No, the GOP won't pivot after Trump

The United States does not have a conservative party.

Oh, sure, the Republican Party claims to be a conservative party, in the tradition of Buckley, Reagan, and Taft.

But don't be fooled. It's nothing of the sort.

What the past three years have demonstrated is that the GOP as it currently exists is a party interested only in power for power's sake, like The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It aspires to this:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Now, unlike the Party in George Orwell's masterpiece, our GOP really doesn't know what it's doing. It aspires to that sort of total control, but is filled with incompetents who somehow evade the odds and don't get run over by buses on a daily basis. It would like perpetual power, but the conditions which obtained in Ninteen Eighty-four don't exist in our modern world. We are not at the short end of a global war. We are, in fact, the greatest, freest, richest civilization the world has ever known. A middle class Westerner is richer, in real terms, than any Roman emperor. She's richer than Queen Victoria. The material culture that even the poor enjoy is so far beyond what a viscount on his estate in Georgian Britain could imagine. It is this prosperity, with all its inequalities, which keeps the Gileadean nightmare to which the GOP wishes to subject us at bay.

But that's neither here nor there.

Joe Biden, God bless him, on the campaign trail says that Republicans aren't evil. Now, unlike others who are less predisposed towards him, I don't think he's speaking of the likes of Donald Trump or Matt Gaetz. To my ear, he says this to make the Republican-leaning independent voter see him as a stable pair of hands into which to place the Republic. He's not referring to those who go to Bund rallies.

This belies a deeper reality, however. Biden may be appealing to that GOP-leaning independent. But the GOP itself is a dead letter.

The party had been veering into an authoritarian bent since it opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt hammer and tongs. It's a short path from opposing FDR's "socialism" to deciding that the ends justify any and all means.

Like Orwell's Party, the GOP doesn't actually care about the people it supposedly represents. They're just vehicles for their ends. Most of the people who vote Republican would, in fact, benefit mightily from Democratic policies. From healthcare to jobs to the environment, GOP voters are in the crosshairs of an increasingly harsh world. But the GOP has done such a job on them that they can't see that. They cling to God and guns, and look askance at anything a Democrat has to say, because their Congressmember or pastor tells them that their immortal soul is in danger, or that "they" want to kill them to make way for gay Muslim feminists to replace them.

The GOP was still a somewhat viable party as late as 2008. But the election of Barack Obama laid the groundwork for its utter surrender to a blood and soil movement.

The election of the first black president upended 400 years of racist beliefs. The idea that white America was going to be displaced by a browning population was encapsulated in the thin, aristocratic figure of Pres. Obama. He was everything that GOP voters had been told didn't exist: an accomplished black man who was more educated and just better than most of them.

The imposition on us of Donald Trump is nothing but the fiercest of backlashes (or whitelashes) to Pres. Obama's administration, and all it represented. Reactionary whites think that the Electoral College, and the outsized power it gives to them, will keep them in the driver's seat.

But what the 2019 elections showed is that is a will-o-the-wisp. Virginia went solidly blue. The suburbs of Philadelphia kicked out the GOP. Kentucky and Louisiana elected Democratic governors. The suburbs which started going for Democrats in 2018 continued that march. They don't want to fight culture wars. They have increasingly little in common with blood and soil fascists. The burbs in the South and the Midwest are looking increasingly like their cousins on the liberal coasts.

As the GOP keeps losing voters who are aghast at their racism and sexism, don't expect it to change to fit the times. They have no other hand to play. They are trapped, as their only loyal voters see Trump as the promised Messiah. And when Trump leaves the stage, they will still be there, demanding someone more Trump than Trump. Republican politicians won't suddenly find spines once Trump has exited. Trump is the party, and the party is Trump. The GOP could have with one voice disavowed the Islamophobic, antisemitic, racist, sexist, homophobic pig in 2016. But he won the primary because of who he was, not in spite of it. What 2016 showed is that the GOP is nothing but a fascist party. It has gone down the rabbit hole. And it's not going to change.

Of course, eventually, there will be another conservative party in the US. Every action brings a reaction. But don't expect it to be built on the framework of the GOP. They're gone 'round the bend. The sooner it expires, the better.