GOP & LP 2024

It looks like we’re finally getting rid of #45 and replacing him with a Democrat who most people choose because he’s not nearly as obnoxiously incompetent as Trump and not nearly as arrogant and unlikable as Hillary Clinton.  Over the last 4 years, the Republican President cost his party the House (2018 midterms) and the Senate (losing both Georgia seats).   He’s compromised the integrity and reputations of all the Republican congressmen who were induced to follow him, not that we’re particularly sympathetic to their plight.  What’s next for the GOP?

 My suggestion, likely to be immediately rejected by everyone, is for the party to break up.  Any Republican with something close to ethics and real values should defect to the Libertarian Party.   I can understand most politicians’ reluctance to do so piecemeal, in dribs and drabs, but a wholesale defection of sitting Congressmen should be another story entirely.  Possibly, but not likely, some Democrats could also defect, though as I write this I can’t identify any plausible candidates by name.  The leading Republicans would be Mitt Romney, Justin Amash, Rand Paul, and Thomas Massie, just to name a few. 

I’ve been re-reading, for the third time, Harry Turtledove’s alternate history series which begins with How Few Remain and continues with three WWI stories, three interwar stories, and four WWII stories.  Herein, the CSA won the Civil War (1861-62), also defeated the US in the so-called Second Mexican War (1881-82), and allied itself with Britain, France and Russia in WWI.  For its part, the US found itself allied with Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  Now imagine US and Confederate soldiers fighting in trenches, with biplanes, machine guns, and poison gas, but in western Virginia, Kentucky, and other locations.  The CSA had purchased Sonora and Chihuahua states from Mexico in 1881, so their territory extends westward from Texas, along the New Mexico/Arizona border to the Pacific Ocean, giving the CSA a Pacific Coast port city at Guaymas.  They also have Cuba.

 In the aftermath of the Second Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln – who was not assassinated in 1865 but survived to become a Marxist – split up the Republican Party in 1882 into a Socialist Party, with the Democrats taking the role of a conservative/reactionary party.  The twin Presidents in 1914 are Theodore Roosevelt (USA) and Woodrow Wilson (CSA).  By this time the Republicans are reduced to an insignificant third party.

 The LP candidate in 2020 was Jo Jorgenson, who had no experience as an elected official and her prime political experience was being Harry Browne’s VP candidate back in the day.   Gary Johnson, the 2016 candidate, was much stronger: a successful two term state governor (New Mexico).  His 2012 result, 1%, was somewhat disappointing, but he was up against both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  In 2016 he received 3%, and probably would have gotten more had he known where Aleppo, Syria, was.  If the LP has former state governors or US senators as its candidates – the kind of candidates the major parties run – they may well have a much stronger shot. 

 Returning to reality, I do believe the heretofore marginal Libertarian Party may well be able to accommodate a large influx of dissatisfied Republicans.  Sadly, over the years the Republicans went from Lincoln’s party abolishing slavery to a conservative party giving lip service to capitalism but more accurately being a quasi-fascist party giving us a corrupt form of capitalism mixed with religious right nonsense telling us how to live our private lives.  The Libertarians, in many ways, are a more pure and principled form of what the Republican Party would be if it actually adhered to many of the ideals which it claims to stand for but which fall by the wayside either due to true indifference or political reality.   Trump’s debacle here in 2020 can serve as the impetus for the more principled Republicans to abandon the party altogether and turn the Libertarian Party from a marginal third party to a real competitor with the Democrats. 

 Quoting Picard:  MAKE IT SO.