Today, in a remarkable interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Florida-based, long-time Republican strategist and lobbyist Mac Stipanovich conceded that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency — and that he himself will vote for her because “I loathe Donald Trump with the passion that I usually reserve for snakes.”
The interview is worth listening to in full, but I wanted to highlight two key passages. The first is when Stipanovich argued that in the coming 2018 and 2020 election cycles…
This thing in going to shake out one way or another. Either real conservative Republicans — men and women of conscience and enough sense to come in out of the rain — will regain control of the party, or they will leave the party. In many ways I think the election process itself will take care of this. One of the things we’re going to learn here is that you can’t be crazy and win a large constituency general election.
A couple more of those lessons in statewide senate races in ’18, governors races in ’18 where people who embrace Trump go down to defeat because of it, and I think you’ll start seeing that Republican candidates in primaries will be more moderate and get closer to the center right so that they have some chance of winning.
What will be the cure for this is the actual outcomes on Election Day, not the BS on social media.
NPR interviewer Renee Montagne then shrewdly asks Stipanovich if the Republican party can afford to lose the sizable population of Trump supporters, to which he replies:
I don’t know that we’ll lose them. Hopefully, there’ll be some re-education, but if we have to lose them then lose them we must. What Trump stands for is wrong. It’s bad for America. It’s bad for the party. And if we have to wander in the wilderness for a decade until we can get a party that stands for the right things and can make a contribution to the future of America, then we need to wander.
I was taken by Stipanovich’s biblical reference to when Moses and the Hebrews wandered in the desert for a generation before the Hebrews entered the Promised Land— without Moses who died just before that happy moment.
For all his pessimism about the current election, Stipanovich is an optimist, since he thinks the GOP can fix itself in 10 years rather than the 40 it took the Hebrews.
But the real power of the biblical allusion lies in an unanswered question: who is Moses in this analogy? Who in the GOP will retire, die or otherwise vamoose before the party swings back to the center, as Stipanovich predicts?
I think the answer is that there is no Moses for today’s Republican party.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a life-long liberal Democrat, and the prospect of a severely weakened GOP does not fill me with dismay.
But I don’t recognize Trump supporters as classic Republicans. That is, fiscal conservatives who want to limit the size of government and who work in a productive tension with Democrats who want to expand government services to all Americans.
Those fiscal conservatives have no home in today’s GOP, where total obstructionists like Mitch McConnell and gutless weenies like Paul Ryan stand for nothing other than their own will to power. The basket of deplorables who support Trump — and I thought that was a mild characterization by Secretary Clinton — and the fundamentalist Christians who want to destroy the separation of church and state built into the U.S. Constitution do not live in the same world as many of the classic Republican I know and respect.
And this is different than what’s going on with the Democrats, which is evidenced simply by the fact that Bernie Sanders is actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton— there is enough mutual respect and philosophical alignment between Sanders and Clinton that they can work together, which cannot be said of Trump’s competitors for the GOP nomination.
So I disagree with Stipanovich: it’s not time for the entire Republican party to wander in the wilderness for 10 to 40 years. Instead, it’s time to create a new tent for fiscal conservatives (who may or may not be social liberals) who can assemble under a smaller but rational tent where concepts like evidence, truth, principle and patriotism can build bridges across parties rather than walls around them.
I suggest the name “The New Whig Party,” or NWP. The old Whigs were pro-business, pro-market, constitutional conservatives and against tyranny.
Perhaps a New Whig Party can help move the country forward rather than in circles.
We used to have Reagan Democrats, but I can’t imagine Trump Democrats. But I can see an NWP making choices difficult for centrist Democrats.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Final Note: I moderate comments on this blog. Flame wars and trolls need not apply.
Leave a Reply