Nine Years of Trump Is a Warning We Must Heed

Apart from Donald Trump, the basic problem of the Republican Party’s so-called fever — the extent to which it has been captured by nihilists and ideological extremists — is that the party is untethered from any electoral dynamic that might force it to moderate its behavior.

For example, despite the much-discussed willingness of some Black and Hispanic men to support the occasional Republican candidate (mostly Trump), the Republican coalition is still overwhelmingly white and conservative and spread throughout the nation’s rural and exurban counties. In theory, there are tensions within the Republican coalition — the party’s commitment to the interests of the superrich is an uneasy fit, to say the least, with the most downscale elements of its blue-collar constituency; in practice, those tensions are subsumed by commitments to a shared cultural (and often religious) identity.

Democrats must navigate a large and fractious alliance of interests, some of which are at odds or cross-purposes with each other. Republicans, by contrast, can sail the relatively calm waters of demographic homogeneity. But what this also means is that there is no force internal to the Republican Party’s electoral coalition that might force its representatives onto a different path.

In the absence of an alternative demographic or ideological base from which to build influence, the ambitious Republican politician has one option if he or she hopes to advance within the party: rigid commitment to ideological purity. The only way to get ahead is to out-conservative — or now, out-MAGA — your rivals.

There is no incentive for anything else. If you want to win a primary, if you want to ascend to leadership, if you want to avoid the ire of conservative media, if you want to be on a national ticket, then you cannot have enemies to your right. There is no room, in the national Republican Party, for the moderate Republican governor of a Democratic state — the Larry Hogans and Charlie Bakers of American politics. There is not even room, it turns out, for the pragmatic conservatives of the party — the Nikki Haleys and Mitt Romneys.

Ostensibly, the pressure to win a general election should work to curb and curtail this dynamic. But the demographic homogeneity of the Republican coalition confers a distinct advantage on the party: It gives it a high floor from which to engage the biennial contest for control of the national government. When enough states in the union are low density and low population, the party that dominates the nation’s rural areas already controls nearly half the seats in the Senate and has a significant advantage in the House of Representatives as well.