Robert Brent Toplin
In this age of fiercely partisan politics, it may seem a pipe dream to imagine that numerous discontented Republican leaders will criticize their party vigorously and try to steer it toward the mainstream. Changing the G.O.P.’s direction would be a daunting task. The party’s base of MAGA and culture warriors is substantial. Candidates and elected officials that challenge their influence go the way of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Jeff Flake. They become outcasts.
Is the G.O.P. victimized by its past? Has the party’s extensive involvement in radicalism made it virtually impossible for reform-minded Republicans to pull their party to the center-right? Will the current trajectory continue, producing greater extremism in the future?
The recent past does, indeed, weigh heavily on the Republican Party. On the day of this writing, September 21, 2023, Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at the New York Times, reported Donald Trump is “polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries.” Despite federal and state indictments of Trump for trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, his support has grown. Trump enjoys a whopping 60-13 and 60-12 lead over his nearest Republican rival in polls released by Fox News and Quinnipiac. The numbers make the G.O.P.’s radical course appear irreversible.
The Republican record is concerning, but deterministic predictions that the party’s future will resemble its past could be mistaken. There have been many times in American history when problems seemed inescapable. Many Americans were pessimistic in the 1780s when the new nation’s experiment with self-government was in jeopardy, in the 1830s when slavery appeared unassailable, and during the Great Depression when a broken economy seemed unrepairable. Yet those crises passed. Conditions improved.
A note of cautious optimism can apply to the current situation. I suspect the G.O.P. will eventually temper its radicalism. The party’s adjustment could be modest or substantial. Its shift might occur quickly or require years to play out. Whatever the size and speed of the adjustment, a change in direction seems likely because radicals in the Republican Party turned their back on America’s mainstream political traditions. Their far-right politicking alienates many Americans, including independents, centrist Democrats that are open to backing competent Republican candidates, and disillusioned conservatives that want the G.O.P. to change direction.
A reckoning with extremists has been postponed, largely because the American constitutional system provides inordinate influence on minorities. Two political analysts at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, identified this condition in their book, Tyranny of the Minority. The Constitution is supposed to safeguard democracy, they note, but many of the founders who created it were suspicious of popular democracy. In modern times, the constitutional framework “allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them.” (p. 10)
In recent decades extremists in the G.O.P. gained enormous political leverage through inequities in this constitutional system. They’ve elected U.S. senators in lightly populated rural states that can exert as much authority as a senator from heavily populated California or New York. In current American politics Republican candidates in southern states and in some western and midwestern states need only to secure their party’s nomination in the primaries to secure a seat in the U.S. House or Senate. To win the primary election, those G.O.P. candidates need to appear more radical than their competitors.
In the general elections Republican extremists strengthened their grip on local and national politics by establishing rules that disenfranchise Democratic voters. President Donald Trump and conservative justices on the Supreme Court undermined reforms achieved by the Voting Rights Act (though in 2023 the Court did reject a bid to give lawmakers unchecked power over elections). The radicals’ influence in state governments enabled them to gerrymander electoral districts. Manipulation of electoral maps in swing states ensured G.O.P. dominance in districts where Democrats received more popular votes than Republicans in recent elections.
The most striking example of “tyranny of the minority” is in elections for President of the United States. Republicans won the popular vote in only one of eight presidential elections between 1992 and 2020. The G.O.P. benefited from the Electoral College’s peculiarities. Despite Republicans’ failure to win a truly popular mandate for bold action, after securing victories through the Electoral College they acted like the election results demonstrated they were the clear favorites of the American people. Republican presidents, officials, and legislators demanded huge changes after winning the electoral count but losing the popular vote. During twelve years under presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, they implemented radical economic, social, political, and foreign policy agendas and established ultra-conservative dominance at the Supreme Court.
The Republican Party, strengthened by constitutional advantages, has been reshaping American life for several decades, but it could face a crisis if its trajectory continues. A growing majority of American voters is disgusted with the behavior of the far-right’s flame-throwers. The radicals’ prominence in the G.O.P. could become a huge liability. Electoral demographics are changing. Many younger voters, appalled by the extremism, are drawn to the Democrats.
It is long past time for disillusioned Republicans to speak out against the excesses loudly and forcefully. The United States needs a responsible, mainstream, center-right party, not a far-right organization of rabble-rousers that is dividing U.S. society and undermining democracy. Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, identified the need for courage when he said, “There are a lot of Republicans who are rational human beings who are horrified by this, but they don’t seem to have the guts to stand up to it and push back.” McGovern’s description relates to recent U.S. political history, but it need not apply to the future. Republicans that are “rational human beings” can serve their party and their country well by resisting extremism.
