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The death of the conservative elite The Republican Party can't live on populism alone

'Will I be back?' Credit: Allison Joyce/Getty


April 22, 2022   6 mins

The Republican Party, from a certain perspective, is in tatters. It is trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Donald Trump, who, although he ended his term in disgrace and remains obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election, still commands the loyalty of many Republican voters and poses a grave threat to any politician who crosses him. Meanwhile, many of the intellectual networks that powered conservative governments in the past have died off, been rendered irrelevant, or defected to the Democrats; there is a sense that the Trump-era GOP, while it may have a durable electoral base among middle-American whites, is incapable of appealing to any significant faction of professional-class elites.

And yet. Biden’s approval ratings keep falling. Polls show the Republicans leading on a generic congressional ballot and suggest an even split in a potential Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Voters have more faith in the Republicans on the top issue, the economy, as well as on inflation, immigration, crime, and foreign policy. They think the President is well-meaning but clueless. A March poll from the Wall Street Journal found that 50 per cent of voters agreed that “Joe Biden tries to do the right thing”, but only 39 per cent agreed that he is “focused on the issues that are most important to me”; a February Washington Post poll found that 54 per cent believed Biden lacked the “mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president”. Thanks to Biden, the GOP, far from being “dead”, could be gearing up for its strongest election cycle in a decade.

What to make of the paradox that the Republicans appear politically strong but remain completely toxic among those who by and large govern the country? A new book by Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, does not address itself directly to this question, but it does suggest an answer: this is the consequence of Trump’s destruction and discrediting of the conservative intellectual and policy elite.

Continetti could be fairly described as conservative royalty. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the most respectable of the right-of-centre DC think tanks, he was a long-time employee of The Weekly Standard during its run as the house journal of the Bush administration. He is also the son-in-law of Bill Kristol, neoconservative founder of the Standard and The Bulwark and perhaps the most prominent Trump-era defector to the Democratic Party. Continetti’s perspective is that of a consummate insider, one tied by professional and familial bonds to the Beltway intellectual establishment that was all but obliterated by the 2016 election. He is, as a result, better attuned than most to the role of elites in the conservative ecosystem, as well as to the limits of their power.

The book is a work of history rather than a commentary on current events, and Continetti refrains from splashy arguments. But his framing of the American Right over the past century has obvious implications for the present day. Broadly speaking, his narrative is one of the “endless competition and occasional collaboration between populism and elitism”. Conservatism, in his telling, “has toggled between an elite-driven strategy in both content and constituencies and a populist strategy that meets normal people where they are and is driven by their ambitions, anxieties, and animosities”. Only a synthesis of the two is capable of anything other than fleeting victories — elite-driven politics fails at the ballot-box, populism fails at governing — yet such a synthesis has been difficult to come by, which explains the “tenuous” and “fragile” nature of Republican successes.

Since FDR’s expansion and reorganisation of the American state in the Thirties, conservatism has always been a minority faction in the American elite, which tends toward welfare-state, social-reforming liberalism with occasional forays into radicalism. The broad middle of the social spectrum is more conservative, or at the very least more suspicious of elite liberalism and its various improving crusades. As a political project, post-war conservatism, embodied by figures such as National Review founder William F. Buckley, was an attempt to harness this popular, anti-liberal political energy for electoral purposes, with the implicit understanding that the elites would do the actual governing, softening the edges of populist anxieties (which often shade into bigotry and conspiracism), while translating them into a viable political programme.

For liberals, of course, this relationship looks like the cynical manipulation of the electorate’s base instincts, and at times it can be exactly that. But, as conservatives like Continetti would point out, it serves an important political function. A liberal governing class ruling over a conservative populace is not an inherently stable political arrangement. When persuasion fails — and people can only be persuaded of so much — there will always be a temptation to coerce, cajole, or mislead. Sometimes, as in the case of desegregating the South in the Sixties, coercion may be justified in the name of a higher moral purpose. But the language of “moral clarity” (not to mention technocratic expertise) can also be used to disqualify legitimate criticism of unpopular or wrong-headed fads.

