Everyone is aware of what has happened in the last two weeks. The president has fired the FBI director with no obvious logic to the timing, then contradicted both himself and his staff regarding the rationale behind the move. He has revealed Israeli intelligence to the Russians without permission, and the information revealed was so secret that our closest allies were unaware of it and the press is still not permitted to say exactly what it is. Then it came to light that Director Comey kept a contemporaneous memo of a conversation with Trump in February, in which Trump asked Comey to quietly let go of the investigation into contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials. If that account is accurate, the president committed a crime. Even some Republicans have begun to wonder openly whether the president will be permitted to finish his term of office.
Those are the stories on every page and screen right now. They are of such overwhelming importance that the attention given to them is more than justified. What I would like to do though is take a step back from the immediate issue, and wonder a bit about what comes next, with Trump or without him. As ubiquitous as Trump has been within the political upheavals of the last two years, he is also the product of unique historical circumstances and political decisions taken well before he was a force in public life. The fissures in the Republican Party that he has exposed remain stark, and even if Trump were to resign tomorrow that party would still be firmly in control of the government for a minimum of a year and a half. There are very real divisions the Republicans have to deal with.
There are two Republican archetypes these days. The first one is modeled on Reagan. An optimist at heart, this Republican is firmly committed to the belief that a less restrictive government benefits everyone, but is open in principle to the use of the government to achieve worthy objectives. This Republican believes in an open society, free trade, and a reasonably open system of legal immigration. Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Lindsey Graham come immediately to mind. I may believe them mistaken about many things, but they are people with whom I have no difficulty communicating.
But there is another force in Republican politics, which has been brought from the fringe to the foreground in the last ten years. Steve King, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon are representative of this group. They see foreign trade as other countries ripping off the US, they see a growing non-white and non-Christian population as a threat to western (read "European") culture. They believe that they are fighting for the substance of civilization in the United States and that their enemies are a part of every branch and department in the government. Accordingly their respect for process and institutions, where it exists, is limited.
This latter faction has been frequently compared to the Nazis, with considerable controversy about that designation. While they may not be genocidal, or (Bannon excluded) in favor of the third World War, there is an important aspect of how they see the world that they have in common with the Nazis, and indeed with any nationalist ideology motivated explicitly or implicitly by race. That is the idea that culture is something to be preserved in stasis, rather than something that is constantly and unavoidably changing in a densely interconnected world.
In reality of course there is a spectrum between these two Republicanisms. Every conservative and nationalist has a little of the other in them. It may even be viewed not as a division within the party, but as a struggle within the ideology itself to accept the consequences of its own program. Republicans championed trade agreements and moderate immigration policy for decades. In order to enact that agenda they needed the support of the white working class, and successfully seduced them with cultural and racial appeals after the civil rights acts of the mid 1960s.
The result of free trade, free markets, and relatively free movement of individuals has been an extraordinary mixing of heritages and profound demographic change for the United States. This, ironically, is the most admirable achievement of the program that the US and the Republican Party in particular has championed for the last half century. Conservatives presented an enticing vision of a dynamic economy, always on the move and moved by passionate individuals, but failed to realize that such dynamism could scarcely be confined to economics. Society followed suit. The divisions in the modern GOP can be largely characterised as between those who embrace social change - however tentatively - and those who reject it.
Trump may be the embodiment of those divisions but he is not their source. With or without him, the Republicans will have to decide where they stand. That drama will play out over the coming decade, and will do much to determine the political landscape of the country in the 21st century.
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