Steve Benen provides a useful summation of what I’ve been predicting over the years, continuing to occur:
Nearly a decade later, however, Toomey is no longer seen as a conservative stalwart. On the contrary, in some GOP circles, he’s actually a boogeyman. The Hill reported the other day on Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, where the former president tried to generate support for celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who’s running to succeed Toomey.
Trump … took aim at former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick, Oz’s primary challenger in the Senate race, saying he is similar to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who is retiring from the upper chamber after his current term and was one of the seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump last year.
…
To drive home the point, consider how much company Toomey has. The Texas Tribune reports today, for example, that the Bush name has lost its political clout in the Lone Star State as the GOP moves further and further to the right. In North Carolina, Pat McCrory was a deeply conservative governor, who’s now seen as a “RINO” Senate candidate.
A decade ago, Mitt Romney was his party’s “severely conservative“ presidential nominee, and now he’s persona non grata for much of the right. Even John McCain’s name in Arizona is now “invoked as an insult“ by conservative Republicans.
And Romney’s partner in that race, Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI), hard right zealot, future Speaker of the House, and boy wonder of wonkhood (since expelled for not being actually wonky enough), has been virtually run out of the Party. If he has any influence, I have not heard of it. He joins a horde of Republicans who’ve left the Party, ostensibly over Trump, but really over what he represents. The Party has been sprinting right, as I’ve been expecting.
But I don’t like Benen’s conclusion:
To fully appreciate Trump’s impact on GOP politics, look no further than the conservative Republicans who’ve been deemed too liberal by the party’s base.
The key question here is to ask, Could only Trump have pushed the Party that far right?
I contend the answer is No.
The Republican Party combination of toxic team politics, in which straight ticket voting is de rigeur, single issue voting, the disappearance of the Party gatekeepers, and the emphasis on winning elections, while scanting the question of competent governance and moderate politics, made the soil fertile for anyone with the wit to realize the party was vulnerable.
But then add in the catalyst of religious zealotry, and the poison of all the previously mentioned features is augmented: God wants you to to vote only Republican, God hates abortion / gun control / business regs / taxes, God favors extremists over those damn compromising moderates – the last seen long ago in the phrase,
Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Memorable, but a dark omen of the future for the Republicans, as this was written for Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) sometime in the 1960s. Returning to my point, Trump reportedly didn’t even want to win, but use the campaign to suck money out of the conservative movement.
The Get Out Of Jail Free card of the Biblical figure of Cyrus, to which anyone who caught the imagination of the evangelical base could be connected, simply made Trump, who allegedly was fabulously rich, which is an important point for the prosperity church segment of the evangelicals, the focal point of a movement that needed a believable leader and had been discarding potential leaders for decades, names such as Falwell, Gingrich, Romney, Ryan, Bush, Allen West (R-TX) – all had a flaw, whether they were too honorable to break the rules and bring the evangelicals their desperately desired power, or too inept at communications, or were the wrong sect, or the wrong color, or couldn’t be extreme enough.
Trump, despite being a master of communication with his base, may be slipping. His crowds are reportedly shrinking, and sometimes he gets booed.
So Benen may blame Trump, but I blame a Party that self-destructed over a couple of decades, following Gingrich’s advice to put victory at the polls over everything else, be it ideological rigor or electoral cheating. Trump was just the lucky guy – if being the most disgraced President in US history can be considered to be lucky – to benefit from Gingrich’s cursed advice.
The question that leaps to mind is whether there’s a politician waiting in the wings who can outdo Trump. Names such as DeSantis, Hawley, Cruz, and a number of others come to mind, but they all have flaws. Meanwhile, the younger generations seem to view the evangelicals and Republicans with great doubt, although the Democrats are not without their own potentially fatal missteps.
Where will it end?
