But in the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future. Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion. One former top RNC staffer told me he no longer speaks to his once-close colleagues; a conservative policy expert who runs a think tank in Washington, D.C., says he’s become adept at steering conversations away from politics and toward college football. Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.
Of the various explanations that have been advanced in such quarters to explain Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Roy’s may be the most explosive. Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters. The element of the party that he once dismissed as a fringe, in other words, now seems to form its core. [...]
Over a mug of skim-milk cappuccino, Roy explained that, while many fellow partisans still see Trump as an anomaly, he now believes Trump is the “logical end point” of the GOP’s long history of racialized politics. “Barry Goldwater was wrong to oppose the Civil Rights Act in 1964,” Roy told me. While the Arizona senator personally supported racial equality, he opposed the landmark legislation on constitutional grounds. His selection as the GOP nominee that year set off a slow-motion realignment of the parties, as the Democrats—once the party of southern segregation—became the party of minority rights, while the Republicans became dominant in the South. For a time, attracting white voters was a winning national strategy for the GOP. But today, Roy believes, the party finds itself not just electorally deficient but morally compromised. “If we aren’t going to confront that history as conservatives and Republicans,” he said, “we don’t deserve minority votes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment