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Is It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?

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JoinSign inShare this postIs It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?thedispatch.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailFeb 17, 2021Share this postIs It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?thedispatch.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailOn the cold, windy night of March 20, 1854, 36-year-old lawyer Alvan Bovay rounded up dozens of his neighbors in Ripon, Wisconsin, and gathered them in a schoolhouse for a meeting that would change the course of American history.It was the group’s second gathering of the month. Weeks earlier, Bovay, a member of the Whig Party, had issued a bulletin: “A meeting will be held at 6:30 o’clock this Wednesday evening at the Congregational Church in the Village of Ripon to remonstrate against the Nebraska swindle.”The Kansas-Nebraska Act—which would repeal the 1820 Missouri Compromise’s restrictions on slavery above the 36°30’ parallel—was barreling through Congress, and those opposed to slavery’s spread were furious. “Of all the outrages hitherto perpetrated or attempted upon the North and freedom by the slave leaders and their natural allies, not one compares in bold and impudent audacity, treachery and meanness with this, the Nebraska Bill,” read a motion adopted at that first Ripon meeting.&nbsp;Nearly 170 years later, the party that Bovay founded finds itself in the political wilderness, having lost control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives that it commanded just four years prior. It’s not a death sentence, by any means—the Democrats found themselves in a similar position in 2017 and have already regained the trifecta—but it feels different.&nbsp;But there’s a deep divide within the Republican Party—one that’s been building for years. It’s about Donald Trump, yes, but more so about the forces that brought him to power and sustained him once he got there: anti-institutionalism, grievance politics, negative partisanship, conspiratorial thinking, lies.The Whig Party broke apart in the early 1850s for several reasons, but primarily because the competing factions within could no longer set aside their irreconcilable differences over slavery. The GOP isn’t there yet—and it very well may never get there—but the possibility is no longer entirely out of the question.&nbsp;The Dispatch“I don’t think there’s nearly enough introspection in the party right now about the fact that this stuff isn’t working.”There’s been much talk since Donald Trump’s loss in November about a brewing civil war within the Republican Party. The president’s post-election lies coming to a head on January 6 only made the chatter louder.Wall Street Journal There was a GOP civil war. It was short. Trump won.&nbsp;“January 6 was the last straw,” says Calvin Corey of Colorado. “The blatant attack against Mike Pence and instructing him to break against his oath to the Constitution was the moment where I knew I had to contemplate my affiliation with the Republican Party.”“Me and what seems to be the base of the Republican Party have no more in common than I do with the current Democratic Party.”This is not the first time in the two-party era that one side’s various factions have diverged to the point of breaking. Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater came to the Republican Party from two different universes. The Democratic Party of the early 1960s at one point included Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, and Birch Bayh, who voted for the Civil Rights Act and led the unsuccessful charge to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Thurmond, and many of his fellow Southerners, eventually defected and joined the GOP, but the existing two-party system held—albeit with reshuffled coalitions.Sasse, the target of the above rebuke, is strikingly honest in his diagnosis of the party’s ailments.“I think we need to admit that there’s a bunch of crap in the Republican coalition right now that isn’t at all conservative,” he said. “Personality cults aren’t conservative. Conspiracy theories aren’t conservative. Acting like politics is a religion isn’t conservative. There are things that we should admit that are a part of the Republican echo chambers right now that are gross.”But he maintains that he’s not going anywhere. “I’m a happy warrior, so I’m not giving up on anything. I want to fight for reform,” he continued. “There are a whole bunch of different parts of the Republican coalition that have something to contribute. There are things that libertarians add to the mix. There are things that Chamber of Commerce-types add to the mix. There are pieces of populism that can be reconcilable with the Republican Party, [though] it certainly can’t be the leading edge of the movement.”The Dispatch“Sure, there’s been some occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy,” Toomey continued. “But most of what distinguished President Trump was stylistic, and personality, and how he communicated, and demeanor, and that sort of thing. It was not as much a whole new set of economic policies.”The assault on the Capitol so “disgusted” Tobin Sparfeld, a professor in California, that he changed his voter registration that day. “Since 2016 I haven’t been a proud Republican, but I felt I was doing a service by voting for Republican candidates and helping signal to the GOP that there were non-Trump conservatives like me out there,” he said. “But after January 6, I couldn’t have any association with a party that had incited such an ugly event and then refused to atone for it.”Bryan Walters, a 31-year-old attorney, said the “final thin thread tying [him] to the GOP snapped on January 6.”“I was sickened by what I saw,” he said. “As I considered what was happening, I concluded that continued association with the GOP would constitute aligning myself with traitors. Before I left the office that day I changed my party affiliation to ‘no party preference.’ I haven't regretted it for one second in the last month.”Sparfeld and Walters are exactly the kind of voters Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan worries about when he says doubling down on Trump is a “terrible mistake for the Republican Party.”“I’m very disappointed in a number of Republican leaders who have not strongly enough denounced the insurrection at the Capitol and have not strongly denounced some of the crazy, just flat-out lies being told by conspiracy theorists,” Hogan said. “I’ve been one of the few that’s been willing to speak up for at least four years—or I would say five years, from the beginning of the campaign of Trump—when I didn’t agree with some of the things that were being said and done. And I thought the Republican Party was turning off big chunks of the electorate that we couldn’t afford to.”Hogan has long ties to the GOP. His dad, Lawrence, was a Republican congressman in the early 1970s—the first one to support the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Lawrence left Congress the following year and mounted an unsuccessful campaign to be Maryland’s governor. He lost in the Republican primary.The Dispatch“I’m not going to be one of those ones that’s abandoning the party or giving up,” Hogan continued. “Whether we win this fight or not, time will tell. But it’s worth fighting for, because it’s the party that I believe in—that I’ve spent my whole life fighting for. And I’m not going to let brand new crazy people try to take it over.”Those Hogan described as the brand new crazy people, however, have already taken it over. That doesn’t mean most Republicans are QAnon adherents, or racists, or sympathetic to authoritarians willing to overthrow democracy. They’re not. The vast majority are decent, hard-working Americans who believe in limited government, strong national defense, lower taxes, and free markets. “My sense is that the traditional conservative Republican views on economic policy are still the dominant views among the coalition,” Toomey said.But individual GOP leaders, given the current construction of the party, have an overwhelming incentive to cater to the loud minority.&nbsp;“A lot of the behavior you’re seeing from GOP elected officials is a response to the loudest voices in the base, and party committees who are enforcing a protective order around Trump, who they have always viewed as a victim of the media and the establishment,” said David Kochel, a Republican campaign strategist. “That’s not where most voters are, but it does represent the most intense grassroots activists in the GOP.”If Sasse, Toomey, and Hogan aren’t interested in reevaluating their affiliation with the GOP, however, it’s hard to think of a relevant politician who would be.The Whigs were out of power for less than two years before the party split apart.&nbsp;Millard Fillmore left office deeply unpopular in March 1853, having signed into law the Compromise of 1850, a collection of five bills that temporarily staved off secession but compromised so much next to no one came away from negotiations happy. It admitted California to the Union as a free state, created two new territories—Utah and New Mexico—where the legality of slavery would be established through popular sovereignty, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and included an updated Fugitive Slave Law that required law enforcement officials in every state—free or not—to aid in returning runaway slaves to their masters.But Jacksonianism eventually faded, and political fault lines became less about tariffs and more about slavery. It proved fatal for the Whigs.Two parties fought to capitalize on the Whigs’ downfall. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 by Bovay in the Ripon schoolhouse, and the Know-Nothing (or American) Party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant movement that grew in response to mass Irish and German migration to the United States.Wisconsin State Journal The fledgling party secured a national foothold in 1854 and 1855, winning a handful of seats outright—mostly in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan—and convincing a few Whigs to abandon ship and get on board.Sen. William H. Seward of New York was one of them.&nbsp;John Fremont, the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 1856, lost to the Democrat, James Buchanan, 174 electoral votes to 114. But the party’s performance less than two years after its founding was “little short of astounding,” Gienapp wrote. Fremont’s strong second-place showing—Millard Fillmore received only 8 electoral votes as a Know-Nothing—“established the Republicans as the major opponent of the Democratic Party in the country and left the once powerful [Know Nothing] Party shattered beyond recovery. Defeating the Know Nothings as the successor to the Whigs was the single most important victory the Republican party would ever win in its long history.”&nbsp;Following the election of 1856, Republicans made up nearly 40 percent of the House and more than 30 percent of the Senate. The party absorbed the Know-Nothings—and their anti-Catholicism—over the next few years, and by March 1861, the post-secession versions of both chambers were firmly in Republican control. Seward was appointed secretary of state in the first Republican president’s Cabinet.But Lincoln came to terms with the Whigs’ irrelevance the following year, and helped found the Republican Party in Illinois.The present-day Party of Lincoln is quite obviously not yet in Whig-level dire straits.The quote—asinine as it was, even at the time—reflected the opinion of nearly every Republican who could have helped put an end to the madness. But the “downside” soon became painfully clear. Seven people needlessly dead, three of them police officers. Democratic control of the Senate after losing two eminently winnable Senate races in Georgia. And a party whose brand will remain hopelessly intertwined with the president who tried to overthrow democracy.“I honestly thought the GOP was going to take the election loss as an opportunity to separate from Trump,” wrote Mark Courchane, a retired business owner from Wisconsin. “Instead I found myself listening to people I’ve known and respected for years, parroting Trump’s remarks about the election. I couldn’t believe it.”Ethan Demme, the former Republican committee chair of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, said the party would have to “loudly denounce Trumpism” to ever earn his support back. But recognizing that’s unlikely, he left the GOP in January. “The current party requires fealty to Trump, and if you question that, you are out.”“Trump has made everything about him,” lamented James Ballinger, a GIS analyst and high school football coach in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “You are either for him or against him. He doesn’t care about policies or principles, just if you are loyal to him or not.”Clay, a founding member of the Whig Party, was instrumental in brokering a series of grand bargains over the expansion of slavery. The Missouri Compromise of 1820—passed while Clay was speaker of the House—admitted the Show-Me State to the Union as a slave state, while banning the practice above the 36°30’ parallel everywhere else. But the slavery issue became thornier over time, requiring Congress to revisit it three decades later. Clay and Democratic Sen. Stephen Douglas negotiated the aforementioned Compromise of 1850, which was signed into law by President Fillmore.Clay went to his death bed two years later believing that his work had warded off a splintering of not only the country, but his own party. But the splintering came nonetheless: The Whigs in 1854 and 1855, the country five years after that. On an issue as consequential as chattel slavery, there ultimately could be no compromise.Trump did not appreciate the half measure. “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack,” the former president said in a statement Tuesday. “If Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.”But like his Kentucky idol, the Senate minority leader may be trying to bridge an unbridgeable divide. Voters in a big tent conservative party can disagree on marginal tax rates, the size of the next COVID-19 relief package, how and where to deploy the United States’ military might. Can they disagree on adherence to the democratic process? Loyalty to the truth? Reality itself?“I cannot see a path to comity with those who either believe conspiracies and lies, or are willing to pander to those who do,” said Luke Harvey, a law student and orthodox Christian from Iowa. “I am happy to make common cause with those who disagree with me on questions of philosophy, ethics, or economics; but those with whom I share neither outlook nor (in some cases) reality, are not people with whom I can join, even if it would be politically expedient to do so.”“I believe there is a deep incompatibility between libertarian-leaning conservatives and those moved primarily by displeasure with the modern social order,” said Erick Scheminske, from Colorado. “Trump has exposed those fault lines, and it’s hard to see any path to repairing the fissure.”“I can work with people who have different policy preferences,” emailed Sarah Solyntjes, a mom from rural Minnesota. “But I cannot align with people who are just not based in reality. It is that simple. Not everyone agrees with my take and many will continue trying to go along with the existing coalition, but it is a fundamentally unstable and unsustainable arrangement. They will lose, and the GOP will be lost in the woods for at least a generation, if not forever.”“I don’t think [the GOP] can continue with its current makeup,” Andrew Beardslee, a former Republican from Michigan, emailed. “It’s a big tent party, sure, but the tent can’t be so big that it includes 9/11 conspiracy theorists and school shooting deniers. There’s got to be a line.”There are plenty of GOP officials working hard to draw that line. Rohn Bishop is one of them. Chairman of the Fond du Lac County GOP in Wisconsin—which encompasses Ripon, where the Republican Party was born—Bishop said it’s important going forward to “keep the tent respectable.”“We can be successful moving forward, but we have to be a party of more policies and less conspiracies,” he said. “That means we have to tell the truth! The election wasn’t stolen. None of the QAnon plan came true. The president straight up lied during his January 6 speech.”The DispatchisThe DispatchWould Hunter Burnett, a history teacher and evangelical Christian in Georgia, join a new party—even if it meant losing for a while? “Yes,” he said. “Shoot, at this rate I would work for it in any official position I could. The way I see it, the Democrats and MAGA Republicans don’t care much for the Constitution, so it doesn’t matter which of them is in charge. Classical liberal ideas are far too important to throw aside merely for political victories.”Like this postShare this postIs It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?thedispatch.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail253 CommentsFor your security, we need to re-authenticate you.Click the link we sent to , or .Expand full commentExpand full commentNo posts© 2022 The Dispatch ∙ ∙ &nbsp;is the home for great writingThis site requires JavaScript to run correctly. 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JoinSign inShare this postIs It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?thedispatch.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailFeb 17, 2021Share this postIs It Time for the Republican Party to Split Apart?thedispatch.comCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailOn the cold, windy night of March 20, 1854, 36-year-old lawyer Alvan Bovay rounded up dozens of his neighbors in Ripon, Wisconsin, and gathered them in a schoolhouse for a meeting that would change the course of American history.It was the group’s second gathering of the month. Weeks earlier, Bovay, a member of the Whig Party, had issued a bulletin: “A...

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