Plus, in a democracy, the people get a vote. You can only ignore their preferences for so long without incurring a backlash. As Eric Kaufmann argues, the rise of populism in the West is in large part the result of conservative elites colluding with liberals to remove immigration restriction from the policy debate at a time when a large portion of the population felt very strongly about it. This did not make the issue go away, however, and the glaring mismatch between popular demand for the policy and its conspicuous lack of supply in the political system provided the opening for political entrepreneurs such as Trump. But the point can be stated more generally: Conservative elites mediate between their voters and a wider American elite, ideally acting as a check on the excesses of both. When they fail in this role, as they did in the years prior to 2016, the entire system becomes vulnerable to outside disruption.

Where does that leave conservatism today? Continetti is pessimistic about Trump’s effect on the Right — he has shattered elite conservatism as an independent force and made the party’s brand toxic to the professional class, whose buy-in was critical to Reagan’s victories and relative effectiveness once in office. He notes, despairingly, that the rise of cable news and social media may have simply eliminated the ability of any conservative elite to perform their gatekeeping and mediating function — constantly at risk of being outflanked by Fox News and Twitter influencers, their options may be to join the populists, join the Democrats, or fade into irrelevance.

Not mentioned, though relevant, is the fact that the radicalisation of the liberal establishment over the past decade has made the old role of conservative elites less tenable. If they represent the interests of their base, they risk forfeiting their status and respectability among their fellow elites. But if they capitulate to each new progressive taboo as it is erected, they forfeit their credibility with the people they are supposed to represent, making themselves superfluous. Few on the Left or the populist Right are likely to shed a tear over this outcome, but absent any group able to effectively translate popular demands into the language of professional-class respectability, the two sides will lose their ability to talk to one another, and American politics will descend further down the road of all-out, zero-sum warfare.

The turning point, at least in the medium-term, will be the 2024 presidential primary. Whoever wins the party’s nomination will be in a strong position to win the presidency, and perhaps to enjoy at least a few years of unified control of the government. A Trump victory would not herald the “end of democracy in America”, but it would be a disaster for the country — four more years of chaos, mutual enmity, and partisan radicalisation in which political disputes are subordinated to the private whims and grievances of one man.

But there is a reason, beyond the Electoral College, why Republicans are in good political position, despite these obvious problems: many Americans, including some of the professional elites now solidly in the Democratic camp, are deeply uncomfortable with the direction that liberalism has taken since 2016, as seen in the rising numbers of “anti-woke” liberal intellectuals and in the emergence of at least rhetorically law-and-order Democratic politicians such as New York mayor Eric Adams. As Continetti notes, an earlier wave of elite defectors from a radicalised Left — the neoconservatives — infused conservatism in the Seventies and Eighties with a previously lacking cultural cachet and intellectual sophistication. They were able to appeal to the mainstream with plausible accounts of what had gone wrong with the Great Society and how to fix it.

There is no guarantee that a non-Trump candidate in 2024 could pull off such a trick, but they could, perhaps, establish facts on the ground to start clawing the party back from the Trumpian abyss, and start rebuilding an elite and professional class constituency. There would still be culture war, and much of the stupidity that makes contemporary American politics so unbearable. But it might be the best chance to finally leave the grim disputes of the present behind.


Park MacDougald is Deputy Literary Editor for Tablet

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Sean Penley
Sean Penley
2 years ago

The sooner the last of the republican elite is gone the better. They spend the campaigns saying what conservatives want to hear and then their tenure in office governing as the liberals want them to. Whether led by Trump, DeSantis, or one of the many genuine conservatives who have stood up the past six years, the Republicans need to completely ditch the old elite in favor of “populists,” a term that is suddenly being used to describe politicians who actually put the interests of their voters first, which is actually how democracy was supposed to work

Last edited 2 years ago by Sean Penley
Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago
Reply to  Sean Penley

well said sir.

Jeanie K
Jeanie K
2 years ago
Reply to  Warren T

I agree

Brian Villanueva
Brian Villanueva
2 years ago
Reply to  Sean Penley

Why would a former high level staffer of the Weekly Standard (neocon wing) and AEI (libertarian wing) have any worthwhile advice about what ails the Republican party? Of course he will blame Trump; the alternative is to look in the mirror.

