NeverTrumpers Must “Fork” the GOP

Where are NeverTrumpers or anti-Trump conservatives headed? After helping to deny Trump a second term, many leading lights in the movement have moved from beating Trump to “saving democracy,” which basically means creating a front with Democrats to block a party that has become a threat to American democracy.

If history is any teacher, a number of these dissidents will leave the GOP to become independents or Democrats. They will follow the trajectory of moderate and liberal Republicans of a generation before. Heterodox Republicans almost never stay heterodox forever.

A number of NeverTrumpers think that for the sake of democracy they can’t simply vote for Biden for President, they have to support the Democrats totally. They talk of supporting the Biden agenda and as we saw in the Virginia governor’s race, support the Democrat Terry McCauliffe, fearing the Republican candidate, Glen Youngkin was a Trumpist.  Robert Kagan, a known conservative and a fellow at the Brookings Institution also champions this method, taking such anti-Trump politicians like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse to task for not joining Democrats in their desire to take down the fillibuster.

Political parties are by nature, essential institutions in a democratic society. They give people a choice in who they want to govern them or hold other parties accountable when the party is in opposition. Parties are the “gateway drug” into the political process, allowing citizens in a liberal democracy the opportunity to influence public policy, meet with politicians or even run for office. When a political party is functioning properly, it should be able to form people into responsible citizens who will maintain the democratic values we all hold dear.

In many ways, NeverTrumpers are trying to change the party indirectly. The long-sought dream of NeverTrumpers and moderates before them is that if enough people leave, the party will lose election after election and will finally come to its senses. But that hasn’t happened. As long as we are a 50–50 nation and as long as the Democrats don’t have their act together, you aren’t going take out Trump and Trumpism. Trump and his acolytes have gone from strength to strength forcing out those politicians that stand up against Trump. Those politicians fight a lonely fight that ends up with early retirements.

People leave believing that leaving the party will cause it to collapse and become a rump party. This has not happened and will never happen. Leaving isn’t going to change things in the party. It amounts to an “Underpants Gnome theory” approach to politics: if people leave the party then the party will change. That’s not going to happen. The Republican Party will still be “Trumpy” and increasingly opposed to liberal democracy.

NeverTrumpers are right to be concerned about the threat that Trump and many Republicans post to American democracy. The Republican Party of 2021 is not a well-functioning political party. It is incredibly dysfunctional and in many ways is working to destabilize democracy. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden said in a study last fall that the GOP is heading down a path towards illiberalism. Parties like Fidesz in Hungary or Law and Justice in Poland started out as mainstream conservative parties, but have become authoritarian. Republicans are not far behind, if they aren’t already there.

Unless people are willing to confront the dark forces in the GOP from the inside, the party will cling ever more tightly to those forces, making it hard for the one party that is interested in governing, the Democrats, from doing anything. From President Trump’s cajoling the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” extra votes, to the scores of GOP Members of Congress who won’t certify the votes of the electoral college, we see a party that has become committed to subverting democracy. An unreformed Republican Party will destabilize American democracy itself.

If relying on the Democrats doesn’t work, what will work to roll back Trump’s authoritarianism? Short of starting a third party as Jonah Goldberg and David French have suggested, the goal needs to be working from within the GOP. But it won’t be done by “being a voice within in the party. Individual action won’t suffice, collective action is needed. Borrowing a term from the tech industry, what needs to be done is to re-create the party or better yet, “fork” the party.

The goal here is not to “burn it all down,” but to build things up by creating structures within the party that could use political means for moral ends. This is where forking the party comes in. To fork something is to take the source code of a program and create a distinct program from that code. It shares the code with the mother program, but it is something wholly different from the original. The most obvious example is Google’s Android smartphone operating system. Android is open source, so a company can take the source code and then build their system off of Android.

In politics, a faction is basically forking the current GOP and making something that is similar but not the same. A forked GOP faction would have its own magazines, funders, and think tanks creating its own organism within the larger GOP.

One way to do this is by going back in time by using factionalism.

This view is shared by Steven M. Teles & Robert P. Saldin and you can read about it in the Fall2020 issue of National Affairs.

What is Factionalism? It’s the acknowledgment of heterogeneity within political parties and how they work together (or don’t) to achieve common goals.

In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party is divided into factions that have become institutional. There are factions on the far right and factions that are more centrist. In fact, factionalism presents a more effective opposition than other political parties. This makes sense in Japan since the Liberal Democrats have been in power almost continuously from 1955 to present. The Liberal Democrats have ruled for all but 4 years since their inception.

In the United States, we bemoan the fact that there are only two major parties in the United States. However, until very recently The two major parties had within them a number of smaller “parties” that came together into one party to magnify their power. You had Southern segregationists and northern liberals in the same Democratic party. You had liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits and conservatives like Robert Taft. Our political parties were incredibly heterogeneous. The parties today are far more homogenous (somewhat), but until the 90s, both parties in some ways weren’t coherent at least in our modern minds.

But even in these times where the parties seem to enforce a dreary sameness, the old heterogeneity is still there in a nascent form. There are Democrats that are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (which isn’t a political party) that run as Democrats in order to advance a socialist agenda. In the late 80s and early 1990s, there were Democrats who were part of the Democratic Leadership Council and ran as “New Democrats.”

