Kasich won't run next year. I don't know whether this is good news or bad news.
My great fear was that he would listen to those who were encouraging him to take the hopeless and suicidal step of challenging President Trump for the nomination of a Republican Party that has sold its soul to the White Nationalists, the nativists, and the alt-right pretty much from top to bottom.
The good news is that he realizes how thoroughly the Republican rank-and-file is behind our thoroughly regrettable president. He won't run for the nomination. The bad news is that he doesn't sound like he's going to lead a third-party ticket, either.
So do you have any plans for 2020, Evan McMullin?
Winning wouldn't be the point. The Republicans lost in 1856, the first time they ran a candidate for president. But they won four years later. And in 2024, the nation will face a quandary. If Joe Biden- probably the best we can hope for from the Democrats this time around- wins, it's by no means certain that at his age he'd seek a second term. If he did, that would be no more of a bargain than his first term would likely to be. But the Republicans wouldn't be an option for centrists, either.
Not long ago, I came across a tweet from somebody at the RNC wondering what us Never Trumpers thought we were going to do in 2024 since we wouldn't exactly be welcomed back into the thoroughly Trumpist Republican party with open arms. He implied that the best course would be for us to swallow our pride, hop aboard the Trump Train now, and try to nominate somebody we liked better next time out.
I am very much afraid that Gov. Kasich is thinking of running for the Republican nomination then. And it would probably be just as hopeless in 2024 as it would be in 2020. As I tweeted back to the fellow from the RNC, even without Trump, the Republican party would still be the party which had proven itself capable of supporting him and his agenda. True, Trump would be gone. The nominee would probably be somebody like Mike Pence or Ted Cruz. Maybe we'd all get lucky, and it would be Nikki Haley, but I doubt it. It simply is hard to see a scenario in which I, or my fellow Never Trumpers, could even imagine rejoining the Republican party as it exists today. It would first have to get rid, not merely of Trump, but of Trumpism, and all the ugly things to which it wedded itself when it embraced him.
Regardless of who the Republicans nominate in 2024, they won't be able to re-write history. It remains my strong conviction that Donald Trump will be defeated next year. Maybe- and perhaps this is what Gov. Kasich has in mind- the defeat will be so decisive, so overwhelming a repudiation of Donald Trump and all his works by the American people that the Republican party will have to re-invent itself and repudiate him and those he brought into the party. The only way I, personally, could ever consider myself a Republican again would be if the White Nationalists and nativists and alt-right types were utterly repudiated and made unwelcome. The damage that Donald Trump has done to the party of Lincoln and Ike and Gerry Ford and the Bushes would have to be thoroughly renounced, even if it probably would take decades to undo.
And it could happen. Donald Trump's election was a shock. Nobody, really, expected it. The polls were wrong. The pundits were wrong. They were wrong for identifiable reasons that won't be repeated in 2020. The marginal types who were not in the habit of voting and were not polled but who came out from under the rocks to vote for Trump in 2016 are now out in the open. The huge number of voters who intensely disliked both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton but who couldn't see their way clear to voting for McMullin or Johnson or Jill Stein broke decisively at the last moment for Trump; these days, the polls say that they would hold their noses and vote overwhelmingly for the Democrat instead. Trump is a known quantity. Trump is the issue. And Trump is not simply unpopular- according to the last poll I saw 62% of those asked disapprove of the job he's doing as president- but is unpopular precisely among the truck drivers and farmers and blue-collar workers who were the backbone of his support last time out. Even the coal miners he pandered to in Pennsylvania by promising to relax clean air standards are discovering that the Trump presidency is more of a hindrance than a help, and turning against him.
I took it as a given back in 2016 that a man as unstable, badly informed, erratic, impulsive, and generally unfit as Donald Trump would do such a bad job if he were actually to be elected that there would be no question of a second term. I actually doubted that he would finish his first. I'm surprised that he hasn't made a more obvious hash of more areas of the nation's affairs. But his downfall- as I thought it might be- is his absolute failure to understand modern economics and the world economy in particular. His trade war with China has been a disaster for those farmers and blue-collar workers who he managed to con in 2016 into thinking that they had a voice in him. The formula which gave Mr. Trump his Electoral College victory in 2016 was a fragile one; the loss of one key constituency and a couple of the several states which aren't looking any too good for him right now would be enough for it to evaporate. No, after 2016, nobody is going to speak too confidently about what will happen in 2020. But barring an enormous stroke of good luck or three, it's hard for me to see how Donald Trump can possibly be re-elected. And so many of the groups which supported him last time out seem likely to support his opponent instead that a Democratic landslide is by no means out of the question,
And sadly, it will take a Democratic landslide for the Republican party to save itself from what Donald Trump has made it. In 1964, Barry Goldwater- a far better man than Donald Trump, though somewhat out of the mainstream for his time and also, like Trump, apt to say ill-considered things (though because he had thought them through and had come to unpopular conclusions rather than because he lacked filters)- went down to a landslide defeat at the hands of President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ carried 44 of the 50 states. The disaster was so complete for the Republican party that it had no choice but to reinvent itself.
