Another autopsy? Time for both parties to examine themselves
Call me skeptical, but something doesn’t make sense about President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden by citing unsupported charges of vote fraud.
For one thing, he’d have a stronger case if he didn’t have a long record of raising allegations without evidence, beginning with his doubts about former President Barack Obama’s well-documented American birth certificate.
For another, what kind of vast liberal conspiracy would let Democrats win the White House while taking a thoroughly unexpected shellacking down the same ballot?
Instead of riding a “blue wave” takeover of Congress, Democrats lost seats in the House, did poorly in state-level races that will determine redistricting and now look to two runoffs in Georgia to maybe — just maybe — win Democratic control of the Senate.
What happened? That’s an excellent and inevitable question. Both parties have good reason to revive the sort of self-examining “autopsy” that Republican leaders convened after Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012.
The Grand Old Party was doing well at the gubernatorial level in those days but losing two important and growing demographics — younger voters and people of color — as well as voters outside of the business class.
But the Trump train derailed that broad outreach in 2016 by focusing on the party’s right-wing base and energizing the “forgotten Americans” on the losing end of globalism and others who had sat out earlier elections.
Democrats responded, after vigorous competition between old and new faces in the primaries, by nominating former Vice President Biden. He wasn’t as charismatic as Trump or Obama but, thanks to Trump’s excesses, his timing was right. After Trump’s unpredictable Twitter furies, voters were saying, dull never looked so good.
But what next? Trump may be on the way out, but what happens to “Trumpism,” the angry, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual and often conspiracy theory-fueled populism that energized a movement now in search of a new champion — or maybe the old champion, if he decides to run again?
Trumpism didn’t begin with Trump. Parallels with the reactionary 1960s conservatism of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace were obvious from the beginning of Trump’s rise, as well as his effective borrowing from Ronald Reagan’s campaigns, including Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
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