The Republican Party has been a shotgun wedding of social conservatives, libertarians, and wealthy chamber of commerce folks since Goldwater. The latter 2 groups worked together to mouth just enough platitudes to get the Christian vote, then enact nothing but tax cuts once they won. Trump actually played the same game. His only legislative accomplishment was a tax cut, but he went to bat on social issues through SCOTUS and EOs. Now that we’ve seen what a candidate who takes us seriously will do, we’ve filed for divorce.

The only question now is whether the chamber and libertarians will have a rebound relationship with the Democrats, or whether they’ll be willing to accept new terms in which they will now experience dhimmitude for a while: we’ll drive our cultural agenda and occasionally throw them a small tax cut. In the end, we don’t need them. The Democrats have so successfully alienated their working class base (70% of the citizens) in a mad attempt to court the wealthy and uper-educated (15% of the citizens), that the former is now ready to switch sides too.

It is not particularly remarkable that Matthew Continetti is upset about this. I agree with him: it IS all Trump’s fault. And I’m thrilled about it. Don’t worry Matthew; we have our own institutions (Nat Con, TAC, etc…) ready to take over the conservative intellectual space. Maybe we’ll invite you and Max Boot to co-author an article every year or so just to remind ourselves why we left you.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
2 years ago

The Chamber of Commerce crowd better not get too comfortable with the Libertarians. While the official Libertarian party might be fine with where things are, most regular Libertarians are looking in horror at Progressives trying to destroy civil liberties and relying on corporate power to do it (oh the irony). Not to mention, most of the Libertarian base is not as excited with unchecked corporate power and open borders as Libertarian Party “representatives” would have you believe. At the same time, the Chamber of Commerce crowd does not seem to care one bit. What are you going to do when you just want to be left alone? The only thing you can do is fight back or give up. Guess who the only group in the Republican Party actually fighting against these Progressive efforts is? Yup, the Populists.

Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
2 years ago

I dare say that

the Trump-era GOP, while it may have a durable electoral base among middle-American whites, is incapable of appealing to any significant faction of professional-class elites.

But my guess is that with a year or so of 10% inflation, a spot of recession and maybe a crash in housing prices, the professional class is going to be in a bit of a funk in the next few years.
LIberalism, in my view, has been an over – under political formula, gaining power for the overclass by bribing the underclass with loot and plunder. And conservatism has been an overclass political formula, failing to teach the masses what is good for them.
But I say that the ordinary middle class has been royally screwed, whether you are talking about slow wage growth, skyrocketing housing prices, cultural insanity, or utter fatuity in education, including the absurdity of student loans that have merely jacked up the price of college.
You may sneer at populism, educated lord, but it reflects a burgeoning injustice perpetrated on ordinary people that the ruling class has done nothing to abate.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
2 years ago

Excellent comment. The commentariat seem to know almost nothing about the subjects on which they pontificate. If its outside the elite bubble then they are just guessing.

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
2 years ago

We like to think Trump hasn’t been captured by special interests as are members of the uniparty. Most uniparty members want to either give us stuff (tax cuts, new benefits) or tell us they are concerned while they carve out provision for their real sponsors. What conservative agrees with tariffs? None, until Trump made it clear that the only restraint on China were those tools. Sadly Trump got rolled, a lot. He didn’t want the wealthy to get tax breaks but Ryan took care of that, spoiling Trump. I do hope we can find a better person than Trump but aside from DeSantis, I don’t know where that person is.

