GOP Schism?

Here’s an email I just wrote to a conservative reader that I thought I’d share.

This article in Bloomberg presents what I was saying last night about the GOP, i.e., that it’s becoming two parties.

One is the traditional conservatives, who believe in small government, personal responsibility, low taxes, little regulation, free markets, etc.  This is the party of you and the George Wills of the world. These people do not admire Donald Trump in the least, though some, like you, believe he is the least of two evils. Others, like Will himself, perceive Trump, through his lawlessness, to be a grave threat to our democracy, which is why he urged all Americans to vote for Biden.

The other part of the Republican Party is the core of Trump’s base: largely uneducated, violent, overtly racist, anti-science, heavily entrenched in conspiracy theories, and saddled with a cult-hero-like worship of the ex-president, as demonstrated by the statements they made upon being arrested after storming the Capitol, “I was only doing what the president commanded me to do.”  There is no reason to think that these remarks were not completely sincere.

Obviously, these people, whom Hillary Clinton stupidly called “the deplorables,” are in fact abhorrent to refined people like you and George Will, but there’s a catch: there are so many of them at this point in the declining educational and behavioral standards from which the U.S. is now suffering, that GOP leadership (correctly) believes it can’t win without them.

The problem facing GOP leadership is that there is no strategy that can keep these factions together.  Educated and cultured people are leaving the party in droves, and there are not enough “deplorables” to carry a national election.