I had a conversation just yesterday with a Middle American. One of those people, that is, who is from the Midwest and from the middle class. One of those sorts of folks with a Rust Belt background who has lived the real American life, with blue collar grandparents, lower middle class parents, and who has done better than their parents.
Not like people who were born and raised in Wyoming or one of the neighboring states.
It was really interesting.
And it occurs to me that if you are from here, and we do have our own distinct culture, the way you look at topics like careers are fundamentally different than other Americans, or at least Americans from other places. We're practically not Americans in this regard. Or at least those who stay are not.
And that tends to get lost on people as we're a minority, most of the time, in our own state.
I've noted it here before, but I was once flying into our local airport and two oil industry employees were in the seat behind me. They were both from somewhere else. One had been stationed in Casper for awhile, the other was arriving for the first time. The new arrival asked the old one about the people in the town, and the insightful other replied
What you have to realize is that there are two groups of people here. People who came in to work in the boom and those who are from here.
The new arrival then commented that the natives must dislike the new arrivals. That fellow, however, replied:
No, they just know that you are leaving.
And we do.
I've lived through at least three busts, one of which altered my original post high school career plan of becoming a geologist. If you look at it, oil spiked during World War One, the price declined after the war in the 1920s and collapsed during the Great Depression, spiked again during World War Two, declined following the war but then turned rocky in the 50s and 60s, spiked in the early 70s, collapsed in the 80s, rose again thereafter, and then collapsed again in recent times. Being born in 63, I experienced the 60s, but don't recall, them, experienced the 70s, which I do, and then the ups and downs since then.
Indeed, all over town there are accidental monuments to booms prior. Three downtown buildings are named for oil companies, none of which still use the names they did back then and none of which is still in town. A golf course on the edge of town called "Three Crowns" was named for the three refineries that once were here, one of whose grounds is occupied by the golf course. In certain areas of down when they dig a foundation, they hit oil, not due to a natural deposit, but due to leaks long gone by from those facilities. Across town one still operates.
If you are from here, and have lived through it, you come to expect the economy to be this way. You worry about the future but you don't imagine you can control it.
Middle Americans do.
I hadn't really realized this directly, but I should have.
My friend, noted above, hasn't lived in Wyoming except during good times and the recent collapse. He's been panicked and has related that to me more than once. He can't believe that things could have collapsed, and I can't grasp how a person couldn't. Then, in our conversation, it became very plain.
He's a really nice guy with a very nice family, but he views careers in the Middle American sense. That is, you study to find a "good job", by which that means one that pays well. You go where that job leads you, for the high pay. It's all about the pay. The pay determines what you become, what you do, and where you live.
It doesn't for the long term Wyomingites.
Oh sure, pay always matters. Wyomingites are just as wanting to get rich as anyone else,. . . or not.
As there are limits, and the limits are the state itself.
Wyomingites, those born here, or those here for an extremely long time and probably from a neighboring state, have an existential connection with the state that's hard to grasp. We are it, and it is us.
This is completely different from the "oh, gosh, it's so pretty I'm glad I came here" reaction some newcomers have. Lots of the state isn't that pretty. Some Wyoming towns are far from pretty. No, it's something definitely different.
And it's also different from the belief that an industry must keep on keeping on because it must. We see that with lots of people who moved in when the times were good. If things collapse, it's not because Saudi Oil Sheiks can fill up swimming pools with crude oil if they want to, or if Russian oligarchs want to depress the market because they can, or because coal fired power plants are switching to natural gas. It has to be somebody's fault, probably the governments, and probably the Democrats.
Not too many actual Wyomingites feel that way, even if we worked in those industries or wanted to. We just shrug our shoulders and say; "well, we knew the boom would end", because we did.
Of course, as will be pointed out, we never do anything about that. That's our great planning failure. But frankly, it's hard to when the town's filled up with newcomers you know are temporary, and they don't want to change anything as they like the low taxes, etc., and this will just go on forever, because for them, it already has.
Which takes me back to my friend. He's upset as the boom appears to be over and that means it might impact his take home, which in turn means that he might have to leave, or so he imagines.
Why? Well, that's what you do as an American, right? If the dollars are higher in Bangladesh, you go there. You, must.
You must as otherwise you won't be able to afford whatever it is you are seeking to buy, or do.
I knew an elderly Wyoming lawyer, from here, who in his first years didn't practice law as he graduated law school in the Great Depression when there was no work. I've known more than one engineer who took completely different jobs for the same reason. An accountant I served in the National Guard with worked as a carpenter. A different accountant I knew was a rig hand during a boom, as that's where the big money was at the time.
Which gets back to career planning.
When my father planned his career, he started off to become an engineer, but he became a dentist. It was because he knew he could obtain that job an and come back here, as that's what he wanted to do. I know a dentist is the younger son from a ranch family, and that's what he did too. I know lots of older lawyers who were the younger children of ranch families, who took that path as there was no place on the ranch for them. And I'm often surprised by people's whose career paths were absolutely identical to mine, almost to the t.
Both of my career attempts, the one successful and the one that failed, had the same logic behind them. Geology was field that employed people here when I was studying it, and I thought I had a talent for it and would be able to find a job. When that fell through, on to the law, as I'd never heard of an unemployed Wyoming lawyer.
