A decade ago, a friend and I were sitting in a local barbecue restaurant and wondering what had become of the Republican Party we both had grown-up in. George Wallace, I ventured, would today be a Republican, and he recalled that Teddy Roosevelt, a champion of environmentalism, was once a Republican icon. We tentatively concluded that the major political parties had flipped, that the Republicans were no longer the party of the well-educated and accomplished, of pragmatic, forward-looking realists, and the Democrats were no longer the party of blue-collar labor.
What do you know? Even the august New York Times has noticed.
In less than a decade, from 2010 to 2018, whites without a college degree grew from 50 to 59 percent of all the Republican Party’s voters, while whites with college degrees fell from 40 to 29 percent of the party’s voters. The biggest shift took place from 2016 to 2018, when Trump became the dominant figure in American politics.
This movement of white voters has been evolving over the past 60 years.
Complicating this, thanks to the malign influence of evangelicals hostile to the whole of modernity, the Republicans are nearer to enraged vandals than conservatives, with the result that there is no genuine-article conservative party in the United States.
So far as evangelicals are concerned, this time in our national life is an Alamo-like last stand and Donald Trump is their Sam Houston; they think it’s bad enough that they are expected to be polite to the descendants of Ham, and they are never going to live peaceably with abortion or Obergefell.
And, of course, the craven submission to Donald Trump’s serial indecencies has destroyed whatever sliver of credibility the current stable of Republican officeholders might once have had. America needs a new conservative party, and it needs to be led by politicians who refused to abase themselves before Trump.