There were a handful of primary elections last week in Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, and while the results from Middle America were more or less predictable—“establishment” Republicans prevailed against some Trumpier-than-thou candidates—the headlines were revealing in their way: “Parties’ Stalwarts Hold Ground Against Rebels,” declared the front-page account in the New York Times; the Washington Post reported that “In Senate primaries, GOP avoids worst fears.”
A cynic like me might be forgiven for detecting disappointment. For decades now, the imminent collapse of the Republican party has been a perennial story, like the loss of family farms or the crisis in health care. Two causes are usually cited: the ever-changing demographics of the electorate—elderly white millionaires will soon be outnumbered by college kids and rising immigrants—and the party’s perpetual lurch toward the right. The peculiar political genius of Donald Trump seems to have combined these two subversive trends into one. And yet, in the same news cycle as those primaries, a new CNN poll revealed that the Democratic advantage in the 2018 “generic congressional ballot” has largely evaporated.
How did that happen?
I should begin by declaring my conviction that confident predictions about the political future are essentially worthless. The late British prime minister Harold Wilson once counseled that “a week is a very long time in politics,” and Wilson’s rule applies over here as well. As Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign staff might testify, you can diagnose trends, crunch numbers, and point fingers, but things happen, stuff matters, and human nature is unpredictable. The Republican party may well be on the verge of collapse—it rose, after all, from the ashes of the Whigs—but it also seems talented at adaptation, the principal political survival skill. In politics, as in biology, Charles Darwin was prescient.
Political journalism seems to be divided between those who believe that Republican adaptation to Trump’s unconventional presidency is its death knell, and deservedly so, and those who think that Trump is another bump in the road. I place myself firmly in the latter category. I would be the first to acknowledge that what might politely be called the president’s style and comportment are not my ideal; but perfection is unattainable in life, much less politics. A pragmatic adjustment to the Trump phenomenon explains a lot about “establishment” party behavior, especially in Congress. And of course, tweets aside, Trump has proved to be a far more conventional Republican than not.
Indeed, in the recent primaries, Republican “stalwarts” were largely distinguished from their Make-America-Great-Again/Tea Party/insurgent challengers on stylistic grounds. In West Virginia, for example, it would be difficult to find substantial distance on the issues between the eventual winner in the Senate primary, state attorney general Patrick Morrisey, and the media’s favorite candidate, ex-coal executive/convict Don Blankenship. Morrisey did not distance himself from Trump, and Blankenship seemed to be running not against the Democratic incumbent (Joe Manchin) but the personification of GOP Washington, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Like most neophyte insurgents, Blankenship succeeded largely in making a spectacle of himself, and the choice for voters was easy.
There’s a lesson here that seems reliably lost on the press: If Republican-leaning voters are comfortable with political expectations—that is to say, at the present moment, if they prefer Trump’s policies, if not his personality, to the alternative—they will overlook the defects that offend detractors.
Moreover, from the GOP standpoint, the president’s comparative success, thus far, has sent the resistance spiraling ever deeper into excess. Trump is now routinely likened to Hitler and wise voices on the left warn about the signs of fascism. But why would anyone else take such talk seriously? Sinclair Lewis’s famous description of the imminent arrival of American fascism— It Can’t Happen Here—was published 83 years ago during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Goldwater delegates at the 1964 Republican convention, in their matching gold lamé vests, were compared to the uniform ranks of the SS. ’Twas ever thus.
And lest we forget, Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat prompted much discussion of his party’s unpromising future. The discussion was not misplaced: Lyndon Johnson had put together a mighty coalition that gained 61 percent of the popular vote—a figure unmatched since—and increased the Democrats’ already-prohibitive majorities in Congress and state legislatures.
From that vantage point, in the winter of 1964-65, it was impossible to see if the growth of the Democratic vote could ever be arrested or the share of the shrinking Republican vote increased. And then as now, demographic trends seemed to indicate permanent Democratic dominance. Except that they did not. Just as lowering the voting age to 18 in 1972 proved advantageous not to the antiwar left but to the silent-majority right, the 1966 off-year elections signaled a trend that, while scarcely decisive, led two years later to the election of a Republican president.
The Democratic and Republican parties are both a curious coalition of disparate tribes, polite neighbors, vested interests, and changing attitudes. Yet these matching quilts are regarded as a Democratic strength but a Republican weakness. They are, in fact, an inescapable mark of our two-party system. And just as the Democrats of today are very different from their brethren of the Kennedy-Johnson age, the post-Reagan Republican party is not, as the press likes to put it, your grandfather’s GOP. Trump is an evolutionary symptom, not a sign of the apocalypse.