But the state was the primary focus in my mind. I'm of it, it's of me.
"I want my kids to be able to stay here", he told me. Well, so they can.
But whatever the economy holds for Wyoming's future, if that means you go just for the mega bucks, career wise, that career is probably somewhere else.
And that's why a lot of people leave.
Those of us who are from here and stay, really aren't unique as a population. There are plenty of examples of this in others.
In 1876 the Sioux left the reservation for one last foray into the wild. They knew it wouldn't last. That wasn't the point. People who wonder what they were thinking aren't of this region. The Anglo American culture at the time thought they should turn into farmers. They didn't really think so, no matter what.
In Utahan Robert Redford's adaption of A River Runs Through It, the protagonist, who is moving to Chicago, asks his brother to come with him. He responds
Oh no brother, I'll never leave Montana.
In David Lean's adaption of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Larissa notes when she's being transported away from disaster, that Zhivago's absence isn't accidental.
You are welcome to censure me again. But let's be clear about why this is happening. It's because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn't about the weird worship of one dude.
Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.
And is an open question where it will go, or if it will become two parties.
Or, quite frankly just go right over a cliff and not survive at all, leaving a decade or more for a new conservative party, or parties, to be formed. There's a pretty decent chance that might occur.
And it is also an open question of what this will all mean for Wyoming.
This is a true disaster in the making. Make no mistake about it.
This past week Mitch McConnell, the de facto head of the the traditional Republican Party, came out in support of Liz Cheney, also a member of the traditional Republican Party, and against Marjorie Taylor Greene, a radical member of the Populist Trumpite Party that has been so influential in the GOP over the past four years.
Let's stop and consider this for a second.
Liz Cheney was under attack for one reason, and one reason only. She'd voted to impeach Donald Trump, while he was still in office, as her conscience lead her to that.
Cheney is as conservative as they come. Her voting record aligns more closely to Trump's positions than those of Florida pretty boy Matt Gaetz, whom normally Wyomingites wouldn't given the time of day. None the less, Cheney has now been censured by about half of the Wyoming county organizations. and the state official GOP organization.
And Ben Sasse, who voted his conscience as well, and who wouldn't go along with the effort to disenfranchise voters that Ted Cruz lead as part of a self serving Ted Cruz effort to bolster his sinking political fortunes is up to be censured in Nebraska, "again".*
Sasse and Cheney continue to have the courage of their confictions. Sasse just gave the Nebraska GOP the middle finger salute, which they deserve, but in an articulate way. Let's consider what he said once again.
You are welcome to censure me again. But let's be clear about why this is happening. It's because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn't about the weird worship of one dude.
Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.
And you should really listen to his entire speech.
Cheney, for her part, refused to back down and chastised her party for believing in lies. She even doubled down a bit on the bad acts of the President that resulted in her vote. She not only has the courage of her convictions, but she's basically laid down the gauntlet to those who are accusing her of disloyalty.
Greene, for her part, is rapidly becoming the symbol of the alt right in some odd way. Congress has a long history of marginalizing its members who aren't regarded as fit for office, but that's not what happened here. Elected this past fall from Georgia, Greene has at least recently continued to wear "Stop the Steal" facemasks and is brazenly pro Trump in the conspiratorial sense. Examination of her public comments shows that she has questioned the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, and espoused a theory that Jewish space lasers started forest fires in California some years ago.
Let's stop to let that one sink in.
Giant Jewish space lasers.
Gee, with all the things Israel has to worry about it's starting forest fires in California rather than zapping Tehran. . . .
In other words, Greene is a complete nut.
But that level of nuttery is what the GOP is contending with given the miles wide fissures that have developed in the party over the last few years.
And this also gives the GOP an opportunity, if it will take it. Right now, it hasn't, and hasn't even come close to doing so. Indeed, it all but retreated into one of the stupidest arguments that people ever make, that being the "well, I don't agree, but everyone has a right to speak", which is closely followed by "well, I don't agree, but the people of the district voted for her so. . . "
The people of Germany in 1932 voted for Adolph Hitler. That argument is made for that. If a person advocated for destroying a building, they'd be arrested. We really don't have to simply shrug our shoulders, nor does Congress, over the really extreme.
As noted, an opportunity exists here, if it will be taken. And its an opportunity the party in Wyoming is likely to sit out and end up on the wrong side of.
A vast danger exists here as well.
Whose in the tent?
We've gone over and over how this came about, and we're not going to do that again. Instead, we're just going to write about where we right now.
The pillars of American conservatism, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan.
On one hand, you have the traditional Republican Party. It's a center right conservative party that looks back to Ronald Reagan as its intellectual standard, and Reagan basically looked to William F. Buckley, the father of modern conservatism. Buckley was a true intellectual and he defined American conservatism in a way it had never been before, and when it badly needed defining. It's defined, or at least was, by the following:
a. It's politically conservative
b. It's socially conservative
c. It's very pro business.
d. It's "small government" but it believes in the government.
e. It's pro defense, and tends to be a bit interventionist overseas.
f. It has a strong adherence to law and order and the rule of law. It's not revolutionary, and it puts the constitution and the law ahead of its own goals.
