You Don't Have the Votes

"This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative," declares David Brooks in the opening of his column today. That sounds strange, given the general despair gripping the Republican Party, and in particular the "it would be nice if our party weren't so goddamn crazy" faction of the Republican Party, but his closing paragraph explains what he means:

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

On the one hand, that sounds about right. I've long thought something along these lines: that the Republican Party as we know it has a clear expiration-date, that eventually it would have to reshape itself, but that I couldn't for the life of me imagine what it would come out the other side looking like. Brooks suggests that Trump represents the destruction of the old party, the "model crisis" in which the old Republican ideas, having grown unworkable over the past few decades, come crashing to the ground. This sets up an opening for a new Republican paradigm, a new model for the party.

But here's the thing: that new Republican Party doesn't have the votes. Not yet, and probably not for a long time. The big problem in American politics right now is that there's a section of the country, no longer large enough to win a general election, as it was back in the 1980s, but still big enough to dominate one party's primaries, which is bitterly committed to a mixture of what we might charitably call white nationalism and conservative Christian traditionalism. Those voters want nothing to do with the new Republican Party Brooks wants. They're angry about America's increasing pluralism, and about the fact that white Christians no longer get to just run everything without serious opposition. Hell, it's worse than that, for them, as this piece about Trump-as-Jefferson-Davis observes: like the South after the Election of 1860, these voters are looking at a bleak future of being consistently outvoted by those who would tear down the social institutions and traditions they hold most dear.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "compassionate," but these voters have, it appears, no compassion for anyone outside their own little group, and precious little of it even within the group.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to have an "expansive open" nationalism, but these voters are practically defined by the "closed, ethnic nationalism" Brooks decries.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "honest," but these voters feel so threatened by reality that they demand unwavering loyalty from their politicians to ideas they'd have to be either fools or knaves to espouse.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to focus less on economic theory and more on "sociology," but... well, okay, let's be honest. These voters don't give a damn about homo economicus and the conservative economic theories which have used him as their justification. As for sociology, though, I fear these voters only have interest in "binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections" in one way, and not one that involves "relating across the diversity of a globalized world."

The basic point is that the people voting for Trump like Trump. They like what Trump stands for, and it's everything Brooks is against. What's more, even those Republicans who aren't voting for Trump are mostly voting for Ted Cruz. Let's run Cruz through the Brooks checklist. Compassionate? Hah. He's one of the least compassionate politicians you'll ever see. Expansive and open in his nationalism? Try "let's see if sand can glow in the dark" and "let's secure Muslim neighborhoods." (Actually, file those under the compassion thing as well.) Honest? Well, I guess Cruz is slightly more honest than Trump, but he's hardly honest. And as for sociology, Cruz is as fanatic about Reagan-style conservative economic theory as anyone on the Republican debate stages. Probably more. So between Trump and Cruz, we're looking at close to 80% of the Republican Party's voters who really don't want the kind of party Brooks wants.

So while I'd sure like to think the Republican Party might rise from its Trump-induced ashes in a form similar to what Brooks describes. But I just don't see where it's going to get the votes. Because the thing is, the people who have been deciding to vote for the Republican Party these last few decades are a lot more like Donald Trump than David Brooks. Perhaps that's because what David Brooks is describing is a lot more like Barack Obama's Democratic Party than it is like the Republicans.

In fact, thinking about it a bit, it sort of seems to me like American politics, particularly in the coming years, is divided in something like three parts. The first divide is between people who think that, e.g., global warming and health care and poverty and race discrimination are the problems with the world (broadly liberal priorities) and those who think that, e.g., godlessness and sexual perversion and invading hordes of Muslim terrorists and racial entitlements are the problems with the world (broadly conservative priorities). The latter form the Trump/Cruz part of the electorate. It's the vast majority of Republicans, but probably not much more than a third of the electorate. Then within the first group there's a division between those with broadly conservative (in a traditional, 1950s sense of the word) ideas about how to solve these problems and those with more aggressively liberal, verging on socialist ideas about how to solve them. That last is the people supporting Bernie, plus those who would support him except for fear that he'd lose the general. So then in the middle, the people who have broadly liberal sensibilities about what the problems are but broadly conservative sensibilities about how to fix them, are people like David Brooks. And Barack Obama, at least as he's manifested as President. (It's tough to know how much more radical he might have been in his approach with fewer political constraints.) Of course, it's really more of a spectrum between Brooks at one end and Bernie on the other, with Obama and Clinton somewhere in the middle.

In a lot of ways, this three-way divide looks a lot like the Socialist/Liberal/Conservative party systems we see in many countries. And it would be really, really nice if we could end up kicking the Trump/Cruz-style conservative faction out altogether, and having something like a socialist party and a liberal party. But those reactionary conservatives aren't going away, not all at once anyway. It'll be many decades yet before we can have a party that includes the Trump/Cruz voters but isn't dominated by them. And in the meanwhile, given that people like Brooks are starting to wake up to the fact that the reactionaries really aren't the kind of people they want to be making common cause with, it's awfully tough to see how we're gonna get two parties out of this electorate in the near future.

David Brooks may think it's a great time to be a conservative, but he's looking at a generation of alliance with either the party of Trump or the party of Obama, Clinton, and *gasp* Sanders.