How We Got to Year Zero

A t the Bulwark, Sarah Longwell argues that one of the clearest results of her many focus groups of Republican voters is that they don’t want to turn the clock back to the time before Donald Trump. She writes, “The Republican party has been irretrievably altered and, as one GOP voter put it succinctly, ‘We’re never going back.’”

And this basically dooms candidates such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley who are running as if the pre-Trump world still existed. She quotes voters who identify these candidates as “pre-2016” throwbacks, one voter saying of Haley: “She would just be right back to the Paul Ryan, John Boehner kind of a thing. That’s a no-go for me.”

Longwell ends ominously with the warning that the next election cycle will dispel any notion of a return to the pre-Trump party. “The question, then, will be what AT [After Trump] Republican politics evolves into once everyone in the Republican party understands that it is the future. The answer isn’t likely to be pretty.”

It’s a piece that interests me because I agree with Longwell that there is no coming back. But, it is also emblematic of a certain strain of rueful NeverTrump commentary. It never ventures beyond what has become the Bulwark’s enduring thesis of American politics: Republican voters are deplorables after all.

Longwell never stops to consider one obvious self-interested reason Republicans would not want to go back to the pre-Trump party, which is that Donald Trump, despite driving a historic turnout against himself in 2020, never took the party to the depths it experienced under George W. Bush in 2006 and 2008.

Consider the position of a conservative voter who trusted the pre-Trump leadership of the party in the decade before Trump. George W. Bush had run for reelection on his war record in Iraq and by turning out values voters to oppose same-sex marriage on state ballots. Once he secured his mandate, his two major desired pieces of legislation were a reform of Social Security he had barely campaigned on and a comprehensive immigration reform that promised amnesty in the present, increased immigration levels henceforward, and, sure, some enforcement at the border, maybe, eventually. The same rotten deal that Reagan had inflicted in the 1980s, but larger. It was routine for advocates of amnesty, such as John McCain, to cynically campaign on lines like “finish the damned fence” and then work diligently for amnesty once reelected.

Democrats took out 30 Republicans in 2006 and reversed the 1994 revolution. The Iraq War turned out to be incompetently executed — no longer a cakewalk, but a meat grinder. The war tended to spread terrorism rather than contain it. Many red staters bore the literal scars of this leadership. Then came the financial collapse, which displaced 10 million Americans. Another 21 seats were lost in the House in 2008. Within a few years, the electoral mandates of Democrats would turn into Obamacare, the Great Awokening, and the overturning of all those 2004 initiatives in the Obergefell decision that brought with it the promise of decades of lawfare against conservative institutions: colleges, churches, and charities.

Meanwhile, until the exogenous event of the pandemic, Trump had presided over a growing economy that was seeing real gains in wages at the lower end. A border crisis had been contained with the Remain in Mexico policy. And Trump made good on his campaign promise and appointed three justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. While Trump suffered a serious reversal in Congress in 2018, Republicans gained seats amidst his 2020 electoral defeat.

The Bush-era bait-and-switch politics tended to disabuse grassroots conservatives of the idea that the elected GOP leadership cared about the same issues or had the same concerns they had. Of course they don’t want to go back to being used and abused. Putting up with all of the baggage Trump brought with him is a testament to how much they wanted a change.

The same high-handed attitude toward Republican voters is continuous in NeverTrumpism, where many of the intellectual luminaries on the right during the Bush era seamlessly defected to repeat liberal accusations and liberal slurs against the voters, Fox viewers, and readers they once courted.

After all, the voters in the Republican Party didn’t really change. They remain the more pro-life party. They remain the party more supportive of religious liberty, the party whose members stand to lose more from the moral revolution unleashed by Obergefell and Bostock. They remain opposed to amnesty. They defend the Second Amendment. The big thing that changed is that the Bush administration wised them up to the game being played on them.

Their critics, however, have abandoned even the pretense of social conservatism and have abandoned every political position they once held. They’ve retained only their fondness for foreign intervention and made explicit what was only hinted at when they were in power and influence: their contempt for the voters that make up the Republican coalition.