Conservatism also, frankly, doesn't mind be a bit eliteist or at least it traditionally didn't. Buckley and his acolytes hoped to see conservatives in power, but they were used to being out of power, and were accordingly used to the idea that they could serve being voices crying in the wilderness, albeit vocies that would be heard. One biographer of Buckley noted that he'd grown up partially in England and as a sincere Catholic in England, he was by definition part of a "fighting faith", but a highly intelligent fighting faith.
Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich can really be viewed as the founder of what became the Tea Party. He ran for President as recently as 2012.
Then you have the Trumpite populist wing of the party.
While he'd disavow it, the Trumpite wing of the party has its roots in the politics of Newt Gingrich, who lead an insurgent, take no prisoners, give no quarter, libertarian movement within the GOP during his time in the House from 1979 to 1999.*** He's notably from the same state that Green is from. Indeed, but for a personal evolution, Gingrich might well have followed the role in a Trump White House that Buckley did in Reagan's, although by 2016 Gingrich had evolved considerably far away from the movement he'd started in the 1990s.
The Trumpite wing, or evolved Gingrich wing if you will, is much more difficult to define in part because its members fit a sliding scale and always have. There are those who are actually more in the traditional party than the Trumpite wing, but have flown the Trump flag for convenience. And indeed, there's a lot of cross over. If we were to define it, however, it is defined by:
a. It's strongly nationalistic, with its nationalism grounded in the founding demographic of the country.
b. It's Protestant and "Christian Nationalist"
c. It's libertarian in terms of economics, but not in anything else.
d. It values cultural "values" of a conservative sort over the rule of law and adheres to the theory that they should be the law or implicitly are the law.
e. It's isolationist.
f. It's basically anti government and a proponent of "state's rights".
These two sets of views are sufficiently divergent that they really can't be housed in one body. Part of the GOP's problem is that its tried to do so for almost 40s years.**** The traditional Republican Party is more like the Canadian and British Conservative parties. The Trumpite party is more like a host of 20th Century European conservative parties. The traditional Republican Party had managed to keep a lid on the populist Gingrich branch for decades, using it when it could, and suppressing it when it needed to. Now, however, with the Trump presidency having dramatically impacted the GOP at its base roots, its unclear if it can do so, and this too is something that happened before, both inside the US and out of it.
As the past is indeed the prologue to the future, and as this is set to have dramatic impacts on the US without a doubt, we should look at this.
The Trumpite wing of the party
The Trump wing of the party strongly resembles a host of European political parties (and I'm including a Canadian political party in that definition) which valued ideology over democracy and let that define their approach to candidates. In each instance, that lead to their downfall.
Now, let me note immediately, I'm not writing that those who are diehard Trump supporters are fascists. I'm also not claiming that everyone who voted for Trump, is in the Trumpite wing of the party. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that Cheney voted for Trump, even if Sasse didn't (which he has been open about). This too, I'll note, is part of the history of these parties. They were sometime successful on their own, but they often existed in environments in which they traveled with other conservative parties. Indeed, in the U.S. system, which is a two party system, this tends to cause their to be more than one party inside of a party, as republican systems such as ours tend to default to two parties almost always, but that's always the weakness of such parties at the same time. They house multiple parties by default, most of the time.
Anyhow, what I am saying is that all of the aforementioned political parties operated or still operate in democratic environments in which they place certain political values ahead of democratic ones. As they very strongly identify with their ideals, they essentially hold that in order for a political view to be legitimate, it had to comport to that ideal, and if it doesn't, it's illegitimate and doesn't count.
The country saw some of this in the recent insurrection. Most of the people who were at the protest were likely simply those who believed that the election had been stolen, and therefore they were were trying to save the election. But running through that were t hose who believed that the election must have been stolen, as Trump didn't win. Next to that were people who believe that Trump must have won, as votes for Biden were illegitimate by their nature, and don't count. And finally you have those who believe that there's a giant conspiracy afoot controlled by some pedophiles in the Democratic Party. If you look at that, you essentially have the gamut of the German right wing parties in the 1920s, leading up to 1932, which we will deal with below.
Al Smith, conservative, who would have recognized what Cheney did as comporting to his principles.
It really becomes apparent when you take this back to Wyoming look at the drama surrounding Liz Cheney's vote to impeach Donald Trump. Her action is classic traditional Republican. It put the rule of law above the party, and hence is admirable. It's much like Al Smith's express rejection of votes that were on religious grounds in the 1930s, or Richard Nixon's concession of the election in 1960. Cynthia Lummis' action doesn't really fit in here, as hers is pure political self interest, irrespective of her excuse.***** An anti Trumper in 2016, she was seeing Ted Cruz as the Trump heir apparent in 2024, and was doing anything possible to kiss his ring and secure a position in a future Cruz administration.
Cruz for his part is probably actually really a traditional Republican, but he knows that he's going down in inevitable defeat in 2024 to Beto O'Roarke and he has to clear out while the getting is good. And therefore he's angling to kiss up to the Trump wing of the party as he figures it's strong, and that Trump is a fading figure. He planned on emerging as Trump's heir apparent for a 2024 run, figuring that by that time four years of panic over a future Kamala Harris administration, assuming that we're not already in a Kamala Harris administration by that time, will propel him to victory. Of course, he pretty much shot his bolt on that and peaked a bit too soon, and in the wrong venue. Indeed, Lummis nailed the coffin shut on her career as well, although she'll no doubt be able to keep on keeping on as Wyoming's Senator as we haven't booted one since Gale McGee's last run/non run.
