Why the Republican Party Is Doomed

Unlike the “cultural populism” that costs them nothing, the GOP’s rich rulers can’t abide real share-the-wealth populism

I finished writing my book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History at the beginning of 2016, when the leaders of the Republican Party were still desperately trying to keep Donald Trump from winning their presidential nomination. At the end of 2016, when he was president-elect, I retitled my last chapter “As Fantasyland Goes, So Goes the Nation.”

“During the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century,” I’d written before he was elected, “the GOP turned into the Fantasy Party, with a beleaguered reality-based wing. A far-right counterculture empowered its millions of followers and took over the American right, as their extremist predecessors succeeded in doing to evangelicalism and the gun lobby three decades earlier….Donald Trump is a pure Fantasyland being, its apotheosis. If he hadn’t run for president, I might not have mentioned him at all. But here he is, a stupendous Exhibit A. To describe him is practically to summarize this book.”

So that aged pretty well. By the summer of 2020, we were so inured to the insane personality cult the GOP had become that their decision to forego a party platform was buried on page 20 of The New York Times’ print edition. Their official resolution could have been satire: “WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump” and “WHEREAS…had the Platform Committee been able to convene…[it] would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump,” then “RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

That moment — Platform? We don’t need no stinkin’ platform! — was a key late-stage milestone in the GOP’s accelerating decay. By admitting that Whatever Trump Says is their only inviolate commitment, the party was being breathtakingly candid — in a specifically Trumpian way. It is the pathological liar’s blithe, unhinged honesty (about his bigotries, brutishness, selfishness, conspiracy theories, gangsterism) that most excites his most adoring supporters.