[Special Feature: America "After Trump"] Where is the Republican Party Heading? The Crossroads Shown by Romney and Trump

2021/02/05

In the midst of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which saw a nationwide resurgence following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020, a Republican senator was seen among the protesters marching in the capital, Washington, D.C., on Sunday, June 7. It was Mitt Romney of Utah, who was elected in the 2018 midterm elections following the retirement of longtime Senator Orrin Hatch. Romney joined the protest march as one of a group of evangelical demonstrators and told media interviewers that he wanted people to understand that Black lives matter. In February of that same year, Romney had been the only Republican senator to vote in favor of impeachment during Donald Trump's trial over the Ukraine scandal. In response to the surge of protests across the country, President Trump, who had styled himself as the "president of law and order," disparaged Romney on Twitter the following day for participating in the march.

According to a local media poll conducted in Utah after the impeachment trial, Romney's reputation in his home state for rebelling against Trump is not bad. Romney garnered a combined 56 percent approval rating between "strongly approve" and "somewhat approve," surpassing the 46 percent approval rating of Mike Lee, Utah's other Republican senator. What is particularly interesting about Romney's approval rating is that it is higher among women than men. While 47 percent of men supported Romney, 68 percent of women who responded to the poll supported him. In the case of Trump's approval rating, this gender ratio is reversed.

Although the increase in ethnic minorities in Utah is gradual compared to the national average, the minority population in Utah, which was 19 percent in 2010, is estimated to rise to 35 percent by 2060. (Incidentally, the university where I work has an exchange agreement with Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and in recent years, more Asian and Hispanic students have been coming to visit.) In the United States as a whole, the minority population will reach 56 percent by 2060, and the white population will become the minority.

In the future, the white population in the United States will become a minority in terms of demographics, and diversity will certainly increase. This trend cannot be stopped. In this context, Romney's actions can be seen as a lonely search for the future of the Republican Party. In contrast, Trump's series of attitudes—emphasizing law and order and holding up a Bible at a church near the White House—were intended to speak for the anxiety and anger of his core base of white voters. The contrasting approaches of Romney and Trump toward the Black Lives Matter movement symbolically expressed the crossroads at which the Republican Party currently stands.

Arguments for reforming the Republican Party have been emerging from around the party since the George W. Bush administration. A prime example is "Grand New Party," published in 2008 as a co-authored work by Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, and Reihan Salam, who later served as an editor for the traditional conservative journal National Review and currently serves as the Director of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. In the United States, the Republican Party is often called the GOP, or the "Grand Old Party." Douthat and Salam argued that this traditional party needed to be transformed into a new one.

As the book's subtitle, "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream," indicates, Douthat and Salam argued that the Republican Party should change into a party that can address the interests of the working class. By working class, they mean people who are not college graduates and not professionals. However, they emphasized that the working class should be redefined as pan-ethnic rather than limited to white people. Salam himself is a second-generation Bangladeshi immigrant, and their work is characterized by the emphasis on the need for the Republican Party to learn from the left and broaden its support among minorities.

One reason Douthat and Salam still differ from liberals is that they view the family, especially the two-parent family, as the economic and cultural foundation that the Republican Party should emphasize. Their book is characterized by the construction of a theory of Republican reform through an interpretation of American political history since the New Deal. For them, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies should be seen as a conservative achievement in that they sought to guarantee male workers a wage that would allow them to support a family.

In their view, the turning point for post-war American society was 1973, when the hourly wages of American workers, which had been rising for 30 years, began to decline for the first time. What emerged during this period, in addition to the decline of manufacturing, was the rise of a new elite of college graduates cloaked in meritocracy. From this point on, America began to polarize into two incompatible cultures. On the other hand, Nixon's attempt to create a new majority ended halfway, leaving the instability of the working class as it was. What the Reagan administration made clear was that focusing domestic policy on tax cuts would not solve the difficulties of workers. George W. Bush initially set out to overcome where Nixon had failed. However, in his haste to excel in the political infighting within the Republican Party, Bush also returned to the existing slogan of emphasizing tax cuts.

In response to these twists and turns of the Republican Party, what Douthat and Salam sought for the future Republican Party was the expansion of tax credits to support two-parent families, educational measures to prevent class stratification based on meritocracy, and comprehensive immigration reform to regulate the mass influx of immigrants that suppresses wage growth. Their proposal was for the Republican Party to transform itself into a party that implements policies that prioritize the economic stability of the working class, regardless of race or ethnicity, as an alternative to left-wing populism seeking identity politics and neoliberalism pursuing economic growth.

In the 2012 presidential election, the Republican Party challenged the incumbent Obama, who was seeking a second term, by nominating former Massachusetts Governor Romney as the presidential candidate and Congressman Paul Ryan as the vice-presidential candidate, but they suffered a defeat following the one four years prior. In response to this defeat, a large-scale review of the election results was conducted under the consultation of Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. The opinions gathered from more than 52,000 stakeholders through various forms such as face-to-face, online, individual hearings, and group discussions were summarized the following year in a report titled the "Growth and Opportunity Project." This report is known as the "Autopsy" of the presidential election defeat.

The report frankly reflected that the Republican Party had focused too much on speaking to like-minded people and lacked the ability to persuade those who disagreed with them. Furthermore, it pointed out that federal-level elections needed to learn much from the efforts of Republican governors who were achieving success at the state level and gaining broad support from minorities. Specifically, it stated that the Republican Party should change into a party that helps people succeed so that people from various social classes can steadily move up to a higher class, and that if corporate executives are increasing their own compensation while neglecting to secure jobs and income for workers, the Republican Party should say so frankly. It also pointed out that efforts should be made to gather support from Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and sexual minorities, whom the traditional Republican Party had not listened to much, as well as support from women and young people. Overall, the report called for the GOP to become an acronym for the Growth and Opportunity Party.

However, after its release, the report drew fierce backlash from influential politicians within the Republican Party. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, known as a libertarian, and Rick Santorum, a former senator and social conservative, strongly opposed the content.

The decisive moment was the 2016 presidential election. Trump, who emerged from a race of 17 candidates, captured the anxiety and anger of white voters who felt their voices were not being heard by the establishment, and won the election by taking Midwestern states. As the aforementioned Salam stated in a 2018 op-ed, Trump did indeed expand support to the working class in a groundbreaking way and broke through states where the Democratic Party had held an advantage. However, the Trump administration never appointed experts who could shape the kind of policies Douthat and Salam sought. Above all, Trump did not expand the Republican Party's new support base beyond the white working class who attended his rallies.

Trump brought a new winning formula to the Republican Party. Although that formula did not lead Trump to victory in the 2020 presidential election, given that many Republican politicians followed Trump as he continued to deny the legitimacy of the election, it can be said that the Republican Party is likely to continue to adopt the new path established by Trump—that is, winning federal-level elections by maximizing the support of the white working class in a populist manner. Even when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and Trump's second impeachment was passed by the House, only 10 Republican representatives defected. In the future, as the population ratio of whites and minorities increasingly reverses, it is possible that the Republican Party and white voters will codependently cling to Trump's legacy.

Nevertheless, it is also a fact that this path will sooner or later reach its limit from a demographic perspective. Pro-Trump intellectuals might say that diversity is a line used by the global elite for self-justification. However, the time will come when the Republican Party must face the "Autopsy" once again. Until then, Romney and his successors may continue their lonely search.