Bill Kristol: Why There's No Hope for the Republican Party

One of the most influential American conservatives of the past four decades regretfully explains that even the best people in his former party have succumbed to Trump’s toxic extremism

By William Kristol The Bulwark

Last week, I dropped by a gathering here in D.C. of organizers of Our Republican Legacy. The group, chaired by the admirable former Sen. Jack Danforth (R-Mo.), consists of Never Trumpers seeking to take back the Republican party from Trump.

My friends asked me to say a few words. I wished them well, and agreed heartily with the sentiment that it would be great to have a responsible Republican party again, and that there is much that’s admirable in the Republican legacy that could help point the way to such a party.

But I also felt I should briefly explain why I don’t expect to see such a party, and why I’d stopped thinking of myself as a Republican, even a Never Trump Republican.

It’s not just that the current Republican party is indefensible. It’s that after a decade of ever-more radicalized and complete Trumpist domination, there’s little realistic hope, I think, for a return soon to decency and responsibility by the GOP.

The Republican party would need to be thoroughly trounced, probably more than once, at the polls before there can be any prospect of that. And even that hope is tenuous, because, sadly, the rot now goes very deep.

And so, I explained, some of us are instead trying to do our bit to help the Democratic party prevail electorally and govern responsibly.

Who knows? History is unpredictable, especially these days, and I could be wrong.

The Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, of George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney—all the GOP presidential nominees from 1980 through 2012—could make a comeback.

But it’s awfully unlikely.

Later the same day, I happened across a recent report of a dinner put on a couple of months ago by the Republican Women of Baltimore County. At the function, several recently pardoned January 6th convicts from Maryland were honored.

“I whacked these officers,” 26-year-old honoree Steven Cook told the audience, according to a recording of the event. I can’t lie about it. I was one of the ones who started the, what they call, insurrection.”

The article continues:

The banquet audience wasn’t disturbed by Cook’s revelation of violence or his actions afterward. Instead, they warmly welcomed him and the others as new celebrities.

“He heard the call of God on that day . . . and answered,” Louise Baker, the women’s club president, told members, according to the video.

“I call them my J-Sixers,” Baker said in a later interview. “They were ready, willing, able, excited, enthusiastic and grateful” to share their stories with the club, she said.

If you go to the website of the Republican Women of Baltimore County , the group doesn’t seem to have been taken over by some kind of fringe element. Its leadership looks to be middle-class long-time Republican voters, normie Republicans of the sort you’d expect to find in a place like suburban Baltimore.

But they’re pro-January 6th. And a quick look at the rest of the website suggests they’re also pro-conspiracy and anti-vaccine and anti-immigrant. They’re comfortably part of Trump’s GOP.

I have little doubt most of these individual Marylanders are personally honest and decent and kind. They’re surely not like the Stephen Millers and Kristi Noems of the world, or for that matter the JD Vances and Donald Trumps, about whom one could say no such thing.

But these normie Republicans have become the willing enablers of the cruelty and autocracy, the destructiveness and lawlessness, coming from the Republican administration they support in Washington, D.C.

Which is why some of us are no longer Republicans, and are unlikely to become Republicans again.

William Kristol, the co-founder of The Bulwark, is an ex-Republican neoconservative who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Subscribe to his podcast here and to the Bulwark’s menu of content here.

Image: Foster Daily Democrat.