Matt Hindman
Matt Hindman
2 years ago

How about the outright screwing over of their voters? From immigration betrayals, bowing to leftist cultural forces, immediately backtracking on legislation promises, Neocon foreign policy failures, an unwillingness to defend the Constitution, to how easily they switched sides and positions once the specter of “populism” appeared (great way to show you have principles), the GOP elites ended up screwing themselves over. It is essential that the people who vote for you can point to obvious differences between you and your opponents. At this point, the vast majority of Republicans I know see little difference between party leaders and their Democrat counterparts and even less difference when they are in power. This was true way before Donald Trump ran for president. Many of the Neocons who fled the party after his election are now Democrat political celebrities. Most of these people just happen to have close associations with party leaders and intellectuals. Definitely not a good look. To make matters worse, the big business wing of the party has become deeply unpopular. Corporate power abuses, broken economic promises, blatant tax dodging, massive offshoring, and woke activism have soured many voters on corporate America. At the same time, the Democrat party has become much more corporate friendly. The leadership of both parties now look too similar for comfort. Then we get to the final fatal flaw, arrogance. They thought they were irreplaceable and were free to let their voters know just how much disdain they had for them. Now their voters feel empowered enough to return the favor. The one thing the GOP elite have going for themselves right now? Even they cannot come close to beating the Democrat leadership in the incompetence department.
Side note, if you really want to get under the skin of these people, ask these so called “conservatives” just what they have conserved lately. Hint, they don’t have a ready answer.

Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
2 years ago
Reply to  Matt Hindman

The Uniparty.

Christian Moon
Christian Moon
2 years ago
Reply to  Hardee Hodges

Controlled opposition.

Matt M
Matt M
2 years ago

DeSantis, at least to a Brit looking in from outside, seems to have added things like message discipline and detailed policy mastery to the populist mix. Won’t that help create effective government whilst delivering popular priorities? Or does it still require buy-in from the permanent administrative class aka the Deep State for things to run well?

Victor Davis Hanson reckons the only way to fix the FBI and stop future collusion between the Dems and the top brass is to move its HQ to Kansas. Does this need to be considered elsewhere?

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

As Sir Humphrey said with a shudder “Move the Civil Service to Kettering!?”

Jem Barnett
Jem Barnett
2 years ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Hehe, I read that in his voice 🙂

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago

Trump didn’t “end his term in disgrace”. He was hounded throughout his presidency with ludicrous, coordinated, paid-for plots (the stated goal in The Washington Post on the day of his election was impeachment), and the 2020 election was stolen (Time Magazine helpfully laid out how it was done).
The “enmity” the author cites was the work of the political kakistocracy, their tech allies, and their media henchmen. Trump was wildly popular and very effective, which are just two reasons the power players went after him with such unprecedented venom (the other reasons begin with his discovery of the staggeringly criminal foreign deal-making that enriches them).
Trump laid the groundwork for younger candidates who are tougher to mock: Ron DeSantis will likely win the presidential nomination. “Abyss”? What ARE you talking about?

Richard Slack
Richard Slack
2 years ago

The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election | Time is what you are referring to. It shows the way that organisation was put in place to prevent Trump from stealing the election. Read it again

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

I suggest you read it again without the scales on your eyes.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago

Those scales are so thick he can stare into the sun without issue.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

On one hand, Trump is viewed as a complete imbecile, yet he was genius enough to steal an election. I suspect you actually believe the Russian Collusion story to this day? And that Hunter’s laptop was Russian misinformation? And that masks work? And that Covid must have come from a bat?
Keep those blinders on!

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

The amount of money poured into that legal effort was extraordinary, not a typical campaign contribution. It lead to never before seen corruption. Add to that a personal contribution of $400M from one person to improve the corruption. The result is 81M votes, bought and paid for. The resultant governance has failed. Is that what the public really wanted?

Nunya Business
Nunya Business
2 years ago
Reply to  Hardee Hodges

81 million ballots, not 81 million votes….

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago

The self obsessed Trump is the wrong hero! The Capitol Hill riots? A good look, do you think? His Presidency was chaotic not just because of those out to get him, but because he endlessly fell out and picked fights with people in his own Administration.

De Santis might be a good bet for the Republicans, a re-tread Trump a disaster, not that he’d be likely to be re-elected, since he didn’t manage last time. And please, maybe there was some dodgy postal voting, we are talking about a few thousand votes here, Biden won the popular vote by a huge margin. ‘Wildly popular’? – you must be ignoring just about every poll going.

If Trump was anything like as popular as his advocates endlessly shout, he’d have won by a landslide.

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

The neocons made their bed and they can lie in it. America’s conservative elites were utter failures and did little but help shepherd decades of progressivism and state capture, even when they had years of ostensible rule. They deserve to be replaced by a force that might actually be willing to fight.