Anyhow, looking locally, ten out of 23 counties have censured Cheney and now the state organization has as well. Why? Well, she didn't vote "right" in their view, and that puts us back on the Trumpite populist scale. She should have, in their view, voted against impeachment as that would be loyal to Trump, which means being loyal to their values, or more properly Weltanschauung,^ which puts the party's positions, or the Trumpite ones, ahead of democracy. Some of them are flat out okay with that, some haven't though it out, some believe the election was stolen, and some of them simply don' believe that any other action is legitimate for the reasons we set out above. Their Weltanschauung is all defining in this context, trumps concerns about democracy in some, and defines the legitimacy or illegitimacy of opposing views. Indeed, the intellectuals in the movement, and there are intellectuals in the movement, are quite open about this.
All of which means that this is a scary position for the country to be in, and a scary place for the GOP to be in, and which means that the GOP and the conservative movement may be headed for a train wreck.
A lesson from history.
We keep hearing that the United States has never been here before. Actually it has to an extent. Probably twice.
We didn't mention American political parties of the past in this tread up until now, but we will here at this point.
The first time we were here was from the mid 1830s through the mid 1860s.
By the mid 1830s it was clear that a growing divide in the country over the issue of slavery was creating a rift that threatened civil war. After the US annexed Texas, that war became nearly inevitable. Hardcore slavery proponents in the South couldn't reconcile the concept of a nation with slavery being limited. That's important, it has to be noted, to realize. It wasn't the threat of slavery being immediately limited that they regarded as irreconcilable with their beliefs, it was the limitation of its expansion. Of course, everyone was savvy to the reality that limiting the expansion of slavery ultimately would mean its elimination. This came to a head with the election of Lincoln and the South took the country into civil war.
Before we move on from here, we have to first consider the pre Civil War in context. Now the thought of slavery is so abhorrent that those who admire the Southern cause nearly always separate it from slavery if they can. But at the time, they did not. The North and the South both had conservatives. The South did not have what we'd call "liberals" in any numbers, however. Some Southern conservatives sided with democracy and sided with the Union, if only in individual allegiance. Some even had arrived at anti slavery positions before the war, which is essentially siding with democracy. But most of the Southern political class couldn't bring itself to that point and was willing to lead the country into war over something that some deeply believed in. Others simply couldn't see past their own financial interest. Quite a few mixed the two with various degrees of acknowledgement of that.
Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. In Coughlin's views, which were shared by many, we can see some of the same type of thinking we're also seeing today in some quarters, although certainly in a much different context.
It also happened again in the 1920s and 30s, with the rise of political extremism. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party struggled with growing extremisms, much like they are right now. On the right there were groups like that formed by Fr. Coughlin, on the left there were serious Socialists and Communist parties, and pretty significant heavy left infiltration into the Democratic Party.
Whitaker Chambers, who had been a Soviet spy in the 1930s after becoming a Communist in the 1920s, before having a profound conversion and leaving the Communist Party.
We know what happened in the first instance. The Civil War, followed by Reconstruction, followed by the betrayal of Reconstruction. We can't say that the hard right, if you will, prevailed in the Democratic Party of the era, but we can say that a disaster truly occurred. Long term, and it was long, the hard right of the Democratic Party collapsed, featuring two 20th Century attempts at forming a new southern Democratic Party, both of which quickly failed.
The Dixiecrats
Strom Thurmond, who was so opposed to desegregation in the 1940s that he ran for President in a party dedicated. Thurmond, it might be noted, was openly opposed to integration, but not so much that he avoided African Americans altogether. He fathered a child by a black long term household employee in 1925, who was still working for him in 1948.
Not without being disruptive, however. Strom Thurmond, seeing integration coming on strong, ran as a Dixiecrat (States Right Democratic Party) in the 1948 election, taking the electoral votes of four states. Truman swept the nation that year, so it didn't matter. So what was the net result?
Well, the Dixiecrats failed to achieve anything and its members ended up rejoining the Democratic Party. They weren't completely done, so to speak, but they were frankly much diminished. A Democratic candidate had won in 1948 in spite of them and they had proven to not really matter much, at least in 48, to the party. Integration of the military went ahead in the 1940s and 50s, and it entered civil society in the early 1950s. The Democratic Party itself, moreover, started to ignore its conservative wing.
Which wasn't enough for it to make one last try.
The American Independent Party
In 1968 George Wallace, running for the far right American Independent Party, took five southern states in an election that otherwise saw Richard Nixon elected to office. He was basically a Dixiecrat.
Wallace was regarded as an actual potential prospect in 68, but that proved to be very much in error. He returned to the Democratic Party, survived an assassination attempt, and changed his mind on segregation prior to his death. For a lot of people today, he's only known as the mysterious reference in Lynard Skynard's Sweet Home Alabama as the Governor who gets the boos. The party itself ran another hard righter in 1972's Presidential election, but ultimately split into two. It still exist as a near non entity except oddly in California, for an odd reason. It pretty much just nominates candidates from other parties now, who are already running, such as its 2016 nomination of Donald Trump. In 2020 it nominated the gadfly ticket of Rocky De La Fuente and Kanye West.^^
Oh, California?