Some might believe it’s nice that the Democrats have some diversity, but there is no chance of that happening in the GOP. But in reality, it is there; it just hasn’t been properly expressed. Teles and Saladin see a faction that could be made up of NeverTrumpers, a liberal-conservative faction that is visible, but without much power- at this point:

The core voters for this liberal-conservative faction will be the middle class, the college-educated, business managers and owners, and more upwardly mobile members of ethnic minority groups, especially in cities and states where Democratic governance begins pinching their core interests. The faction will find significant economic support in the financial sector, which is generally less socially liberal and more suspicious of increased taxation than the technology entrepreneurs of the West Coast while sharing with them a generally internationalist orientation that makes the nationalism of the populists and socialists anathema. It may also find increasing support among some mainstream business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which is already being pushed to the breaking point by the economic policies of the Trump administration. This faction will still be recognizably conservative — especially on questions of social order like crime and homelessness — as well as suspicious of the regulatory agenda of both progressive Democrats and Republican populists.

The appeal and competitiveness of this faction in the bluer parts of the country can already be seen in the re-election of Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts, who, in a somewhat inchoate form, already embrace such an approach. These examples of GOP success in Annapolis and on Beacon Hill are of the lone-wolf variety; fueling a durable faction with something more than charisma will require these leaders and their supporters to build a broader organization and forge connections with like-minded partisans elsewhere. As of yet, Governors Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker have not achieved anything of the sort. However, their success offers hope that building a liberal-conservative faction within the Republican Party is not a fantasy.

But why would a NeverTrumper remain in the GOP even if it is a faction? Because it might provide a successful counter to Trumpism. Commentators like Jonathan V. Last believe that Trump’s hold on the party is permanent, which means there is little that anyone who is opposed to Trump can do about it. But just because Trump has a hold on the party today mean it will be that way in the future. Trumpism is only as strong as people want it to be. Teles and Saldin note that a factionalized party very well could give dissenting members of Congress an organization that could support candidates that didn’t bend the knee to the President. One of the reasons there have been so few legislators willing to stand up to Trump is because they saw what happened to people like Jeff Flake and Mark Sanford, two legislators that opposed Trump and were voted out of office. A factionalized GOP would also have some control over the nomination process as an informal primary could take place that would weed out unqualified candidates.

What makes factionalism so attractive is that one doesn’t have to “win” outright, gaining control over the whole party. A faction only needs to organize a small party of the GOP to gain influence. The goal is to make room in the party for moderates or Anti Trump people, not to win the whole party.

Nor does it need to be created from whole cloth. There are already some organizations and people in place a nascent movement could build on. Governors Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker from Maryland and Massachusetts respectively can create a base of power that can reach beyond their states. Moderate Republicans in Kansas already act like a faction and work with Democrats at times in order to thwart the conservative faction of the GOP. Organizations like Principles First and Standup Republic, which were created in response to Trump could also be the basis of a future faction within the GOP.

Again, you don’t have to win the whole party, all you have to do is gain a faction, peel off a few of the persuadable and join the Democrats to get objectives to become a reality.

But for any of this to happen, people have to want it and I’m not so sure NeverTrumpers want to win. A number of NeverTrumpers are wary of What creating a faction is that they will need to make deals with politicians that weren’t sufficiently anti-Trump. But that is what politics is about-making deals to get an objective done. For some NeverTrump has become NeverTrumpism. That’s a problem because it makes the perfect the enemy of the good. It begs the question, why don’t Republican dissidents want to fight for change from within? Why do they place hope on the Democrats sending the GOP into electoral oblivion when again and again the Dems have not delivered? Why is it so hard to build an organization of support from within?

I know, Biden has to get his act together and Democrats have to govern and progressives and moderates need to get along. But meanwhile couldn’t Democrats do more to discredit a GOP that will in 2022 feature candidates you wouldn’t tolerate in your workplace or allow in your home?

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 10, 2021

If a moderate or NeverTrump faction is to emerge there needs to be people who are willing to see a different Republican party. They need to be able to take on the bad elements in the party directly and not through the Democrats. That is the only way American politics will change for the better. It won’t happen through a third party or do-good government scheme. The only way to paint the barn is to paint the barn.

But right now it seems like no one is interested in casting a vision for a modern party. No one is interested in steering the party away from Trumpism, it’s flirtations with authoritarianism or overt racism.

Everyone has problems with the party in its current state, but no one sees a need to steer the party in another direction. People say they want change, but their actions show their disinterest.

What people want is a party that somehow vanishes from the scene. We want wishes instead of getting involved in the work of politics. We want the GOP to be out of sight and out of mind. Anti-Trump forces want to wash their hands of the matter and move on. But a Trumpified and increasingly illiberal Republican Party will not leave the scene.

Unless people are willing to confront the dark forces in the GOP from the inside, the party will cling ever more tightly to those forces, making it hard for the one party that is interested in governing, the Democrats, from doing anything. But in a larger sense, an unreformed GOP will destabilize American democracy itself.