Realignment for real, part 2

(Bring yourself up to date first with part 1, here.)

With four months to go until the first actual voting (the Iowa Republican caucuses on 15 January), campaigning for next year’s United States presidential election is well under way. Since we last looked at the race back in June, Donald Trump has firmed in favoritism for the Republican nomination, despite (or conceivably because of) his indictment on a variety of state and federal charges relating to his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election.

As of this morning, Maxim Lott and John Stossel’s aggregation of the betting odds gives Trump a 66.0% chance of being the nominee. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is next at 11.4%, followed by crank businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at 7.1%, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley at 5.6%, South Carolina senator Tim Scott and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie each at 1.4% and former vice-president Mike Pence at 0.9%.

While Trump is clearly the front-runner, my view is that those odds are overstating his chances. But today I want to look more at what the contest might mean for the theme of political realignment. I’m interested in two issues in particular: firstly, Trump’s crusade against democracy, and secondly, the war in Ukraine.

So far, attitudes on the two issues seem to match remarkably well. Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are anti-democracy and pro-Russian; Haley, Christie and Pence are pro-Ukrainian and, at least by the standards of the Republican Party, pro-democracy. Scott is somewhere in the middle, avoiding commitment as much as possible but apparently leaning to the anti-Trump side.

You might think that this alignment is not so surprising. After all, Trump is the dominant figure in the party and is known for his love of dictators in general and Vladimir Putin in particular. So those who line up with Trump and his “Big Lie” of election theft might be expected to also be unfriendly towards Ukraine.

But what’s interesting is that DeSantis is not in the obvious sense a pro-Trump candidate; he started his campaign by attacking Trump, and Trump has often reciprocated, labelling him “Ron DeSanctimonious”. Haley and Pence have both been much more guarded in their personal criticisms of Trump. It’s only on the specific question of the attempt to overthrow democracy and Trump’s subsequent legal troubles that DeSantis seems to be more sympathetic.

As we’ve noted before, DeSantis’s strategy – which looked promising at first but now seems to be stuck in the doldrums – was based on Trumpism without Trump. He has mostly identified himself with Trump’s policy positions, and when he’s criticised them it’s been from the right: for example in his embrace of the anti-vaccination cause. His argument is that the Trumpist program is basically fine, but Trump is personally unfit to implement it. (Ramaswamy, on the other hand, tends to ignore Trump personally but doubles down on his program.)

A couple of weeks ago, Jon Chait tried to explain why DeSantis was failing, and why Chait’s earlier view that DeSantis should be the favorite was mistaken. He says he had underestimated the extent to which the party had become a personality cult, and that Republican elites were no longer able to challenge it. As he puts it, “Defeating Trump in a contest determining who can most effectively advance ideological or party goals is difficult but attainable. It is obviously impossible to defeat Trump in a contest of who is most loyal to Trump.”

I think this is true, albeit (as Chait recognises) unhelpful. And if that’s all there is to it – if the Republican Party has become the Trump Party and nothing more – then not much can be done. But it seems to me that the policy disagreements show that there is more going on, and that what’s needed (as Christie at least recognises, and as seems to be dawning on some of the others) is a frontal assault on Trumpism in both personal and policy terms.

Republican voters are never going to abandon Trump if none of their leaders will be open with them about Trump’s failings. As Chait laments in a later column, Trump’s critics “have focused primarily, and in some cases exclusively, on criticizing Trump on grounds that he can’t win, playing down or omitting any normative moral criticism of his authoritarianism.” Frontal assault might not work either, but at least it has a chance; trying to out-Trump Trump is doomed from the start.

The more confrontational the primary campaign becomes, however, the more likely that the party will split in some way: either by Trump losing the nomination and running as an independent, or by Trump’s rivals getting more comfortable with the idea of opposing him openly if he is the nominee. In either case, democracy and Ukraine would be likely to be prominent among the defining issues.

If a split can be avoided, a non-Trump candidate like Haley would be favored to win the election, and in doing so might be able to rebuild the Republican Party as a mainstream centre-right force. It would not be clear sailing: there are still demons deep in the Republican soul, particularly on racial and cultural issues, of which Trump was a symptom more than a cause.

Many parties (and individuals) manage to keep their demons tolerably well under control, and it’s possible the Republicans could do so as well. But some of the worst of the party’s authoritarians are not personally attached to Trump: their hostility to democracy is not just instinctual but theoretical as well, and Trump’s departure, however achieved, will not make them go away.

Nor is the admiration for Putin in certain quarters a recent development, although the war in Ukraine has brought it to the forefront. (We’ll talk more about Putin envy later this week, when we come to Europe.) Although Putin himself cares almost exclusively about his own power, he has decked it out with themes – anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-intellectual – that have strong appeal on the American right, and that even its most non-Trumpy figures often have some sympathy with.

Nonetheless, for the time being, escaping from Trump’s control is the number one priority for the party. But it’s not at all clear that it is up to it.