Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
How do Republicans plan to govern? The GOP needs a positive program for reducing inflation, fighting crime, reforming health care, keeping entitlements solvent and boosting employment. The party also desperately needs the administrative capacity to get a recalcitrant civil service to carry out its plans. Without those things, the GOP will fail voters and quickly lose power again.
Republicans might retort that they’re winning, aren’t they? Why not ride cultural antitrust to power, then worry about the rest when they get there?
Donald Trump’s whole presidency testifies to the dangers of running hard on emotional issues, without policy substance behind it: He left having accomplished almost nothing that could not be undone by an unfriendly judge or the stroke of a Democratic successor’s pen. The notable exception was the conservative judges he appointed — notable because it involved a concrete political goal (appoint these judges!), enabled by decades of work by conservative legal scholars who built up a law-school-to-judiciary pipeline.
That’s exactly the kind of patient work Republicans are not doing, on cultural issues or anything else. If Republicans want to change things, or even to hold office for more than a few years, they need to prepare to run the federal government, not just yell about the things they’d do if only they’d been elected governor, or king.
