Dismantling the Republican Party

David Hilfiker

How do we move past the Republican Party?  In ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week, Israel’s parliament may have shown us a way.  The Washington Post reported that the parliament voted to

give power to an unlikely coalition of parties from the right, center and left of Israel’s spectrum. … [These parties have] little in common beyond a determination to end the contentious rule of Netanyahu, who has clung to power despite being on trial for corruption and failing to secure a majority after four inconclusive elections in two years.

In other words, political parties (including the Islamist Ra’am party, the first independent Arab party to sign on to an Israeli governing coalition) agreed to put their stark differences temporarily aside in order to oust a leader they believed was damaging the country.

Something similar happened in my wife’s home country of Finland in 1932 as the extreme right-wing Lapua Movement threatened the country’s 10-year-old fragile democracy.  Like the German Nazis, Lapua demanded the destruction of communism by any means necessary and used violence to further its goals.  At first, other more moderate conservatives tolerated Lapua because its anti-communism was useful to their own agendas.  As Lapua became more radical and violent, however, Finland’s traditional conservative parties saw the threat to their democracy and formed a coalition from across the ideological spectrum to isolate Lapua, which quickly fell apart.

Today in the United States the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party, as I’ve written often in the last two years (see here), is also a threat to democracy.  They are a distinct minority (Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over seven million votes), but the antidemocratic institutions of our democracy (the electoral college, the Constitution’s provision for two senators per state regardless of size, gerrymandering, and now the Republican statehouses’ attempts to suppress the vote) make a 2022 Republican victory likely in the House and possible even in the Senate.

It’s time for a coalition of political leaders to unite to isolate the Republican Party even at the risk of their own political futures.  Like Netanyahu, who lost by only one vote in the parliamentary election, Trump has a large number of acolytes and followers, so victory is not assured.  But if the Never-Trump Movement, the Libertarians, the Green Party, the democratic socialists and others who see the danger could agree temporarily to put aside their political differences, dismantling the Republican Party would be likely.

It's important to recognize the danger to which those Republicans who would join the coalition are exposing themselves.  Trump has been merciless in destroying the political careers of many who oppose them.  There is certainly no guarantee that the coalition would be successful.  It’s not only conservatives who put themselves at risk, however.  Progressives both within the Democratic Party and other left-wing groups would have to limit their agendas to appeal to all independent and moderate Democratic voters.  Everyone would have to risk alienating their base constituencies.  We must all recognize that the risk to the country of letting the Republican Party keep its power is simply too great to allow our ideologies weaken our common cause.

Current politics in the United States is different, of course, from that in present-day Israel or 1930s Finland.  The Republican Party is not so blatantly threatening to the democracy as was the Nazi Party or the Lapua Movement.  The multi-party system in Israel makes isolating Netanyahu less threatening to individual members of parliament.  The coalition I’m suggesting would be unique in American history.

As in Finland in the 1930s, there are many conservative politicians who oppose Trump yet still, apparently, have fantasies they can hang on to their values while not making their opposition to Trump public.  Like some conservatives in Germany during the 1930s, they may believe that Trump is still useful to their own political goals (like Trump’s 2017 tax cut).  By the time the German conservatives recognized the true danger the Nazis embodied, however, the opposition no longer had the power to control it.  

Now is the time!  After the 2022 elections may be too late.  If even a small number of Republicans who have opposed Trump (eg Senator Mitt Romney of Utah; the nine other senators who have publicly opposed Trump; Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Tom Rice of South Carolina and other members in the House of Representative; along with the 20% of Republican voters who do not support Trump) were to publicly join a coalition movement to support progressive candidates, it is likely the Republican Party could be successfully confronted.  A new, truly conservative party could eventually grow from the ashes.

We have a way out.  It will take extraordinary political courage from a few elected Congress people to lead the remaining Republican voters out of the party.  It won’t be enough to oppose Trump.  Despite their ideological differences, citizens and politicians of all political stripes will have to actively support the commonly agreed upon candidates.  

The most important thing for American democracy at this point is not our particular ideological agendas but that we come together to dismantle the Republican Party.