It’s Time to Whigify the Republican Party
America’s modern Republican Party deserves the fate of the Whigs.
You remember the Whig Party, right? It was once one of two dominant political parties in the U.S. The Whigs were a powerful political force before the Civil War. Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, Henry Clay, and William Henry Harrison were all Whigs. The Whigs elected multiple presidents and were perennially powerful in congress. Then the Whig Party disappeared into the dustbin of American history during the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
I’m not a professional historian or political scientist, so I’m not going to try and explain the underlying issues that brought the Whigs to an end. I’m just an American who is patriotic enough to have devoted a vast amount of my life to trying to elect Democratic candidates ranging from those I knew to be good and talented public servants to those I believed were at least better than the alternative in the election. Those experiences haven’t given me much insight into the ultimate causes that drove the Whigs into extinction 170 years ago, but they have convinced me of one thing: for the good of America, for the good of Americans, and for the good of the world, we must Whigify the Republican Party. As long as the Republican Party exists in anything close to its current form, we are all at risk.
The contemporary Republican Party is a force for evil.
First, let’s be clear that no one should mourn the demise of what the Republican Party has become. Today’s Republican Party is a force for evil. Different Americans may list the GOP’s sins in different orders, but all of us outside of the ever-shrinking Republican tent have a very long list of sins the Republican Party has and is committing against America.
Today’s Republican Party isn’t just ignoring the climate change emergency, it’s trying to affirmatively accelerate the catastrophe by expanding fossil fuel extraction.
The contemporary GOP is suppressing democracy by, among other things, working to destroy the Post Office — the Post Office! — to keep Americans from voting in a pandemic.
Speaking of the pandemic, the Republican Party has turned broad swaths of America into science denying, snake-oil cure relying, and rapidly dying petri dishes of COVID-19.
The Republican Party of 2020 has devoted itself to transferring wealth from working Americans to billionaires through every means possible, such as by weakening unions, by removing workplace protections for workers, repeatedly trying to strip Americans of health insurance, and by giving tax breaks to the uber-wealthy while shifting taxes onto the desperate middle class and the terrified working poor.
Today’s Republican Party has allowed Big Business to poison our air, our water, our soil, and our food in the name of profit.
The current GOP has welcomed misinformation campaigns by foreign dictators into our body politic and covered up election meddling from abroad.
The Republican Party has sent uninvited federal forces into America’s cities to instigate violence and silence dissent.
Worst of all, the Republican Party has anchored the entire American political system to the far right, effectively (and I believe intentionally) limiting the range of what is considered politically possible to exclude implementing the policies required to face the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Any attempt to completely list the sins of the contemporary Republican Party would run on for pages and still would inevitably leave something out. I hope that, just as past scholars have studied the failings of the Whigs, future scholars will write books asking what went wrong with this once great Republican Party. It would be a just fate for what the Republican Party has become.
The contemporary Republican Party has no redeeming qualities.
I know that some cooler heads may insist that, whatever its copious current flaws, the Republican Party possesses some positive traits. The cooler heads may claim that these positive traits justify reforming the GOP rather than destroying it. This would be the classic argument against throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the problem is that there just isn’t a baby anywhere in the GOP’s fetid tub. The entire bath needs to be dumped outside, and then the tub needs to be chucked out and burned.
Whatever redeeming qualities once marked the Republican Party — and even I will admit that there are some historical positives associated with the GOP — those positives are now actively opposed by the Republican Party even if a few individual Republicans still pay lip service to them.
The GOP that ended slavery and fought to maintain the Union is long dead. The husk that remains of that proud party now shelters the ideological heirs to the very Confederacy that the Party of Lincoln defeated at a terrible but necessary cost.
A president elected by the Republican Party once warned of the threat posed to the nation by a growing “military-industrial complex.” Today’s Republican Party has shot its tendrils of corrupt self-dealing throughout the very entity we were cautioned against.
The Republican Party that once championed Main Street’s small businesses and entrepreneurs has entrenched the oligarchs and monopolists that have wrecked the real economy most Americans live in.