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 years ago

You could equally argue that before Trump both the Republicans and Democrats were a cosy cartel of rich old men (mostly). Trump, the populist (gasp!), broke into that cartel and disappointed Hilary Clinton terribly – it was her turn after all.
As a result of the upset of Trump’s presidency and the threat to ‘drain the swamp’ the cartel swung behind Biden (rich old man, perhaps too old for the job). Rumour has it that after Biden the perennial candidate Bernie Sanders (another rich old man) could make s Presidential bid.
So, if the Republicans have a problem with their more thoughtful supporters dying off so do the Democrats. The days of the Buggins turn gerontocracy are fading.

ARNAUD ALMARIC
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

Oh the joy that we have Boris & Starmer!
How wonderful to feel so smug!

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
2 years ago
Reply to  AC Harper

‘thoughtful’ lol.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
2 years ago

Muh elites. We have to help muh elites. ‘Trump’s destruction and discrediting of the conservative intellectual and policy elite.’ Nope, the ‘conservative’ elites discredited themselves, hence Trump. Apart from the fundamental mistakes which form the foundation of this article, it’s quite good…

Bryan Dale
Bryan Dale
2 years ago

What an amazingly clueless and tone deaf article. It does offer “a certain perspective”, but declaring the Republican Party to be in tatters while the Democrats are disintegrating before our eyes requires a complete denial of reality. I think the writer needs to get out of whatever bubble he’s inhabiting.

Nicky Samengo-Turner
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago

Britain and America have one terrifying negative in common…not shared by Europe, and certainly not most of Asia, and that is the chronic lack of education and literacy amongst more and more people, simultaneously being replaced by algorithm targeted internet and social media.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago

Yes, social media algorithms are to blame for a lot of our division today.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago

Park, I believe you are a victim of the journalist who gets their information from the Twit.
Yes, Trump is painful to listen to or watch, but he is precisely what we need in today’s world (sort of like watching sausage being made), which is a brash, hard-nosed, no BS, business savvy bully, who won’t let foreign or domestic elites and oligarchs line his pocket and sell us out.

Andrew McDonald
Andrew McDonald
2 years ago
Reply to  Warren T

Business savvy? I thought there were some doubts about that. Also, ‘No BS’?? That ain’t so, whatever else you admire about DT.

William Hickey
William Hickey
2 years ago

The only important question for conservatism to address, and the source of all of the West’s troubles, is how our elite came to be ALIENATED from the very human stock and culture it sprang from.

That is the historical anomaly of Enlightenment culture, the conflict that lies at the core of the West’s decline.

Read this review with that in mind.

Justin Clark
Justin Clark
2 years ago

Having just read G. Edward Griffin’s book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66499.The_Creature_from_Jekyll_Island) I realise how none of this really matters. I didn’t appreciate how badly the American people have been undermined by such traitorous acts. This book has had a profound effect on how I view politics not just in America but here in the UK too. IMF… World Bank…WEF… it’s disgusting. Even Trump isn’t strong enough to try to reverse the damage done. This is one of the most important books of the 21st century and so few have ever read it.
God Save America.

Last edited 2 years ago by Justin Clark
Christian Moon
Christian Moon
2 years ago

Is there a useful summary somewhere of just what was wrong with Trump?
There’s a tremendous amount of people recording their horror and disgust with him, but what was actually wrong with his policies?
Most criticism just sounds as if the cross-party liberal establishment regard any opposition to their own preferred policies as illegitimate. It is as though they think they should never be allowed to lose an election.

Will ?
Will ?
2 years ago

Good piece, Park.
The ideal situation is that in the long term the Republican Party is trading in more mediocre elites (William Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Stephen “Saddam has WMDs” Hayes, Matt Continetti) for better ones (Julius Krein, Oren Cass, Michael Lind) etc.

