RIP GOP?

Posted on July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 by albrooke

ScreenShot164 Alan Jacobs writes this recent post:

“My friend Ross Douthat disagrees, mostly, with Avik Roy’s contention that the Republican Party is dead, but by contrast I suspect that Roy is too optimistic. He thinks that some kind of renewed GOP will eventually rise from the ashes, but I doubt that. I don’t think that the rise of Trump marked the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but rather that the party’s incoherent and brainlessly reflexive responses to Trump, whether positive or negative, were the equivalent of the last few electrochemical twitches of a corpse. The current donor base will pay for one or two more decades of artificial respiration, but no more, and I suspect that as early as 2024 the GOP will be completely irrelevant to American politics, at least at the national level.

At that point we’ll still have a two-party system, but the two parties will be the Neoliberal and the Socialist — basically, the two main wings of the current Democratic Party. And I’m not sure that, when that happens, we’ll be any worse off than we are now.

Alan Jacobs, “Two parties,” Snakes and Ladders (July 25, 2016) [link]. (That last line may be fairly discouraging to many, but I think AJ means it to be encouraging — it is not going to be much worse.)

Jacobs is referring to an article in Vox about Republican strategist Avik Roy’s dismal predictions regarding the GOP:

“The work of conservative intellectuals today, [Roy] argues, is to devise a new conservatism — a political vision that adheres to limited government principles but genuinely appeals to a more diverse America.

“I think it’s incredibly important to take stock,” he says, “and build a new conservative movement that is genuinely about individual liberty.”

Zack Beauchamp, “A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die,” Vox (July 25, 2016) [link].

I think believers can pray that an American political party will rise from the ashes that is committed to social justice as well as limited government. I wonder what it will be called? Compassionate Realism?

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