John Lamparski/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
A Trump supporter during a rally at Freedom Plaza, December 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Recent reporting by The New York Times finds that the “falsehoods, white nationalism and baseless conspiracy theories” that Donald Trump “peddled for four years have become ingrained at the grass-roots level” of the Republican Party. Yet the outcome of the presidential election and the runoffs in Georgia show that these ideas are deeply repellent to the independent and suburban voters Republicans need in order to win many elections. This presents the GOP with a predicament: They cannot win national office without endorsing fabulist conspiracies, and they cannot win national office if they do.
Sealed off in a world of their making—sporting majorities who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, or that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq—Republicans crossed the Rubicon long ago. Trump provides only a vantage point to view the river from the other side—and the insurrection of January 6th, a pointed summit. No GOP candidate can vie for the presidency without scaling this mountain in some way, picking up the necessary votes to win the primary the higher she climbs, while shedding general-election votes in equal measure. In losing control of their party, Republicans also lost the ability to control the national narrative.
Republicans cannot win national office without endorsing fabulist conspiracies, and they cannot win national office if they do.
The next political election is a long way off, and American memories can be short. Six years after Watergate, Ronald Reagan swept into office. Nevertheless, in its current form, the Republican Party is no longer viable for the presidency. The GOP has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections; if Democratic gains in the Sun Belt continue, the Electoral College will become a less reliable prop. In an age when so much power is vested in the executive, the inability to run competitively for the White House will be a punishing blow to the Republican Party.
We could view the national collapse of the Republican Party in a number of ways. Scholars typically follow a standard history of political-party organization as described through a series of successive “systems” (we sit now in the sixth, or perhaps the start of the seventh). Recent modifications to this scholarship emphasize long stretches when one of the two parties dominated national life, as well as the polarization that has followed from the rough parity of recent years.
But a more abrupt framework to understand party evolution is available as well. Since the country’s founding, one organized political faction has been dedicated to preserving institutionalized racism, whether slavery or its successors. To observe this fact is not to imply that the other party showed reciprocal devotion to the Black freedom movement, nor is it to delineate all facets of white supremacy and its enduring imprint on American life. Acknowledging this, a consideration of a strictly partisan nature may yield benefit. Regardless of party “system,” whiteness appears as a constant: One party always espoused the preservation of white power, not in incidental fashion, but as a dedicated agenda.
Republicans supply the latest iteration of this pattern. Will they also be the last?
As the white share of the electorate falls, so too does the reach and relevance of a party dedicated to structural racism. From the standpoint of party organization, this marks new (if also unheralded) territory. Most important is the fact that the standard historical pattern—that some entity exists ready to accommodate the politics of white privilege without risking majority status itself—no longer applies.
On the other hand, the voters professing the overt racism of pro-insurrectionists, as well as their many sympathizers, will not simply fold their tents, renounce their views, and melt back into the landscape of American life. (This is to say nothing of the forces of racism broadly speaking.) An entire media ecosystem ministers to their delusions; a political system built by slaveholders amplifies their electoral power. Nor will right-wing authoritarians wander like vagrants, from pillar to post. They will organize into an identifiable set of voters ready to leverage their voice.
That may take the form of simply taking over the Republican Party, pushing the apostates, the Lincoln Project and “Never Trump” Republicans, into the waiting arms of the Democrats. Or it may lead to an exiled third party running its own candidate for president. On the final full day of the Trump presidency, The Wall Street Journal reported that the now ex-president has discussed forming a new party called the Patriot Party, as perhaps a final act of revenge on—or leverage over—a Republican establishment he feels abandoned him after the election.
We can reasonably anticipate at least one additional party emerging from the delusive chords of Republican disarray.