Pirate Saxon
Pirate Saxon
2 years ago

Surprising still that people still don’t get Trump nor his appeal to so many Americans and especially a growing number of people of color. This author writes of the “disaster” what was Trump and what “he” brought to Washington. The fact is, it was the ruling class and their unelected minions that represent a million deep stators that caused such chaos. That, coupled with legacy and social media Gas-Lighting, all America saw was messiness. Yet, the policies of Trump were effective and did a lot to improve the plight of the middle class through increased wages and access to the American dream. You, the Elite, just saw a usurping of your power and did all you/they could to stop him. Well, is worked to a point yet, we are still here and getting louder, kindly, but louder. Thanks to the Progressive left’s take over of the current President, old, weak, senile, Joe, the Wins should be massive. Then a great Purge of the so-called ruling class “Elite.” Republican and Democrat and most especially the 100s of thousand that sit in power beneath the elected ruling class.

Nunya Business
Nunya Business
2 years ago

As an irredeemable Trump populist…good. The conservative elite are scum, may they die and receive a blank tombstone.

David McDowell
David McDowell
2 years ago

The Conservative Elite committed suicide by repeatedly over promising and under delivering to its core constituency. And quite right too. A world where such entities were able to repeatedly get away with that would not be a democracy.

RD Richards
RD Richards
2 years ago

Smart piece, with some important elements I haven’t thought about before.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

Who are the strong Democrat leaders (elite?)?

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
2 years ago

There are none. And Barack Obama ensured there would be none in his first midterm wipeout – what he referred to as a ‘shellacking’ – of the Democrat bench. Moreover, Obama was so full of his own wonderfulness, that he rarely campaigned nor promoted Democrat talent. Yet, Obama never learned from his neglect to build the party; in his mind, it was all about him. The only person he truly seemed interested in promoting was Kamala Harris and so we have the most giggly and unserious VP in years. Unlike Trump, who constantly acknowledged Republican Party stalwarts and to this day keeps on working at building the team, creating a spirit of party unity along the way.

Last edited 2 years ago by Cathy Carron
polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

The odd thing about modern elites, at least in the US and the UK, is that the have few of the cultural attributes that earlier generations would have taken for granted. They are mostly just rich plebs. And it shows.

Maria Bogris
Maria Bogris
2 years ago

The HELL with these so called elites…they are seeing more and more of us fed up with them and they are SCARED…GOOD! Tar and feathering is too kind, they’ve ruined everything and are steering us into technocratic dystopia and depopulation

Andrzej Wasniewski
Andrzej Wasniewski
2 years ago

status and respectability among their fellow elites.”
You mean being respected by those who were wrong about any issue of importance for the last 10 years and already lost respect of any person with any traces of functioning brain?

Richard Slack
Richard Slack
2 years ago

There has only been one occasion since 1988 when the GOP got the majority in the popular vote in a Presidential Election and that was 2004. Until about 1980 both parties had liberal and conservative wings, what has happened since then is the the liberal republican is a rarity dying out and conservative Democrats have shifted to the GOP particularly in the south. States like New York and California which the GOP have won in my lifetime are now solidly Democrat and Texas is moving that way.
That does not mean though that the GOP can’t carry on causing damage. Their main stronghold is the Senate, because of the way the rules operate the small, largely conservative GOP states are represented way above the level of support nationally that they have. In general they, like the modern GOP fight elections largely on culture wars (abortion, prayer in schools) and by coded racial references. If the GOP win the Senate they will set about being as destructive as they were under Obama but constantly threatening to shut down the government till they win some little concession or other.
Fortunately the conservative majority is significantly older white males and they are a diminishing currency. But at the moment the GOP is miles away from being the party of Reagan, let alone Eisenhauer.

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

California and New York. Perfect examples of Democratic strongholds with disastrous results, unless you are a billionaire oligarch or a drive-by “journalist”.

Last edited 2 years ago by Warren T
Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
2 years ago
Reply to  Warren T

We left NYC after 35 years – it’s a dysfunctional mess. Violence, trash, homeless people on the streets, a feeling of being unsafe both on the street and in the subway – and this was BEFORE Covid! It will take at least 5 years or more, with strong leadership & vision for the city to come back.

Hardee Hodges
Hardee Hodges
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Slack

And we see people from one party states voting with their feet. We need effective competition everywhere with robust debate over policy. The one party states are in ruins for the average person.