Bill Kristol is right: Trump's GOP is a cult, and he's broken it beyond repair
We can all remember Republicans and conservatives criticizing George W. Bush and even more, his dad. On several occasions, the National Review took issue with both the positions and actions of Ronald Reagan. Conservatives never hesitated to speak up when they thought Jerry Ford was wrong. Even before Watergate, I remember William F. Buckley publicly declaring his "suspension of support" for President Nixon, and Congressman John Ashcroft actually staged a (symbolic) challenge to Mr. Nixon's renomination without destroying himself politically. As popular as Ike was, Republicans seldom hesitated to speak up when they thought he was making a mistake.
As popular as President Obama was among Democrats, he wasn't considered above criticism. Neither was Bill Clinton or- heaven knows!- Jimmy Carter. Lyndon Johnson had his critics in the Democratic Party on both his right and his left and was eventually driven from office by them. And so did John F. Kennedy.
And that's as it should be. In a democracy (or a republic, if you're a pedantic conservative) leaders are accountable and expect to be criticized even by allies when those allies think they are making a mistake. There's very little that is closer to the heart of what it means to live in a democratic society than the right and even the obligation to express one's opinion fearlessly, even if it happens to fly in the face of the leader of one's party or the nation.
But that's changed now. Donald Trump is the first American president certainly in my lifetime whom the members of his party dare not criticize. It's not just the eye-brow raising oversensitivity that causes him to lash out viciously if usually childishly at anyone who dares to criticize or disagree with him. His lack of manners is worrisome on one level, but far more worrying is that he takes total agreement and absolute personal allegiance as his due. He utterly refuses to be accountable to anyone, friend or foe, and he has cowed and intimidated the Republican Party and with a few exceptions (Kristol and the others at The Bulwark come to mind) into servile fealty. Even Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb), once a principled and eloquent critic of Mr. Trump, has been intimidated into silence, made to understand by his own state party that the price of continuing to speak his conscience would be his Senate seat and likely his political career.
When former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld and former Congressman Joe Walsh, a libertarian of sorts far to the left of the Republican mainstream and a somewhat eccentric denizen of the far-right whose political positions historically have been virtually identical to Mr. Trump's, announced quixotic challenges to the president's renomination, neither posed even a remote threat. Yet so completely was the Republican Party remade in the image of The Leader that states began canceling their primaries to deny Weld and Walsh even the opportunity to be crushed by him at the polls. Not a few people both inside and outside the Republican Party were troubled by this evidence of the degree to which the party had embraced the same authoritarianism Mr. Trump so admires in the leaders of foreign nations, and the central thesis of authoritarianism: that dissent is not to be rebutted rhetorically and defeated politically, but crushed, and treated as fundamentally illegitimate.
When it was only a matter of offering to pay the legal expenses of supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies or suggesting that the law be changed to allow him to sue journalists and publications which ran "intentionally false" stories (begging the question of who would decide what is true or false, and what the motivations were of those who wrote and published it), it was possible that in Mr. Trump we were simply seeing a man who lacked even a rudimentary understanding of the Bill of Rights and the assumptions by which a free people governs itself. But such is no longer the case. Donald Trump is, as I have always feared, a convinced authoritarian, a man who holds the rights guaranteed us by the Constitution in contempt. And he has transformed the Republican Party into something that more closely resembles the Ba'athist Party in Syria or Sadaam Hussein's Iraq, or the Communist Party in China or the old Soviet Union, than any political party in American history.
I was one of those who were concerned about the cult of personality that seemed to be attached to President Obama. But he never encouraged it. Mr. Trump doesn't simply encourage his own cult of personality. He sees it as his due, and demands to be treated as no president and no party leader in our history has ever presumed to think himself entitled to be treated. And forty percent, more or less, of the nation, goes along with it.
This in itself ought to frighten thoughtful people to death. But there are fewer and fewer sufficiently thoughtful people on the American right and in the Republican Party as time goes on. The Republican Party has become in its very essence the antithesis of everything it stood for as recently as four years ago, and what every previous major political party in the nation's history has had in common: a commitment to principles rather than personalities, and especially the principle that free people should freely express what they believe without fear of retribution or retaliation.
No, a Republican who disagrees with the president will not be sent to the Gulag; only a political Siberia awaits him. And he certainly won't be "disappeared." "Primaried," sure, if he can't be intimidated into toeing the line. But the only death such a Republican will face will be political rather than physical.
But that doesn't make Donald Trump's Republican Party any less a fundamentally anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian institution, or a conservative movement which gives lip service to the Constitution and the rule of law, in fact, a movement in thrall to the rejection of the principles of the former and the practice of the latter. But as Kristol points out, there's something still worse about all of this.
There is no going back. Donald Trump has broken the Republican Party and the American conservative movement beyond repair. Kristol clearly sees what I have seen as unmistakable for the past four years: that however many of us balk at the prospect, other arrangements will have to be made by those of us who believe in what the Republican Party and the conservative movement stood for before Donald Trump came along.
It will require a clean break with the past, a new political party, and even a new movement. The leaders and opinion-shapers who have sold their souls to Donald Trump and his newly authoritarian Republican Party and movement which while it may be right-wing is anything but conservative can never be trusted again.
When the Federalists became irrelevant, the Whigs replaced them; then the Whigs were no longer adequate to the new challenges and new realities of a Union on the brink of dissolution, Fremont and Lincoln and the Republicans took their place. And now that the Republican Party and what calls itself the conservative movement have become enemies of the most fundamental things those two labels have always stood for, they, too, must give way so that their historic principles can survive.
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