then someone – not necessarily a disgruntled Republican, it could be a liberal engaging in triumphalism – will contend that Donald Trump killed the Republican Party by, first, having the unmitigated gall to enter the Republican primaries in 2016, then to be nominated (aided by the Russians, no doubt – still an article of faith for the Democrats and the mainstream media), and then to be elected (ditto). And Republicans ever since then have been wringing their hands that here's this Godzilla-like creature in their midst who's ruining everything and giving Republicans a bad name, and that the country will never forgive the Republicans for having foisted Trump off on them, and that this spells doom for generations to come, et cetera.
I have a slightly different take on this. My opinion is that Trump actually saved the Republican Party from its own boring, colorless incompetence... injected new life into it (or tried to)... and kept it, basically, alive for four more years -- since it was at death's door by the end of the Obama administration, and a Hillary victory would have been the coup de grace (or coup de disgrace, whatever). The problem is that most Republicans, and especially the “never Trumpers”, would disagree with this, and contend that the party would be in much better shape now if it hadn't been forced to, somehow, go along with the bulk of Trump's initiatives, or at least not actively oppose them (with a few notable exceptions).
Party loyalty is, of course, party loyalty, not loyalty to any one person; all we have to do is go back to the Watergate era to find confirmation of that. (And at a slightly earlier time, a lot of Democrats bailed on LBJ.) But sometimes party loyalty involves compromise – doing what you have to do. And yet there were, and are, people who disagree, the foremost example having been John McCain, who took an active role in subverting the Trump administration from Day One. And Mitt Romney was, basically, McCain's understudy.
But the point is that Trump, simply by being who he is and doing what he did, at least kept the Republican “brand” on the market, even though it was an operation not unlike the process of keeping a disembodied brain alive in a jar like in some horror movie. (Except in the case of the Republicans, he was keeping a body alive without a brain – not even the “Abby Normal” brain from “Young Frankenstein”.)
So Trump gave the Republicans a new lease on life, except they didn't want it and didn't appreciate it. They would rather have been dead (as a party) than be seen as supporting Trump, as many of them said quite explicitly during the 2016 campaign. Distance from Trump = virtue and respectability was the message. He was as much an outsider to them as he was to the liberals/Democrats/progressives.
So now they get to return to the soporific creature comforts of minority status, except this time for keeps. Which means, incidentally, that the U.S. finally capitulates and converts to a one-party system on the national level, which is an inevitable characteristic of tyrannies and dictatorships everywhere, and that the Democratic primaries become the equivalent of the election, assuming that the Republicans even bother having primaries any longer. (Many states, cities, and counties already have a one-party system, and you can generally tell which they are by measuring their level of incompetence, corruption, and downright failure – not to mention less-exalted measures like the number of homeless and the incidence of fecal matter on public property.)
But why else, aside from their general demeanor and appearance, are the Republicans the walking dead? It's because they have become a minority party that can barely capture enough independent and “swing” votes to win elections, except in certain “deep red” locales. And why, in turn, is this? One reason is the power of ideas; the Democrats have them, and the Republicans don't. Say what you like about “AOC” for example, she has ideas. They may be wrong-headed, foolish, and delusional, and reflect profound ignorance, but they are ideas, and they serve to energize and inspire. And when revolution is in the air, ideas are all that count; cold reason and pragmatism can take a hike. And, of course, youth must triumph! By definition! Of course, the youth of the 1960s are now the grizzled veterans of the culture wars, whether they consider themselves to be on the winning side or not. They may have won many battles, but the culture war is still on or Trump would never have been elected.
Is there a Republican AOC out there anywhere? Some talk-show hosts might qualify, but they already have paying jobs and are not about to enter politics. We are, once again, in a time of revolution, the way we were in the 1960s, and the Young Turks in Congress are at the forefront, with the Old Guard forced to deal, cope, dither, rationalize, whatever it takes to hold on to their weakening grip on power. The 60s were not just about “sex, drugs, and rock & roll”, although those were the loss leaders. They were about more profound cultural changes, which took root then and are being promoted to new levels at the present time. Anyone who wonders when this process will stop – when it will be “mission accomplished” – has missed the concept of continuous revolution, of which the most prominent advocate was Chairman Mao, but which has plenty of lesser followers, including the present-day governments of Cuba and Venezuela (not to mention Antifa and BLM on the home front). For them, the revolution is not finished until Utopia is realized, and since Utopia can never be realized, the revolution is never over. Call it a full employment act for “agents of change”.
Another reason – and this is old news, but still – is that the Democrats are busy importing new constituents from other countries, primarily Central America but other places as well. And these people are willing to do work that Americans just won't do – namely reproduce. So... to over-generalize just a bit, you have self-sterilizing Democrats and liberal eunuchs bolstering their numbers by letting people in who have a vested interest in their programs, i.e. “benefits”. It's a smart move, for sure. And even if conservatives do have an edge when it comes to reproduction (it would be more accurate to say that traditionalists of many different kinds have an edge in that department), there's no way it can make up for what amounts to a siege from the Third World. There is a human wave – nay, a tsunami – coming across our southern border every day, and making its way even to the northernmost reaches of the land, hence the incidence of Mexican restaurants in places like Minot, North Dakota. History will record this as one of the great migrations of humanity, but it's hard to appreciate historical significance when you're getting overrun. (One consolation for those who don't believe in the American Empire is that this may be the biggest single factor in its demise; time will tell. There is, after all, a high correlation between the death of empires and said empires being overrun by aliens, although the precise order of events varies.)
Then you have good old generational differences – and, as always, the revolutionaries are on the young side and the conservatives are on the old side. This is not to say that the conservatives will one day be totally replaced by the revolutionaries, because even in the worst of times there are people who, somehow, manage to engage in rational thinking... but we are, basically, looking at a revolutionary society on the national level (a process which has been building slowly over a century at least, but which is now coming to full fruition) which will do everything in its power (which is considerable) to silence and neutralize all opposition, if not engage in its outright extermination. (As things stand, the liberals are busy exterminating themselves through abortion, which is ironic to say the least. So the race is on – do they cease to exist during or after the revolution? Time will tell. And if they do cease to exist, who keeps the revolution going? Oh, right – immigrants. But many of them are way more conservative and traditionally-minded than American liberals. So maybe irony will win in the end.)
So, to sum up, Trump arguably saved us from a headlong rush into this fate for four years. But it does seem inevitable; the long-term trends are what they are... and I haven't even touched on aggravating factors like the national debt, crony capitalism, environmental degradation, decaying infrastructure, the cost of empire, the collapse of our public education system, social media turning us all into robots, corruption in general, and so on. Everything that's happening at this time can be considered an accelerant; there are no counter-trends that I can think of.
So what we should be seeing very soon is the final death rattle of the Republicans on the national level – an event which will be celebrated far and wide, no doubt. And the conventional wisdom will be that Trump was what did it – he was the bull in the china shop, the disrupter, the destroyer. But if that's true, as Trump leaves the political stage the Republicans should expect to recover whatever respect they enjoyed before he took that fabled escalator ride. The problem with that idea is they didn't enjoy any such respect, except possibly in their own deluded world view. And remember that Trump's hard-core supporters didn't vote for him because he was a Republican; they voted for him because he was who he was. (He might even have won as an independent candidate, the way Ross Perot tried to do.) So without him to prop them up, the Republicans are going to collapse – said collapse being long overdue. And Trump's hard-core supporters will fade back into the fields and forests of flyover country, satisfied that, for one brief shining moment, their voices were heard and their values were honored. They will hunker down and wait out the revolution, hoping that one day they, or their descendants, will once again have a voice.