Trump might instead call his wistful creation the “American Party,” the official name for the Know-Nothings, a mid-19th-century eruption of anti-immigrant, conspiracy-minded nativists who destroyed the Whigs, the northern counter to the Democratic South. In fact, it was the unusual difficulty the Republican House caucus encountered when electing a Speaker in 2015 that first attuned me to the prospect of a possible imminent collapse of the Republican Party; a very similar thing happened to the Whigs in 1854. (The House Speaker election discloses a lot more about the tensile strength of a party coalition than a campaign for president, which has so many placating promises at its disposal.)
Out of the ashes of the Whig Party came the Republicans, dedicated to stopping the spread of chattel slavery. Their arrival reinvigorated the strange stability of our party structure, in that guardians of institutionalized racism always had a preferential home in one party, or else a standing invitation to join the other. Whiteness—recognized by myself and other scholars as the architecture of our political system—also served as a stealth anchor for a two-party system; a partner with two suitors vying for her hand, always ready to play one off the other.
As she struggles to find a partisan home that will include access to the presidency, will the long-reigning, often valorized dominance of the two major political parties struggle alongside her?
Brief periods of disruption to two-party stability are common, typically heralding the slow and fitful process of political realignment. Strom Thurmond’s “Dixiecrats” in 1948 (formally, the States’ Rights Democratic Party) foreshadowed the emergence of the 1968 Republican presidential coalition, which relied on white voters in the previous Democratic stronghold of the South. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential run under the banner of the Progressive Party (sometimes called the Bull Moose Party) forecast the rupture of Republican electoral dominance in the North, later capitalized on by Franklin Roosevelt to form a New Deal coalition. Observing these harbingers of realignment, famed political historian Richard Hofstadter once noted that in American politics, third parties are like bees: They sting, then they die after one or both parties restructure in response.
If we look at the Republican Party from a pragmatic perspective, we can see some noteworthy political bolts, suggesting that perhaps American politics may soon suffer some bee stings. There could be internal battles among the Trumpist and non-Trumpist factions, coupled with a more sedate period of Democratic dominance. The minority party, once stabilized, could capitalize on inevitable shortcomings that, by process of accretion, will result in a return to majority status.
On the other hand, despite our deep habituation to a world of only Democrats and Republicans, the balkanization of our media habits suggests the viability of organizing various internal and external constituencies into formal parties. We can reasonably anticipate at least one additional party emerging from the delusive chords of Republican disarray. Lacking the predicate of whiteness, my additional supposition is that, within 20 years, we will see the end of two-party dominance in American politics.
In the end, whiteness as a structuring partisan force is without rival.
I say this with due regard to the ways in which the Electoral College favors a two-party structure, though it’s worth noting proposed changes to this system, as well as the growing popularity of runoff thresholds or ranked-choice voting. I also recognize that elections run based on a first-past-the-post electoral system—where voters cast only one vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins—play a poor host to governing coalitions forged in parliamentary systems. Finally, I acknowledge the adaptability of parties, disciplined in defeat to follow a new mode of politics, and pursue new voters.
Nevertheless, these all pale in comparison to the fact that whiteness can no longer command a majority in a party system, serving to cement together what would otherwise be divided along other factional lines. Is there any surrogate or substitution to accomplish the same purpose? I would be the last person to diminish the significance of anti-choice politics for the Republican Party, but recent events—in Argentina, in Poland—suggest that, like whiteness in an era of diversity, the actual implementation of extreme policies invites a scorching backlash. It might be possible to weave together an impressive multiracial electoral coalition relying on anti-choice politics, but you could not long govern on that basis. Likewise, a loosely jointed celebration of “diversity” may serve as mortar in the joints for a dominant Democratic Party, but lacking a serious opponent for the presidency, how long would that hold?
In the end, whiteness as a structuring partisan force is without rival. As of now, for the first time in our history, she is also without a serious new suitor. But she is not done wielding her ruinous force, promising to hobble the Republican Party in one way or another. Amid the turmoil of her damage and disgrace, we may fail to see that we stand on new political ground, with buried fault lines soon to surface as the new boundaries of partisanship.
