About a year ago, a republican political strategist named Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark that the republican party was facing an ‘extinction event’ that resulted from Donald Trump having converted it into the MAGA party. The flailing efforts of the republican House majority to elect a speaker yesterday and so far today also are another sign that the extinction event has descended on the party.
Its schism into the group of the shamed and silent and the smaller and louder Trump-MAGA group brings back memories of the 1854 fracturing of the Whig Party, with some important differences, the largest of which is that the Whig Party fell apart over an irresolvable policy dispute: should slavery expand, continue, or be eliminated? No common ground among the factions was available, as the policy difference was over a stark yes-or-no question.
By contrast the modern republican party gave up any pretense of policy ambitions years ago under Newt Gingrich’s leadership. It has no policy; its modest platform for the 2020 election could be described as “policy” only in the way that a fig leaf can be described as “clothing.” But where can the remaining rational republicans find a home? On philosophical grounds they can’t join the Democratic Party, and without a billionaire or two as a funding source and a media presence (their henhouse won’t stand without a Fox to advertise it) they can’t start a new national party. The two-party system needs two strong and responsible parties, and the republican leadership is too frightened of its cohort of crazies to make the effort to return it to reason. Maybe what saves the system is not right-wing repentance but a variant of the solution played out in the Utah senate race, where the Democrats tried to elect a rational conservative to replace Mike Lee, something like the plain-bellied Sneetches temporarily donning stars. The Democrats could contribute to bringing the opposition toward reason by picking a few moderate republican representatives and then voting as a bloc for those representatives, one after another, until one of their candidates from across the aisle attracts the votes of 10 sane republicans. Odd as it would be for the Democrats to vote for a republican for speaker, doing so is their one way to get a speaker of the House who won't have had to make promises to the Boeberts and Gosars of the republican caucus.
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