The Republican Party needs to reinvent itself – for the sake of America

Whether Trump wins or loses, the old Republican Party will be dead

Donald Trump is the nominee presumptive for the Republican Party (Getty)

"The Party of Lincoln is Dying.” Thus a headline in The Washington Post this week on top of an article about how far the Republican Party – whose moniker the “Grand Old Party” harks back to the Great Emancipator and the saviour of his country’s unity in the Civil War – has strayed from the great man’s ideals. So much, however, has long been obvious. More pertinent is the question: what comes next?

Imagine the Republican Party as a supermarket product. If the product isn’t selling well, managers of the company would change or replace it. Indeed, an in-house post-mortem after Mitt Romney’s resounding 2012 defeat (an election Republicans genuinely expected to win), recommended precisely that. The party had to stop “marginalising itself”, said the report by the Republican National Committee, and boost its appeal to women, minorities and the young.

Instead, the opposite happened. Republicans stuck to the same-old, same-old, concentrating not on making their product more appealing, but on making it harder for consumers to buy the rival one. Hence the introduction of tougher ID requirements for voters in Republican-run states, and other tactics designed to make it harder for poorer people, preponderantly Democrats, to take part in elections.

In short, the party was crying out for someone who claims to know how to run a business. And lo and behold, up pops Donald Trump, who boasts he’s the smartest businessman since John D Rockefeller. In doing so, he has blown to bits the coalition forged by Ronald Reagan, the Republicans nominal patron saint.

Broadly, this coalition had three parts: traditional conservatives (including Wall Street, country-club Republicans and advocates of small government); national security hawks and neocons; and social conservatives and evangelicals. Sometimes the parts co-existed uneasily; more often they overlapped. Trump, though, has flouted core tenets of all three.

By no measure is he a traditional economic conservative; he refuses to take an axe to social security. He’s obligatorily hawkish on America’s own security, but is positively Obama-like in his aversion to the sort of “boots on the ground” adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere favoured by neocons. His past support for abortion rights flies in the face of social conservative dogma.

But none of this has mattered. Trump may change his position on the issues every few days, or even hours. But grassroots Republicans (and not a few Democrats as well) have responded to his call. What’s happened reflects a rejection of “politics as usual” of which Trump is the antithesis, amid disgust at Washington and the internal games of the ruling class, its disconnect with ordinary America.

And yes, it also reflects the nativism and racism that persists in a party whose citadel is now the South. Republican politicians have habitually used the dog whistle to evoke such matters. Trump has used a megaphone, and in the primaries swept aside the strongest and largest Republican presidential field in memory. No wonder he now politely extends two fingers to the party establishment. Their every criticism only reinforces his appeal to the faithful.

The tensions between candidate and party are unprecedented. Some conservatives still desperately cast about for a Republican independent to run against Trump. Others fancifully dream of “unbinding” delegates pledged to Trump at the next month’s nominating convention in Cleveland. Capping everything was the spectacle of Paul Ryan, House speaker and the senior elected Republican in the land, accusing his party’s presumptive nominee of “textbook racism” in his denunciation of the Mexican-American judge handling the case of alleged fraud at the now-defunct Trump University.

Other members of the leadership have struck a similar note. Yet they hold their noses and profess support for “the party’s nominee,” all the while carefully avoiding use of the T-word. Their confusion is understandable, if not forgivable. The establishment desperately wants to play by the old rules. Instead, it is trapped in the classic Gramscian definition of a crisis – when the old is dead and the new cannot be born. Except that something new must be born.

Whether Trump wins or loses, the old Republican Party will be dead. Should he win, a new one’s contours are already plain: right of centre, but populist, nativist and protectionist, with a dollop of authoritarianism. Maybe “movement conservatives” will reluctantly go along. Maybe they’ll form their own party.

But if he loses, it also won’t be possible to put Humpty Dumpty together again, as if nothing had happened. Normal service cannot be resumed. Republicans, like the managers of a struggling brand, will face the pre-Trump problem – how to find a new product, and build new policies that appeal to a new majority coalition. Otherwise the Democrats, who have already won the popular vote in five of the past six elections, will continue that streak.

Obviously, the new product’s exact formula is unclear. But it will surely include a commitment to smaller government – a tenet honoured in the breach by most recent Republican presidents. There has to be less emphasis on tax cuts targeted mainly at the wealthy, predicated on the failed doctrine of “trickle-down” economics that militates against the interests of the party’s working class supporters.

The self-righteous foreign interventionism of the neocons, founded on the dogma of American exceptionalism, will be no more. Parts of the social conservative agenda that especially offend women, and the bigotry that puts off so many minority voters, must also disappear. The process may take a while. This does not mean a surrender to liberalism (as Americans understand the term). What emerges from today’s rubble will be a more “normal” centre-right party.

The tragedy is that it’s taken a Trump to point the way. In some ways his policies, or what pass for them, fit the new model. In more ways, all too repellently, they do not. The odds are he will lose in November. Barack Obama would thus fulfil his ambition of becoming the first two-term Democrat since Andrew Jackson back in 1837 to hand over to an elected successor of his own party. That would be a landmark. But it doesn’t obscure the fact that Americans need a right of centre party that can once again be trusted to run the country.