In back rooms and think tanks, Republicans are already mourning their party—and plotting the fight over who’s going to be in it after Trump.By Julia Ioffe
October 28, 2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/donald-trump-2016-gop-civil-war-republicans-rnc-future-214396As the country geared up for the third and final presidential debate last week, the fellows of the storied conservative Hoover Institution gathered in Palo Alto to present their research to the think tank's wealthy patrons. Elsewhere in America, in the homestretch of perhaps the weirdest election the nation has ever experienced, things were getting tense, excited, even feverish. But the rooms at the Hoover retreat at Stanford University could have doubled as a funeral parlor, and the lectures as eulogies for a bygone era. Larry Diamond, a prominent political sociologist known to fellow scholars as “Mr. Democracy,” talked about the breakdown of the party system. Kori Schake, a National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration and adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, spoke about how the U.S. was endangering the international order it had itself created. Peter Berkowitz, a conservative political scientist and commentator, gave a talk about “the unraveling of civil society” in America.
“Obviously the party and the conservative movement are very troubled, and there will obviously be a crisis whether Trump wins or loses,” Berkowitz told me later. “What are the core conservative convictions going forward?”
“If he wins, he will for all intents and purposes reshape what it means to be a Republican,” said Schake when I called her. “We’re fumbling our way through, which I hope will lead us to consensus, but we’re nowhere near it now.”
This election, the conventional wisdom goes, has done tremendous damage to the American body politic, but nowhere is the damage as severe as it is inside the party that nominated the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump. Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. In the face of mounting evidence that Hillary Clinton is set to dominate the electoral map on November 8, Republicans across the right side of the spectrum recognize there’s defeat coming. And behind the scenes, in conversations and closed-door venues—the Hoover gathering was not open to the public—the people who once considered themselves the heart, or at least the head, of the party have begun a very pessimistic reckoning.
As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support. “You’re assuming that ‘establishment Republicans’ are going to be Republicans anymore,” said Juleanna Glover, a GOP lobbyist and former staffer to then-Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri.
“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the party survives.”
Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the U.S., and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.
The chasm that opened first was intellectual: The neocon movement, which was, in essence, the brain trust of the latter Bush, “has broken off,” Berkowitz said. The next fissure appears to be generational: The so-called reformicons—a priesthood of intellectual Gen X-ers who have been trying to recalibrate Reagan’s vision for the conditions of the 21st century—are at the very heart of the agonized intraparty conflict. On one hand, they’ve often been seen as the potential ideological future of the party. On the other, a resoundingly loud majority of their electorate, the very people for whom they were tending the flame, have roundly rejected their vision. Few in the Republican base in 2016 cared much for free trade and supply-side economics, preferring the isolationist, nativist, paleocon teachings of the itinerant preacher Trump.
Establishment stalwarts in their 60s, meanwhile, are rolling their eyes at the angst of these rarefied intellectual purists, saying there’s nothing wrong with tinkering with your ideology for the sake of forming a coalition to hold power, no matter how motley. To them, Trump is a black swan event, and the way forward, though significantly more difficult after the chaos he’s wrought, isn’t all that fraught: Toss some ideological dead weight overboard to bring in more voters, and run a candidate like Trump’s VP pick Mike Pence in 2020.
That is an appalling prospect to the younger conservatives, some of whom have begun to use the word “collaborator” to describe the Republicans who publicly signed on with Trump as he steamrolled toward the nomination. “I know lots of high-value donors who have no desire to have any collaborators at the top of the ticket in 2020,” Glover said of Pence. “That’s a commonly held opinion.” “Pence has disgraced himself in this election,” says reformicon archpriest Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former senior adviser to the younger Bush. “He has been making arguments that he can’t possibly believe, on behalf of a man he can’t possibly believe in.” To them, Pence made a pact with the devil, and says Wehner, “There should be consequences for that.”
With less than two weeks until election day, this is what Republican agony sounds like. “I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” Douglas Heye, a former Republican National Committee official and staffer for former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, rejects the word “collaborator.” “I don’t like that language. I don’t think it helps,” he told me. “I’ve been watching a French TV series about World War II, and now I’m watching the part about the aftermath of the war where they’re trying to figure out who’s a collaborator, shaving women’s heads, etc.” The echo scares him. “I would like to see us sort out our differences in nonpunitive ways,” he says.
(more at link)