The Future of the GOP

Let’s be honest. The Trump presidency was an absolute dumpster fire that ended with a domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by a president who actively courted the support of extremists, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and domestic terrorists. His aversion to science and expert-based policymaking led to the deaths of nearly half a million Americans from COVID-19. His family separation border policy shocked the compassionate conservative base and shook us to our cores.

There’s a lot of very reasonable fear amongst Republicans about how we come back from that. Can we remain a viable political party when the tent seems stretched to its limits and we know we have to make a choice to either let the most radical or the most moderate faction walk out? Could we survive right-wing extremists leaving to form their own third party, voting neither Republican nor Democrat?

Conversely, could we survive the same number of Republican voters moving from being one-time, Biden Republicans who still turned out to vote for moderate conservative congressional candidates to becoming full-time Democrats who turn out reliably and vote blue all down the ticket?

The choice is clear. We can and should win elections without the extremists. We‘ve done it before and we can do it again. But we clearly can’t win elections when we start to hemorrhage our own base to the Democratic base because we’ve become brainwashed into thinking the destructive cult of personality around Donald Trump and all the immoral and disgusting stances that cult requires one to adhere to are actual conservative values.

An Eye Toward The Future

We have to stop reacting viscerally like petulant children to everything the Democrats do and start thinking proactively about what our values are and how they can translate into policy that serves the American people better than the policies put forth by Democrats. There’s a strange, unspoken fear among some conservatives that maybe we can’t compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas and policy because maybe the liberals are right in their caricatures of us as idiotic country bumpkins whose policies and values must inherently go against our own self-interests and can be of no value in the 21st century.

Those caricatures have become more deeply ingrained in the American psyche every year for the past several decades and culminated in Donald Trump, the ultimate embodiment of the “dumb, evil, racist, 1%-rich Republican” caricature. In a way, we manifested it ourselves. Instead of rebelling against liberal caricatures by being our best selves, the conservative media sphere too often leans into them and tries to rebel by unabashedly embodying those caricatures to pretend there’s no shame in them.

But that’s not true rebellion against the liberal media as it still grants them permission to define who we are, what we believe, and what our priorities are. True rebellion against the liberal media would be to ignore them, look inwards, and decide for ourselves from a place of confidence who we want to be and what kind of impact our values and policies can have on the future of our country.

I believe when we allow ourselves to define ourselves, conservatives are intelligent, compassionate, and have a value system that is good for 21st-century America.

For example, when guided by caricatures from the liberal media we assume we are a party that relies on white supremacy as a cornerstone of our base and is incapable of moving forward, changing with the times, acknowledging reality, or treating racial equality as the serious problem it is.

But when we look at actual conservative trends, that is not the case. According to a recent Pew study, Gen Z Republicans are more than twice as likely as Boomer and Silent Republicans and nearly twice as likely as Gen X Republicans to say overall in our country today, blacks are treated less fairly than whites. They’re even 13-points more likely than Millennial Republicans to say that, showing how the trend of conservatives who not only agree that racial equality is good but actively see and acknowledge systemic racism in our country (a necessary first step in dismantling it) should be on a steep growth trajectory as new generations of Republicans become voters. Granted, that does assume we’re able to keep them in our party by acknowledging the reality they see rather than kicking them out for telling the truth.

Another place caricature and reality contrast is in the values of big Republican donors. For example, even many Republicans mistakenly adhere to liberal caricature assumptions of what the Koch brothers stand for, assuming they must oppose policies for racial justice. But the Koch brothers are actually huge advocates of actively dismantling systemic racism in America and they put their money where their mouths are on it.

They approach it from a fundamentally conservative-libertarian value system wherein the most abhorrent things the state can do are oppress its citizens through violence or otherwise diminish their access to their constitutional rights, so they invest a great deal in helping organizations studying and preventing police brutality and mass incarceration or making sure every American has equal access to quality legal counsel.

The Koch brothers are also huge proponents of using entrepreneurship to help people get ahead so they invest in a lot of training and support programs for young entrepreneurs. This is heavily in line with the values of the Gen Z generation who are growing up watching millennials start their own tech companies. Over half (54% according to a Neilson survey) of Gen Z want to start their own company. They’ve also grown up with the freedom of the gig and influencer economies replacing the need to do as many traditional menial labor jobs as young people typically do at the beginning of their working life.

These values stand in stark contrast to the values of a Democratic party moving ever further left, demonizing the wealthy even when they get wealthy by starting companies that add astronomical amounts of genuine value to society and create American jobs. This newer generation that rivals millennials craves the freedom to be entrepreneurial, dream big, take side gigs at will without paternalistic regulations, and start wildly successful, American companies without the headaches of arbitrary red tape and demonization.

Clearly, even in the 21st century, there is a strong need for conservative and libertarian values that promote and enable entrepreneurship, the slashing of harmful, arbitrary red tape, and the dismantling of systemic racism from a point of view of ensuring every American has equal access to their constitutional rights and is free from state-backed violence and coercion.

As a party, Republicans are at a crossroads. We can choose to focus on petulantly tearing down liberal policies and politicians while embodying liberal caricatures of Republicans in a misguided attempt to rebel against them, dooming us to a future where we hold tight to a few extra extremist votes while hemorrhaging to the Democratic party the moderate Republican votes and future Republican votes that would enable us to win us future elections.

Or we can choose to focus on defining ourselves and our priorities, confidently and unabashedly facing reality knowing if we amplify the voices of those using conservative and libertarian values to solve important problems, we will not only prevent large swaths of our base from becoming Democrats, we may even have a chance at attracting new, younger groups into our base so we may win elections, maintain a healthy two-party system in America, and remain relevant for many decades to come.