“There is no Republican Party. There is the party of Trump,” John Boehner told a gathering of GOP faithful in Mackinac, Michigan, last week. “The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”
Former Speaker Boehner should probably re-check the pulse of the aged party, because the Bush-Boehner GOP may not just be snoozing. It could be a coma.
To consider. This GOP was committed to free trade, open borders, amnesty, and using American power to punish aggressors and “end tyranny in our world.” This GOP set out to create a modern world order where dictatorships were threatened by “regime change” and democratic capitalism was the modern order of the ages.
However, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination and won the presidency, saying goodbye to all this.
How likely is it that the future candidate of the Republican Party for president will resurrect the Bush-Boehner agenda rejected in 2016, implement it, win and impose it on the party and the nation?
Bush-Boehner Republicanism seems as dead today as Harding-Coolidge Republicanism did after 1933. And if Trumpism is not the future of the GOP, it is strenuous to imagine what a promising GOP agenda could look like.
A little history: In seven elections beginning in 1992, Republicans won the presidency three times but won the popular vote only once, in 2004, when George W. was still basking in “mission accomplished” in Iraq.
What fractured and overwhelmed the Bush-Boehner Republican Party?
First, demographics. The mass immigration of Third World nations that began with the 1965 Immigration Act and the degenerating birth rate of Native Americans began to swamp the Nixon-Reagan New Majority.
Second, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the USSR removed the great unifying cause of the party from Eisenhower to Bush I – the Cold War.
After the Red Army returned home, “America First” gained a modern charm!
Third, true to the free trade cult in which they were raised, Republicans supported NAFTA, the WTO, and the MFN in favor of China.
Historians will recall with amazement how American free-trade fanatics gave away the greatest manufacturing base the world has ever seen, quoting with approval the 18th- and 19th-century scribblers whose ideas contributed so much to the downfall of their own country, Great Britain.
Between 1997 and 2017, the EU ran a goods trade surplus of more than $2 trillion at America’s expense, and we also footed the European defense bill.
From 1992 to 2016, China was allowed to run trade surpluses of $4 trillion at our expense, transforming itself into the world’s first manufacturing powerhouse and depriving America of tens of thousands of factories and millions of manufacturing jobs.
In Trump’s first year, China’s trade surplus with the United States reached $375 billion. From January to March this year, our trade deficit with China was at almost the same astronomical level.
“The trade deficit doesn’t matter,” we hear from economists.
They could explain it to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And perhaps someone can explain the sense of giving 4 percent of our GDP each year to a hostile nation while American admirals talk harshly about confronting that hostile nation over islets and reefs in the South China Sea.
Why do we so enormously enrich and empower those we are told we will have to fight?
Fourth, under Bush II and Obama, the United States intervened massively in the Near and Middle East – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. And the forces that entered these conflicts and so disappointed the nation that it elected Barack Obama are back, calling for a modern war with Iran. They can get this war too.
However, given the anti-interventionist and anti-war stances of the victorious Trump campaign and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, U.S. involvement in wars in the Middle East seems less like America’s future than its past.
After 16 months in office, it appears that Trump’s presidency, no matter how miniature, will be a defining moment in the history of the United States and the world, as well as the future of the GOP.
The world is changing. NATO and the EU are showing their age. Nationalism, populism and tribalism are ubiquitous on the Old Continent. And America’s willingness to shoulder the burden of defending Europe when they move virtually freely is clearly diminishing.
It is challenging to understand why and how Republicans will once again become the party of Bush-Boehner that preceded Trump’s rise to power.
What would be the argument for returning to a rejected platform?
Not only did Trump defeat 16 Bush Republicans, but he put forward an agenda on immigration, border security, amnesty, foreign intervention, the Middle East, NAFTA, free trade, Putin and Russia that was a rejection of what the Bush-Boehner party stood for and strived for 2008 and 2012 presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.
If the Republican Party is “snoozing”, let it sleep soundly, because its time has passed. We are in a modern world now.
