When Reince Priebus and the RNC lined up behind Trump, #NeverTrump people believed the party sold out the conservative agenda. On the other hand, supporters of Donald Trump believe the “Establishment” sold out in favor of the ruling class.
They’re both right. And that’s why we need a new party.
Continued support for the Republican Party will only mean continued support for nationalism and populism. Even if the Trump phenomenon crumbles after he leaves the national stage, the GOP will simply be left with a leadership establishment that cares more about their own power than the good of the country.
It’s time to face facts: defeating the party bosses has simply become an insurmountable task.
The only way to advance a conservative agenda moving forward is to create a third party intent on replacing the Republican Party and stopping the Democratic Party. Building new political institutions will not be easy, but it is necessary for any kind of real change.
When the founders of the Republican Party outlined their first platform, they began with a statement of principle: “That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution are essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions.”
From Lincoln to Reagan, Republican statesmen have tried their best to uphold the conception of natural law and federalism rooted in the Founding. The leaders of the Republican Party today, however, express little interest in this grand tradition. Instead, GOP elites seem interested in their own political power.
Take the GOP elite’s pivot on social issues, for instance. in a 2013 interview with Time Magazine Alex Smith, current chairwoman of the College Republican National Committee, essentially argued that Republicans needed to abandon their commitments to traditional marriage, which has been in the party platform since 1856, to get votes.
Or the party’s recently-broken silence on Obamacare. Republicans have been attacking the President’s healthcare law since 2010, but few GOP leaders have had been bold enough to offer an alternate plan rooted in free market reform. Even now, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan lacks many specifics
The tipping point, however, is the RNC’s utterly undignified rush to support Donald Trump. Reince Priebus openly admits that both Trump’s character and proposed policies — few that there are — ought to give Americans concern. But, Priebus hurries to add, they should vote for him anyways, because the Republican Party wants to be in power come January.
“This is it. We have the House. We have the Senate. We need to win the White House. This is our chance to actually govern,” Priebus said in a recent interview. “But we have a few [dissenting] voices out there. And it’s their right to speak. They’re making it more difficult.”
The national leadership of the Republican Party has proven they no longer care about natural law — their only interest is maintaining power. With Supreme Court seats hanging in the balance, radical Islam on the march across the globe, and the Democratic nominee being possibly the most corrupt, pernicious major party nominee in U.S. history, a vote for Donald Trump certainly does not constitute treason.
In a 2010 article for the American Spectator, conservative scholar Angelo Codevilla pointed out that, increasingly, Republican elites in Washington were abandoning core conservative values held by many ordinary Americans.
“Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues,” he wrote, “show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.”
If possible, this problem, hostile to the idea of representative government, has only grown since 2010. The Tea Party, started to be a sort of hostile takeover of the Republican Party by conservative activists, has largely failed electorally. In 2016, Tea Party darlings like Marlin Stutzman or Greg Brannon have consistently lost to more establishment-friendly candidates.
The Trump phenomenon has unveiled a certain anxiety rippling through the American people. They fear that we have forgotten what it means to be American, and are looking for a strong personality to “Make America Great Again.”
If we build our platform around a common conception of justice and human dignity, like the founders of the Republican Party did, then we can broaden our appeal — both to the white working class and to other minorities that feel disenfranchised, like Latinos and African Americans.
If conservatives present the people a program rooted in the permanent things, rather than the emergent nationalism of Trump, we can appeal to the same faith in the Founding that propelled Ronald Reagan to the White House.