Former U.S. Sens. John Danforth of Missouri, William Cohen of Maine, and Alan Simpson of Wyoming — Republicans one and all — have taken to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to headline:
Between Trump and Biden, what should real Republicans do?
How Republicans should think about 2024 and beyond.
In their piece, the three — decent, thoughtful, and good former public servants one and all — begin by asserting:
Millions of Republicans are struggling with the question of how to vote in November.
Not mentioned? Per the results of the GOP primaries, former President Donald Trump received 14,922,942 votes — which is to say, just shy of 15 million. So, quite clearly, there are “millions of Republicans” who are decidedly not “struggling with the question of how to vote in November.” They are for Donald Trump. Period.
The senators go on to say that they believe the country needs a “healthy” two-party system, a belief doubtless shared by all these millions they mention — and don’t mention. And, to the senators, a return to “traditional Republicanism” is the goal.
The senators write:
Recently it has become popular to assert that this traditional brand of Republicanism is dead, replaced by a new populist, radical version. We disagree. In our view, traditional Republicanism, though currently in eclipse, is no more extinct than the sun was over portions of the country on April 8. And all of us who believe in it must do what we can to ensure its expeditious return.
To facilitate this comeback, we and other former GOP officeholders and officials are not leaving the party, but instead forming a new organization within it — “Our Republican Legacy.”
One can only shake one’s head at the lack of historical memory.
Apparently, none of the three recall that sentiments exactly like these were expressed by Establishment Republicans as Ronald Reagan’s political star was rising. Allow me to recall from my own piece in this space in 2015:
- Vice President Nelson Rockefeller dismissed Reagan as “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.”
- New York’s Republican Senator Jacob Javits: Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.”
- Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”
- Former President Gerald Ford: “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.”
Then there was the media of the day on Reagan:
- New York Times: Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.”
- New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.”
- New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.”
- New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.”
- Harper’s magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.”
The former senators go on to say:
[There are] five principles that historically have defined our party and been universally accepted across its membership.
In their words, these five principles are listed as:
- The Constitution
- Union
- Fiscal responsibility
- Free enterprise
- Peace through strength
They continue:
In short, this group will be a catalyst for a movement to reassert traditional Republicanism against the populist version it has become under Donald Trump.
This is something new. Many Republicans have given up on trying to winch their party out of the populist ditch. National resistance has been missing. Our Republican Legacy will provide that resistance and do so with credible leadership and sufficient funding and will continue as a force well beyond the November election.
“Populist ditch”?
The senators should take note of this message from historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley’s bookThe Search for Reagan: The Appealing Intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Shirley wrote the following, bold print for emphasis supplied:
Reagan changed the Republican Party from one of the elitists, Eastern concerns, and country clubs to one more Western, more conservative, and more populist.
He took seriously his words, “The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club-big business image,” in his groundbreaking 1977 speech to a group of young Washington conservatives. He then elaborated:
“Our task is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult; we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.”
In other words, taken altogether, “the populist version” that the GOP “has become under Donald Trump” is a process that began with President Ronald Reagan.
What these senators are proposing is returning the GOP to the much-losing pre-Reagan “traditional” and decidedly elitist party that Reagan called “the country club-big business” party.
The senators end by saying:
For those who boast that traditional Republicanism is dead we issue this challenge: Tell us — tell the nation — precisely how and why you disagree with this group’s five defining principles. Tell us how the embrace of these principles would contradict the ideals of this great nation. And tell us how their abandonment would make our nation stronger.
On the Constitution? Safe to say, when Trump departed the White House, he specifically noted this:
One of the things we’re very, very proud of is the selection of almost 300 Federal judges and three great Supreme Court justices.
And every single one of these Trump nominees supported the Constitution. Just to pick one at random, whom Trump appointed to the Supreme Court, take Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Trump’s nominee is well on record saying:
“Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition.” … “[O]ne factor matters above all in constitutional interpretation and in understanding the grand sweep of constitutional jurisprudence — and that one factor is the precise wording of the constitutional text.”
Which is to say that supporting the Constitution was core doctrine with Trump nominees like Justice Kavanaugh.
Support for the Union? Trump has been to every state in the Union over time, most recently going to New Jersey — a “blue state” that he deliberately made a point of not ignoring in his campaign. Some 100,000 Americans turned out to hear him. (READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally)
Fiscal responsibility? In fact, as these senators well know, fiscal responsibility is the job of Congress. And, sadly, as I learned firsthand working for a House Budget Committee congressman during the Reagan era, it isn’t Democrats alone who spend relentlessly. Republicans in Congress signed on for those enormous spending bills, many supporting spending binges on their home state’s favorite projects. One would be curious about the records of these three senators when it came to spending federal dollars in their home states. Safe to say, one suspects they did not turn off the federal spigot.
Free enterprise? Trump’s entire pre-presidential career was spent in the world of free enterprise, building the Trump Organization from scratch.
Peace through strength? A Reagan mantra in which Trump and his supporters believe. Ukraine was invaded not in Trump’s term but during Biden’s. Vladimir Putin did not dare invade when Trump was in the White House because he knew that Trump was a staunch supporter of peace through strength.
Again, the senators end by saying:
For those who boast that traditional Republicanism is dead we issue this challenge: Tell us — tell the nation — precisely how and why you disagree with this group’s five defining principles. Tell us how the embrace of these principles would contradict the ideals of this great nation. And tell us how their abandonment would make our nation stronger.
To be clear, what is dead is the idea, as Reagan put it, of a once-traditional Republican Party that, in Reagan’s words, was “limited to the country club-big business image.”
First with Reagan, now with Trump, millions of Republicans have rallied to the party of what Reagan called “modern conservatism.”
Alas, as exhibited in their op-ed, these three former senators simply don’t get it. The elitist “Republican Legacy” of the country club and big business that they miss is not coming back — and shouldn’t.