Well those who have studied it suspect that those who register as part of it in California actually mean to note that they are Independents, not actual members of the party.
Both Wallace and Thurmond were really Democrats, but conservative Democrats deeply dedicated to segregation. Both got over it towards the end of their careers, but that's not the point. The point is that the Democrats had an extremely strong conservative element from 1865 until 1968, and it really only had a liberal branch starting in 1912. The liberal branch had a companion center left/right branch, yielding to a center left branch alone in the 2000s.
That hard right fringe, which is what it was, is completely dead in the Democratic Party. Dead. And both of these insurgent Democratic bodies are, well, irrelevant now.
The lesson? Well, in Birmingham they may love the Governor, but choosing positions that weren't viable with the country at large and whose day was done may have won votes temporarily in the South, but in the long run it killed conservatism in the Democratic Party.
The application? Well, taking hard right positions of the type we're seeing right now which place party above the democratic process may win accolades from inside the party room right now, but outside, it's pretty cold and this may alter the GOP forever without a populist wing.
So let's look at the other movements and see if that's just an American fluke.
The Union Nationale
Long serving, and two time, Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis.
Quebec's government was run by the Union Nationale from the mid 1930s, when it was first formed, until the late 1950s.
In that time, Quebec was similar in some ways (and very much not in others) to some of the regions where the Trump wing of the GOP is popular today. It was heavily rural, at least in so far as the French speaking population was concerned, with islands, if you will, of big cities. And it had a culture that was distinct from the WASPish culture that ran Canada. It was, in that fashion, sort of like Wyoming, in that it had a rural population that felt oppressed, different and besieged by the national culture, whether it was to the extent it imagined or not.
The party, lead by Maurice Duplessis, was extremely conservative and extremely French nationalistic. It pursued a form of isolationism within Canada from the rest of Canada itself. It's economic policy, at the time, might be regarded as agrarian distributism. Like a lot of the Trumpite wing of the GOP, it was Christian Nationalist, but not in a protestant fashion, but a Catholic one.
The Union isn't a wholly unadmirable party by any means. It did a good job of guiding Quebec through the Great Depression, which brought it to power. But it was nearly an anachronism at the time it was formed, something that Trumpites should take counsel from.
The Union was French Quebecois to the core and rightly realized that the Quebecois had preserved their identity due to their religion more than anything else. Following the French defeat in the Seven Years War the Quebecois were allowed to retain their religion, and the church had realized that the only way that the Quebecois were going to survive was through a type of self isolation. The Quebecois largely eschewed commerce and industry, as well as governance, and kept to themselves as a separate French speaking, Catholic, body in an overwhelmingly English speaking, Protestant, North America. The Church kept the Quebecois in existence.
But following the Boer War the English Empire was rapidly changing. The UK itself recognized that the days of old fashioned colonialism were drawing to a close and sought more and more to develop what had been an empire into a family of English speaking sister states, with England as their mother. In this world, Canada was drawing more and more into being fully and culturally separate from the United Kingdom, although it would take World War One and World War Two to really make that true.
As Canada's politics developed into their own, the Union Nationale stepped into the culture of the province that had defined its path, and with a vengeance. The party was singularly nationalistic in a Quebecois fashion. Realizing the history of the Church in preserving the provinces identity, it operated more and more to try to institutionalize that history into a quasi governmental role, much like Fianna Fáil did in Ireland following Irish independence. As with the Irish example, the party operated to see that education and social services were nearly wholly run by the Church, which at first accepted that role due to it traditionally occupying it.
The party lost power in Quebec during World War Two which in part reflected that it had developed fascist sympathies by the late 1930s. It returned to power following the war, but by then Canada was rapidly evolving into its modern self. By the 1950s the Church was begging the Union Nationale to take over the normal social roles that were occupied by the government in other Canadian provinces, but the Union refused to accept the reality that the Church saw coming. Instead it ran its old policies into the ground and by the late 1950s it was subject to what amounted to a political revolution with a cultural reaction, much as the same started happening in Ireland in the 2010s and which is still occurring. In both instances, interestingly enough, the institutions that it sought to keep in a traditional role sought to be relieved of it, being more savvy to the the nature of a modern state than the party.
To conclude the party's fate, the party was essentially defined by and lashed to the identity of Duplessis himself. He died in 1959 and his immediate successor, seeing the tidal wave coming, attempted to initiate a "100 days of change", but died before that was over. His successor called an election, and the liberals won. The Quiet Revolution, and all the ills it brought, and it did bring ills, came about. Reform came, but all at once and in a disastrous way.
Much of that blame can be laid right at the feet of the Union Nationale. It should have seen what was coming as early as 1945/46, and it should have listed to one of the organizations it was attempting to boost, the Church. It didn't.
The party dissolved in 1989. There are a couple of parties that claim it as their intellectual ancestor, but they amount to nothing.
The lesson here? The party stood for something, and something real, early in its history, but even then was backwards looking, something it failed to appreciate because of the economic situation Quebec was in. It was unable to adjust, at all, to the sweeping changes that came into Canada as soon as World War Two ended and went down in defeat, forever, for its failure to adjust to them. In a lot of ways, if you insert the story of the "Tea Party" or "Alt Right" wing of Wyoming's GOP in here, it reads much the same. If so, it's probably in the 1955-56 period on the Union Nationale timeline.
