To make sense of Donald Trump’s political rise and the unraveling of the Republican Party he now leads, progressive writer E.J. Dionne listens to conservatives who saw it all coming.
In 2013, after Republican nominee Mitt Romney lost young and minority voters, the Grand Old Party formulated a plan to ensure victory in future elections as the country becomes more diverse in age and race.
The party of Lincoln could no longer rely on white, middle-aged voters to pick primary winners who wouldn’t be soundly defeated in general elections by a broader American electorate.
Yet this folly is precisely what Trump repeated this year, drawing strong support from white men who are fast becoming a minority in America.
“Republicans were warned about this by Republicans,” Dionne, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told a packed lunchtime crowd at Quaker Station on Thursday.
“This was a report about rebuilding the party after 2012,” Dionne said of the GOP plan. “And I think in the long history of advice giving, it’s hard to think of a case where good counsel was so resolutely rejected.
“And large chunks of the Republican primary electorate did the rejecting.”
As the fourth speaker celebrating 40 years of Akron Roundtable discussions, Dionne gave a spirited and energetic recap of the rise of Trump and how liberals should not rejoice if he loses but instead show empathy for the discontent of his followers.
Rise of Trump
Dionne was up late the night before filing a column with the Washington Post on the third and final presidential debate. Fifteen minutes after the candidates walked off the stage, Dionne filed his first draft.
In Akron the next day, the prolific writer gave a 20-minute synopsis of the election year, leaning often on the words of John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, conservative and progressive champions William F. Buckley Jr., and Michael Harrington and the late pillar of bipartisanship, U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette of Ohio.
The political commentator and author, whose election year reads include Why Americans Hate Politics and How the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to Trump, explained how Trump hijacked the Republican Party and what the future holds for the GOP should he lose.
“Is Trump’s interest in creating a Trump wing of the Republican Party?” Dionne mulled in response to a question from the crowd. “Does he want to do that or does he want to split the party? Do he and Steve Bannon of Brietbart (a neo-conservative news website) want to create a party to the right of the Republican Party?”
Rewinding the clock, Dionne explained that Republicans have been making promises they can’t fulfill since Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee, scared away black voters.
Promises to reduce the size of government have been rejected by an American people who Dionne said want Uncle Sam to build roads and provide social and national security. Promises to reverse the cultural shifts of the 1960s and reset the ethnicity of the country to a whiter day, most recently by Trump’s plan to deport 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally, too are rejected by popular opinion, he said.
Republicans also have relied too much on white working-class voters who have suffered the adverse economic impacts of globalization, Dionne said. This, in particular, set the stage for Trump to run as an outsider, rejecting long-standing bipartisan support for free trade.
Finally, Dionne said, Republicans have refused to reject extremism, whether in the form of intolerance or absurdity, as in Trump’s previous persistent and false claims that President Barack Obama was born in Africa. Even Romney, who denounces Trump today, did not reject him in 2012 when Trump pushed the “birther” movement and endorsed Romney.
“Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside,” Dionne said, quoting Kennedy’s 1961 warning to those who support tyrants.
Sympathetic response
The Democratic Party and progressives must not shun Trump supporters, Dionne argued.
“If progressives are not going to be sympathetic to those folks, then they have no business calling themselves progressives,” Dionne said.
“I am a liberal who really doesn’t like liberal elitism. I really don’t think that liberal elitism ever paved the way for liberal egalitarianism,” Dionne said. “Those of us who believe in change, who believe in equality, cannot look at our brothers and sisters in opposite corners and simply write them off.
“Now I say that without pretending that within the Trump movement there really are forces, and you see them out there online and you see them at rallies, that engage in racist behavior … a horrible rise of anti-Semitism on the web … and a great deal of intolerance.”
Re-creating conservatism
John Green, director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, introduced Dionne at the luncheon as a colleague.
Dionne joked that Green should take a year after the election to rebuild the GOP, just as Bliss did after Goldwater.
“Can you imagine, John, what Ray Bliss would think of this election?” Dionne asked.
To find common ground and move the country forward, Dionne encouraged bipartisanship and “discovering a new form of Eisenhower conservatism.”
“I hope a great heartland place like Ohio can lead us back to dealing with each other with a degree of empathy, compassion and understanding,” Dionne said.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .