How Conservatives Lost the GOP
Yuval concisely recounts how and why conservatives lost to Trump within the Republican party, but after decades of drinking their own potent Jonestown punch while reciting their political catechisms, the reality challenged conservatives aren’t going to listen to him.
For many conservatives, the 2016 election has been a surreal nightmare. This was a year when a Republican with a powerful conservative message should have been able to ride the public’s frustrations with the Obama years to the White House. And then came Donald Trump, a bombastic real-estate developer and TV star with no discernibly conservative agenda. Not only did many Republican voters cheer him on, but GOP elected officials fell in behind him.
To put it mildly, this election cycle has revealed serious fault lines and weaknesses on the right, and the Republican Party will be working to make sense of it all for years. But for conservatives—I mean those who champion some version of the difficult balance of traditionalism in the moral arena, market mechanisms for addressing our economic challenges and American strength in a dangerous world, all bound by a limited-government constitutionalism—this sorry year’s lessons have one overarching implication: We can no longer treat the GOP simply as our own.
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Over the past three decades, conservatives increasingly fell into the habit of taking the party for granted as a vehicle for advancing our views, and taking the Republican electorate for granted as steadfastly conservative. This understanding of the party drove the evolution of a series of policy litmus tests for candidates—commitments on taxes, health care, welfare, education—that were supposedly required to win the allegiance of the GOP’s activists and voters.