The Union Nationale still has parties that assert its heritage. They have no real role in Quebec politics today. Looked at that way, the hard Trump wing of the GOP, or at least Wyoming's, should consider where the Union Nationale was in 1950. . . and then in 1960. . .and now.
Let's look at another French example.
The Revolution Nationale
"Work, the Country, Family". The personal standard of Marshall Petain, but one which was adopted informally for the Vichy regime itself.
The Revolution Nationale was a movement, not a party, but none the less its instructive as Trumpism is a movement, not yet a party.
The Rrevolution Nationale was the movement put together by the defeated French right wing following France's surrender to the Germans in 1940. Contrary to the way its sometimes imagined, the French government didn't cease to exist in 1940 in any fashion. It's surrender was legally legitimate, and for that reason members of the "Free French" forces were de facto rebels. The Free French themselves reflected a variety of backgrounds, De Gaulle was a monarchist, but the French left went largly out of office when France surrendered and into opposition, if not into outright exile.
Phillippe Petain in 1941.
Vichy, while remaining a legitimate government, knew its limitations and it accordingly turned in on itself, with Phillippe Petain, the hero of World War One at its head. Petain was, as is well known, a great hero of World War One. As a career military man, he could be expected to hold the views of the military class, in regard to politics, but he doesn't actually seem to have. Somehow, however, he acquired these with the fall of France.
French politics were extremely odd up until recently, and a bit difficult to follow, with factions that arose in the French Revolution continually fighting it out over the decades. As part of this, at some point the French officer class began to contain a significant number of traditionalist monarchists, something that is foreign to the US, but which is instructive in what we're going through now. Emphasizing French tradition over liberal reform, the French monarchist saw the figure of the monarch as the standard bearer of conservatism. Its truly odd in that the last really fully legitimate French monarch was on the thrown last arguably in 1792, or maybe in 1848. . . or maybe in 1870, but no monarch had been on the thrown of any kind since 1870, which was a long time before 1940. None the less, monarchist remained and a lot of them were in the Army.
How the Revolution Nationale conceived of itself in comparison with the pre war regime.
They weren't solely in the Army by any means, and over time a line of hard right monarchist philosophy came about due to such thinkers as Charles Maurras, founder of Action Frances. They identified themselves with all things traditionally French and based in their thinking on the concepts in Integralism. Integralism held that all things had to be oriented towards the Church, but in their application of this they went far beyond these principals and into a sort of unique French traditional cultural orientation.
Once in power, Petain gravitated towards this view and it became the ethos of the government. It had, quite frankly, the virtue of standing both for and against something simultaneously. It remained distinctly French in this fashion until the second half of the German occupation of France during which time the Germans came to more and more dominate Vichy and Vichy slid into collaboration, and hence less French, but its politicians still striving to retain their highly conservative and insular views. Originally conceiving of it self as a means of protecting the real France against what it regarded as threats to France, including the French left, it ultimately decayed into simply collaborating with the Germans in France as a practical matter.
Poster depicting France as imagined by the Revolution Nationale.
Vichy of course fell with the Allied landings in 1944. What's significant here, however, in this story is this. The French right, including the traditionalist right, had been a factor in French politics since the early 1800s. But with the cooperation with the Germans, the traditionalist right's bolt was shot. There would be other right wing French politicians, and there still are, but the legacy of Vichy has so tainted the traditionalist right wing that the French right wing has simply had to accommodate itself to the permanent influence of the left, even when its out of power.
Now, this lesion would be easy to dismiss, but the key fact may be this. Accommodating to the seeming lesson of the immediate age deprived the French traditionalist right of a role in its future. France that came out of World War Two had no place for it even when those who were really basically sympathetic to it, including Charles DeGaulle, were in power.
Let's turn sought from France for a second and look at a similar example, that of Spain
The Spanish Falangist
Falangist ideology is misunderstood in the US and always has been. It wasn't represented by one political party, but two. And it isn't fascism, at least in the abstract. And, moreover, it never ruled Spain. Furthermore, in some ways the party was uniquely Spanish
Falangism had its roots in the collapse of the Spanish monarchy, which was a long time in coming. The movement itself was diverse and included everyone from true fascist to dedicated monarchist. By and large, if taken in broadly, and if its individual branches aren't examined, what it stood for was syndicalism as an economic theory, something that has never been popular in the United States, monarchism, and traditionalism. While one branch of the party was decidedly fascist, and therefore anti religion, another part was decidedly Catholic, and as time went on, while the two coexisted, they never completely reconciled. This later feature was emphasized by the forced union of all of the Falangist parties with the Carlist parties under the Franco regime. Carlist were a distinctly traditionalist and nationalist movement that was dedicated to monarchy.
Looked at this way, Falangism had some themes that were very similar to the Revolution Nationale, after the forced 1934 merger. The movement had a dedicated inward looking economic view that was opposed to Communism and Capitalism, it sought to vest great power in the state, it was highly traditional and Christian Nationalist, and it came to be focused on one man, Francisco Franco.
Franco, of course, came to power either rescuing Spain or destroying it, depending upon your view of things. Which every it was, he remained in power until his death in 1975. Franco was never a member of the Falange, but he did rely on it and it was accordingly heavily associated with him.