The GOP that used to describe America as a City on a Hill and a beacon of hope to a world yearning for freedom has now made common cause with the world’s worst dictators.
The Republican Party that once preached American Exceptionalism now strives to make America excel at political pardons, selective prosecutions, and self-dealing.
The Republican Party that scorned flowery, unattainable ideals and instead insisted on a realpolitik that addressed hard realities both abroad and at home now ignores inconvenient truths, be those truths hundreds of thousands dead from a pandemic, rapidly rising seas or the chaos we’ve sewn amongst our former allies.
The GOP that once demanded personal morality from America’s leaders now props up a fraud and an adulterer who is morally bankrupt in ways not even imagined by Republicans who served in simpler times.
Today’s Republican Party has effectively sold its mother’s bones to buy flowers for a harlot. It has squandered any claim to the higher principles it once championed. Because of the GOP’s betrayal of its principles, it already falls to other civic institutions must preserve the more noble principles that once undergirded the Republican Party. There is nothing in the GOP worthy of preserving.
The “Good Republicans” will be better off without the Republican Party.
I know that there are still a few “Good Republicans” out there yearning for a political home, the sort of people that I ardently disagree with but who believe in an America with elections and civil rights and a constitutional order. These Good Republicans are all too often well-hidden, but I know that they are quietly opposed to the anti-reality, white nationalistic, anti-democracy turn the GOP has taken.
These Good Republicans will be better off with the Republican Party as dead as the Whigs. The evil monstrosity that is today’s GOP shouts down Good Republicans even more than it silences Democrats. Ending the contemporary Republican Party doesn’t require that the Good — or even the Bad — Republicans suffer as individuals, merely that the Republican Party receive the electoral punishment it deserves.
Ending the current GOP merely means that the political organization known as the Republican Party must fail. The individual members of the Republican Party will still be with us after the Republican Party is no more. Those Good Republicans, as well as the Bad Republicans, will be free to advocate for their ideas as independents, or to become Democrats, or even to start their own new political party. Whatever path they follow, they will find their work easier without the albatross of today’s GOP hanging around their necks. Whigifying the Republican Party will be a boon to the Good Republicans.
Whigify the Republican Party at the ballot box. Repeatedly.
I am not a historian or a political scientist, so I can’t speak to the root causes of the fall of the Whigs, but as an old political hand I know precisely what kills a political party. I damn well know that losing elections is what finished the Whigs off.
Losing elections hurts a party. Losing elections up and down the ballot year after year kills a political party. A losing party struggles to find candidates, volunteers, and donors. Without these basic components necessary to do politics, a losing party shrinks into itself, infights, and finally dies. That’s what happened to the Whigs of the mid-Nineteenth Century, that’s what nearly happened with my Kansas Democratic Party, and that’s what needs to happen to the Republicans of today.
Whigifying the Republican Party will take more than a single election cycle, but it must begin with this election. Ending the clear and present danger of the contemporary GOP requires that in 2020 Democrats win the White House, but it also requires that Democrats win the Senate. We must go further than even that, though, if we are to truly begin Whigiying the Republican Party. Republicans must be defeated in races from governor to state representative, from to mayor to dog catcher. We must beat Republicans in places the GOP now deems safe. We must beat Republicans who run good campaigns. We must defeat even the Good Republicans who are friendly, kind, and considerate so that they will know that they can no longer affiliate with the GOP and win elections. We must defeat so many Republicans that anyone with ambitions to hold office will know without a doubt that they cannot win elections while members of the GOP.
Taking even this first step requires us all to hold together in a fractious coalition that ranges from the right of John Kasich to the left of Bernie Sanders. I hold no illusion that it will be easy for us to hang together through the next Election Day, much less beyond, but I know that we must. Defeating today’s GOP by overwhelming margins takes that kind of broad coalition, and defeating Republican candidates by overwhelming margins is the only way to Whigify the Republican Party.
And Whigifying the Republican Party is the only way to save America.
