THE LONG DECLINE OF THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT

THE LONG DECLINE OF THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT

By Nicholas Lemann at the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-long-decline-of-the-republican-establishment

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Hillary Clinton is without a doubt either a member or an ally of the establishment—probably the former—and there was powerful anti-establishment sentiment at both Conventions. In the Democrats’ case it was contained; in the Republicans’, it was controlling. What has changed since Rovere was writing is that the establishment has moved from being bipartisan but mainly Republican to being overwhelmingly Democratic. Ronald Reagan moved the Republican Party to the right in ways that alienated the establishment, especially on social issues like abortion; Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the center in ways that attracted the establishment, especially on economic issues like trade and deregulation. Trump is now likely to become the first Republican candidate ever to lose among white, college-educated voters.

Right now, people are wondering whether, after Trump’s apparently inevitable defeat on November 8th, the Republican establishment will be able to reassert control over the Party. We often forget, though, that even after the 2012 election, there was a round of hand-wringing by senior Republican politicians and funders over what seemed to have been an unacceptably high level of populism. There had been too many Presidential candidates, too long a primary season, and too many debates, with not enough serious policy discussion. And only a year ago it seemed as if the Republicans had an unusually bountiful crop of plausible conventional Presidential candidates—Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie—and, in Paul Ryan’s long, earnest “Path to Prosperity” budget document, a serious governing manifesto. Everybody seemed to think that the 2016 nominee’s big project would be uniting the Party’s business, religious, and Tea Party anti-government constituencies.

What Trump made clear was that a completely different message is pure magic, at least with Republican primary voters, and at least if delivered by him personally: swaggering, red-hot resentment of Rovere’s establishment, immigrants, and ethnic minorities, combined with full-throated advocacy of venerable laborist policies on economics and social welfare that the other Republicans assumed had been killed off back in the Reagan-Thatcher era. The gap between the establishment’s institutions and Republican electoral politics seems unbridgeable in the near future.

A useful synecdoche for the changing relationship of the Republican Party to the establishment is the Bush family. Prescott Bush, a senator from Connecticut, lived in an echt-establishment world of Greenwich, Yale, Wall Street, and causes like Planned Parenthood and the United Negro College Fund. His son George H. W. Bush moved to Texas and spent much of his political career insisting that he wasn’t as establishment as he appeared to be. His son George W. Bush was raised in Texas, embraced a more militant conservatism, actively courted religious fundamentalists, and lived at a self-enforced distance from Prescott Bush’s world.* Today, the only Bush who holds political office, George P. (for Prescott), Jeb Bush’s forty-year-old son, who is the Texas land commissioner, has spent no significant time in the Northeast, and is the only Bush who endorsed Trump for President.

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