Franco, always enigmatic, saw his own end and the end of the state he created coming on with his death. Before that time came, he restored the Spanish monarch and the current king of Spain actually briefly ruled the country following his death. But with Franco, the Falange pretty much died as well. In the 1930s it was the single most significant political movement in Spain. Now, while Falange parties remain, they're non entities.
The lesson here? Well, perhaps not much of one because the state of Spanish democracy was such a mess in the 1930s its hard to really see a Spain that didn't collapse into civil war. But if there is one, it's this. The Falange wasn't a believer in democracy. When democracy came back to Spain, it died. Vested ultimately in, as Ben Sasse would say, om the "weird" dedication to "one dude", it didn't survive the dude.
Let's go a bit to the west, Portugal
The National Union
Here's another movement that has a now familiar sounding name and, as will be scene for those not familiar with it, now familiar sounding politics. The Portuguese National Union.
The National Union came to power with António de Oliveira Salazar, the strongman who ruled Portugal for a blistering 36 years..
Portuguese generals following the coup of May 26, 2926.
Salazar was an economist who was brought into the Portuguese government in 1926 when the Portuguese Army, distributed by Portuguese political instability, stage a coup on May 28 of that year. Most sections of Portuguese society, except for the left, supported the coup. While the generals felt that they had saved the nation from disorder, they proved unable to run the economy, and brought Salazar in as the finance minister.
Salazar was successful in addressing the Portuguese deficit and by 1932 he was running the country as its Prime Minister. His policies were somewhat like those already mentioned for Vichy France, but nowhere near as extreme. Perhaps for this reason, his rule lasted an incredibly long time. He was, in essence, a moderate authoritarian.
Which provides, perhaps, the lesson.
Salazar.
Salazar was a conservative, anti democratic, and yet dignified man. He likely would have found the Trumpite wing of the Republican Party deeply repellant for a variety of reasons, and indeed he was opposed to political parties in general. He was a deeply religious Catholic himself, but he did not seek to unify Christianity with the nation, regarding politics as separate from faith. HIs regime studiously observed religious tolerance and he made every effort to separate the government from religion. He believed that his death would end the National Union, but it didn't immediately.
But it did end, and when it did, it went down in the Carnation Revolution of 1974, a left wing, military coup by young officers in the Portuguese military.
For a time, it was feared that Portugal would become a Communist state. It did not. Today its current government is a coalition government of Socialist, conservative Christian Democrats, and monarchist, an unlikely coalition if ever there was one. The country none the less features some significant left wing parties. They aren't governing, however.
So the lesson here is that Portugal's anti democratic highly conservative movement also, interestingly enough, eschewed extremism. It remains in power longer than any other autocratic governments, and its figurehead was not charismatic. When it fell, it fell peacefully, and more or less into moderation.
The German Conservative Right.
The German right wing political pars of the Weimar period give us an other example, although an interesting one in context. They actually were evolving in the opposite direction in some instances, although not enough to save them.
German National Peoples' Party poster from the 1920s. I think this is supposed to show a Teutonic night, the symbol of Germany, trapped between a Communist and a Pole, but I'm not really sure. It's creepy, that's for sure.
The big right wing political party in Germany between the wars and before the Nazis was the German National People's Party. It wasn't the only right wing German party by any means, however. All of the far right "conservative" parties were an odd mixture of highly nationalistic, monarchist and militaristic ideologies, including the NDV. Some of the really nasty ideologies that would fully bloom in Nazism were present in the NDV before the Nazis amounted to much.
The NDV, however, oddly evolved in a different direction. Never a huge fan of democracy, they became more democratic as time went on. It actually began to fall apart when some of its leadership admitted in 1928 that campaigning to restore the monarchy was pointless as it wasn't going to happen and younger Germans didn't support it. That set the party up for real problems as German politics became increasingly extreme after October 1929 and radicalized far right Germans gravitated towards the Nazi Party, just as radicalized left wing members of the SDP increasingly joined the German Communist Party. As right wing radicals struggled to drag the party back to the right, moderates bolted and formed the Conservative People's Party, a center right party.
Every German political party came basically to an end with the Nazis coming to power in 1932, although not immediately, and the NDV, to its lasting shame, participated in brining the Nazis to power. Some NDV figures participated in the early Nazi government, and as with all German political parties some simply went over to the Nazis. The Nazi government ultimately suppressed the NDV on the grounds that it had been infiltrated by Communists. However, some surviving members of the party were part of the July 20, 1944 plot, which makes a great deal of sense as the goals of those plotters were less purely democratic than they were in the nature of conservative anti Nazism.
After the war the NDV never revived. The Christian Democratic Union, untainted by the Nazis and their rise in any fashion, simply supplanted them. The CDU, however, was not really a conservative party but a center right party. And that's the lesson here. The NDV's inability early on to place democracy above its own interests made it an inherently anti democratic party whose reform came to late, as it participated in the damage to German society and its democracy that gave rise to the Nazis. When Germany returned to democracy after the war, the anti democratic role of the NDV was too much of a legacy for the German right to overcome. It simply disappeared. The fact that the majority of the German populace was no less interested in democracy than the members of the NDV didn't matter. It's day was done, just as in democratic West Germany, the day of the KDP was done as well.