It's not that it suddenly turned liberal, though at the time "liberal Republican" was not the oxymoron it is today. It simply recovered its sense of self-preservation and remembered its history. Ray Bliss replaced Dean Burch as chair of the RNC, and strong efforts were made to reach out to the disaffected moderates who had been unable to swallow Goldwater. The Republicans once again became a center-right political party rather than a right-wing one, and a coalition of various viewpoints of the right of the Democrats capable of winning a national election.
The nominee in 1968 was not Nelson Rockefeller or Chuck Percy or Mark Hatfield, but Richard Nixon. Nixon was able to command the support of all elements of the party, from the moderates to the movement conservatives, from the pragmatic to the ideological, from Main Street to Wall Street. The Democrats were badly divided (more or less their chronic state throughout the history of the party) by the war in Vietnam and a catastrophic convention, though those wounds healed enough in the closing weeks of the campaign to make the result of the election very close indeed.
Nevertheless, the Republicans won. The disaster of 1964 was followed by the triumph of 1968. And in no small measure, it was due to the repudiation of some of the same slimy, bizarre, crazy, hate-and-militant-ignorance-driven elements that came out of the woodwork in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Those are the people Hillary Clinton actually meant when she used the term "deplorables," before blundering by making it possible for the term to be misunderstood as applying to Trump voters in general. Those are the people who made up Donald Trump's base in 2016 and have been instrumental in so completely deforming the message, nature, and objective of the Republican party since then. These are the people whom Goldwater's successor as the leader of the conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, managed to prevent from becoming the face of the Republican party in his day, and proved a strong enough leader to prevent from becoming a distraction during the eight years he was in the White House.
Those are the people who have to be removed from positions of influence and authority in the post-Trump era if the Republican party is ever going to find itself again.
Donald Trump was nominated and elected at a peculiar moment in the history of the party. The so-called "establishment wing" of the party had been in charge for some time. The Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney had all been its standard-bearers. But the rank-and-file of the party had been moving right. I supported first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio for the nomination. But I am convinced that if Donald Trump had not been the nominee in 2016, Ted Cruz would have been.
And I would have voted for him. He is an intelligent and principled man, and although he's well to my right he was and remains so far superior to Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or any of the extremists running for the Democratic nomination that I would not have hesitated. In 2024, Ted Cruz may well be the nominee. Or Mike Pence, who has thus far shown me little that would indicate that he's up to the job.
Or again, if we're lucky, Nikki Haley.
I could vote for a sane conservative, even one far to my own right, especially given the alternatives the Democrats are apt to offer. But I think the country may need something else when the time comes to clean up the mess Trump is making. In fact, it will need something else. It will need exactly what it needs now: leadership from the center, which can draw it together rather than pushing it apart and make it possible for Americans to use their "inside voices" while talking to one another, and in doing so have a reasonable hope of being heard and understood, if not necessarily agreed with.
Perhaps Kasich and others who have remained within the Republican party are right, and it can still not only be saved but made the vehicle for that work of national reconciliation and salvation. Personally, though, I have my doubts.
In any case, America will need what neither the Democrats nor the Republican right will be able to give it. It will need precisely that which so thoroughly turned off the Republican rank-and-file in the years leading up to 2016: an understanding that rather than being a form of surrender or spinelessness, compromise is the life's blood of democracy, and the air the breathing of which keeps freedom alive.
It will need a return to civility and comity which idealogues simply can't generate. And it's unlikely to come from the Democrats. Even from Joe Biden. And as able and fundamentally decent a man as Ted Cruz is, I'm not sure it can come from the combative and ideologically-driven right-wing of the Republican party either.
Perhaps that's what John Kasich is counting on. I hope things turn out that way. I hope that either the Republicans or enough of them to form the nucleus of a new party step up and do what the nation needs to have somebody do. And Kasich could be a man to lead such a movement.
The problem is that he'll be 72 in 2024, and this might have been his year- not as a Republican, to be sure, but perhaps as the John Fremont of a movement capable of giving new life to a nation that seems bent on tearing itself apart.
I can't say that I'm optimistic, but I hope so because it has to happen before too much time goes by or the American experiment is going to collapse.
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