Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XIV. Wishful Thinking.:
March 12, 2024
North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley was chosen by the RNC to serve as the party's new Trump sycophantic head, and Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair in unanimous votes.
The Republican Party has died, which makes up my mind in my earlier "shall I stay or shall I go" question I posed here.
Positions with the RNC are being slashed as the party merges with the Trump campaign organization so that it can more effectively apply the Führerprinzip.
The Republican Party, founded on March 20, 1854, nearly 170 years ago, has died. Donald Trump killed it. Ronald Reagan, who was a Republican, and Newt Gingrich, who was too, gave him the weapons and ammunition to do so.
The GOP was founded as a left wing progressive party that embraced Federalism and the economic thoughts of the American System. It opposed a party, the Democrats, that was racist, nativist and provincial. The GOP used the absence of the Democrats during the Civil War to expand the nation's railroads and agriculture through direct government involvement. It retained its essential views through the Taft Administration, after which it entered the political wilderness and stood for "business". It became isolationist during the Great Depression, but returned to its traditional views, which it retained throughout the Cold War, at the start of World War Two.
It became, in the post Taft era, the conservative party due to in part its economic views, which were not laissez-faire, and in part due to its social views. The social views became much more paramount following the Democratic Party's lurch to the left starting in 1968, causing the rise of Ronald Reagan, who obtained the Presidency by making a deal with Southern Democrats, bringing them and their laissez-faire, extreme populists, ideas into the party.
Though a combination of factors, which we have dealt with elsewhere, that wing of the party has now supplanted the party itself. Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Hoover, and Eisenhower couldn't recognize this party, nor would they wish to be part of it.
With the co-opting of the RNC, there's no going back. The current Republican Party doesn't resemble the party of old at all. It's more Francoist than Buckleyite.
If Trump fails to win the Oval Office in the Fall, it'll destroy the new GOP. It's already throwing itself apart. If he does win, that'll destroy the GOP, as the next four years will be ones of totally unpredictable turmoil. Nobody really knows what Trump believes in, other than himself. His followers apply the Führerprinzip to what they believe he reflects in their beliefs and belief that he reflects them back.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