A British Example
Let's throw in a British example, from something along the lines of the last time this happened in an English speaking country.
Let's look at Oliver Cromwell.
Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell started off as a parliamentarian, and in that role he was a central figure in the English Civil War.
The English Civil War was, obviously, quite a while back and it figures into the long mess of the English trying to sort out the disaster of the Reformation and the accompanying Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which was no settlement at all, but rather a compromise that allowed Elizabeth to reign without things being decided and, at least by some accounts, without her actual belief in it.^^^ Be that as it may, during the reign of King Charles I, the question of the rights of kings, a long running dispute in English history, arose which pitted the highly Anglican King Charles against he Parliament.
Parliamentary forces fell to the control of Cromwell, who proved to be an able general. He was also a devout Puritan, which is to say a devoted follower of Calvin, and he believed the Church of England to be tainted, in his view, with Catholicism.
Cromwell's military prowess lead him to victory and on to the position of English dictator as the "Lord Protector". That lead him to be hated. He was even posthumously executed, with his body desecrated, and his head being kept in a secret location to this day, least the desecration repeat. His actions lead to the execution of King Charles I, but his reign lead to the restoration of the Crown under King Charles II, who for all his faults converted to the faith Cromwell feared the most, Catholicism, prior to his death.
The lesson? Well Cromwell was a purist fanatic. His fanaticism lead him to power and it lead many people to their death, including King Charles I. In effect, Cromwell, in his view, "stopped the steal", but his government then went about telling everyone what to think and what to do, and not to do, in accordance with the leader's beliefs. It lead the English to hate him in his own day, and the Irish to hate him forever. Puritanism fell from grace and they ended up fleeing to Holland and the English colonies in North America. Not a real record of success.
So what to make of all of this?
What indeed.
Well, perhaps quite a lot.
Right now the Republican Party, a party that did not have its origin in extreme conservatism and which originally sought to overthrow at least one item in the existing social order, and which has both flirted with liberalism and been the standard bearer of conservatism, has seen a large part of its based infused by populism. Some of those populist were Democratic populist at one time, an element of the Democratic Party that was once strong. Additionally, in some regions of the country the GOP is the only party, the way that conservative Democrats were once the only party in the South.
A longer strain of history in the party, the traditional Republican Party, has seemed to lose control of the situation and right now there's a civil war in the party about what sort of party it is going to be. Long history suggest the traditionalist will will out, but right now there's good reason to believe that won't occur. Maybe the Trump wing will persevere and dominate. Maybe the party will spit into two.
And here's the concern. The country needs a conservative party, and as basic conservatives, we'd like to see a real conservative party exist. But the direction the Trump wing of the party is taking it won't succeed long term, and might not succeed short term, even if it contains real elements of conservatism that should be in a conservative party. The history of all such movements in western society has been disastrous, not only to themselves, but to the movements they espoused, and often to conservatism in the larger sense.
Ben Sasse has warned about the an allegiance to "one dude". His warning is well placed. Beyond that, an allegiance to the movement over the democratic process has a really bad history. It tends to lead to the extinguishment of such movements themselves, no matter what the merits of their aims may be.
Put another way, by censuring Sasse and Cheney, real conservatives, they're essentially and ironically censuring themselves in the pages of history, and probably to their ultimate political extinction, and that which they stand for. They need to step back and consider what they're doing, but in the heat of the moment, that hardly ever occurs.
*People should be making no mistake about Cruz. Cruz was already going to go down in defeat if he ran again for the Senate in 2024. He has his eyes on the White House, but he has to. He has nowhere else to go and is going to be out of a job in 2024.
Cruz was supporting the Trumpites as he hoped they'd draw his wagon into the White House. Cruz was serving Cruz in recent events, and he likely sank his political career permanently as a result.
**Of note, those in the administration who were openly religious nearly uniformly were protestants, with perhaps the exception of Kelly Anne Conway, who is a Catholic. Mike Pence was a fallen away Catholic who had become an evangelical Christian, something that's extremely significant in regards to a person's religious views if their serious about it. Mike Pompeo went overseas to Italy while in office and noted his Italian roots, but he's also a protestant which, in the case of ethnicities such as Irish Americans and Italian Americans frankly disqualifies a person from claiming that status.
***Gingrich has moderated considerably with age and his views on various things have changed. He's acknowledged a lot of fault in his prior life of all types.
****The Democrats have the same problem, however, in that the moderates in the party and the left wing radicals really can't be housed in the same party either.
*****Lummis, who regarded Trump with distain in 2016, endorsed him heartily in 2020. While perhaps her conversion was sincere, it has the appearance of somebody calculating their political fortune and making a guess that Wyoming was Trumpite, and Cruz was Trumpite, and Cruz was headed to the White House, therefore she'd have a position in a Cruz White House. That calculation was almost certainly wrong and will likely permanently marginalize her political future.
^Weltanschauung is a German word for "World Outlook", but the term conveys more than that and is difficult to translate into English.
^^Events such as what is going on inside the GOP must be madding to members of parties like the Indepedant Party or the Constitution Party, which have long been hard right. They must wonder where all those people were all those years.
^^^While it may be apocryphal, by some accounts she refused the attention of priests of the Church of England upon her death, calling them "false priests", and thereby tacitly acknowleding the position of her sister Mary.
