“These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element.”
Political parties die. Who now is a Federalist? Where are the Whigs today? The Federalists became Whigs, and the Whigs became Republicans, but this time it feels different. There is no sure and certain hope of a resurrection, and for the current iteration of the Democratic Party it looks like the long goodbye, having decisively lost the presidential election this month, along with the Senate and the House of Representatives. (This was all accomplished while dramatically outspending Republicans.)
Think of the Democratic Party of today’s core beliefs and ask whether any part of them will be thought worth preserving. The pre-modern identity politics, the obscenely paid football stars who took a knee, the Women’s March attendees in their hats in the shape of the female genitalia, will we ever see them again? Will anyone miss the maddened Antifa mobs or the “mostly peaceful” riots? Whatever happened to the defund the police movement? Where are the diversity trainers and the lectures on unconscious bias? Remember Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposal for transgender surgeries for illegal aliens in our prisons? There were so many great ideas, just a few short years ago, and now they are permanently consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Democrats have become the party of illiberalism. The idea that we should be judged as individuals and not as members of a race or sex was tossed out the window. Free speech rights were all very well and good when the Left was in the dissenter role, but not after it ascended to power. Then the dissenters were on the Right, and the Left became the censors. At one time a patriotic respect for our founding principles might have restrained some on the Left. Those principles constitute our identities as Americans, and that which is not liberal is not American. But for Democrats American patriotism was jettisoned when the Founders were revealed to be irredeemable racists.
The bright new ideas on the Left are inconsistent with our Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions and do not even count as moral theories. Immanuel Kant said that rules are not moral unless they can be applied universally, and Jeremy Bentham thought that everyone should count as one and no one as more than one. This comes down to saying that all lives matter, but that phrase was taken as an assertion that black lives do not matter. As nonsensical as this was, it became the official ideology at our best universities.
The Democrats became the party of a well-credentialed economic elite. One could recognize them by their mating calls: “Hate Has No Home Here” or “Call Me by My Pronouns.” They became detached from the moral core of an older Democratic Party that saw itself as allied to working class Americans. In the 1930s, Democrats supported the striking mine workers of Harlan County, Kentucky, and its allied folk singers asked: “Which side are you on?” But 80 years later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought that global warming was the more pressing issue. She boasted that she was going to put a lot of coal companies out of business, and then in 2019 President Joe Biden said that miners should learn how to code. But President Donald Trump spoke up for them, and, in 2016, Harlan County gave him 84.8% of its votes.
To become the Republican nominee in 2016, then-candidate Trump defeated his right-wing, libertarian rivals and remodeled the GOP as a workers’ party. Unlike a Mitt Romney, President Trump does not divide Americans into makers and takers. President Trump does not seek to eliminate entitlement programs but thinks instead that the best social welfare program is one that provides jobs to willing and able workers. He would pursue socialist ends through capitalist means, and not through socialist means as would Senator Bernie Sanders.
These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element. Republicanism was born in the West, the home of progressivism, and its greatest leaders—Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower—may fairly be called progressives. They were also conservatives, even if they did not reduce every issue to mere economics.
What might rightfully be called the Republican Workers Party is liberal, progressive and conservative, all the things which the Democratic Party is not. As an American party, it embraces the liberal principles of the Founders. It is also authentically progressive and not a thin ideology of right-wing economists or of technocratic Democrats in the mold of Secretary Clinton. Finally, it is conservative and rejects the woke antinomianism that has been ascendant.
We are poised for a revival that affirms America’s essential goodness and the republican virtue of the founders. Only the Republican Party can provide this today, and only its members can govern without discrimination for the common good, which is as close to the ideal of political virtue as one can find. Republicans will not ask voters to ally themselves with teachers’ unions or grievance peddlers, with corporate welfare bums or with dogmatic libertarians, or with anything that degrades the individual person. And, thus, the Republican Workers Party will become America’s natural governing party.
F.H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at Scalia Law School and the author of The Roots of Liberalism: What Faithful Knights and the Little Match Girl Taught Us about Civic Virtue, which was released this year with Encounter Books.
