Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Questioner: "Why did you leave the Republican Party?"
George F Will: "The same reason I joined it. I am a conservative."
If I were to listen to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or some of the Freedom Caucus here in Wyoming, it would be go.
If I listen to lifelong residents here in the state, including some lifelong Republicans whom would currently be classified as RINO's by the newly populist Wyoming GOP, it would be stay. Alan Simpson, who is an "anybody but Trump", former U.S. Senator, and who the Park County GOP tried to boot out as a elected precinct committeeman, is staying.
The problem ultimately is what time do you begin to smell like the crowd on the bus?
Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union, West Germany's first post-war chancellor. He worked towards compromise and ended denazification early, even though he'd speant the remaining months of World War Two in prison and barely survived. By CDU - This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation, as part of a cooperation project., CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16173747
To put it another way, I'd give an historical example. It's often noted that quite a few Germans joined the Nazi Party as it was just a way to get by, or advance careers, etc., during the Third Reich period of German history. When I was a kid, there was a lot of sympathy, oddly enough, for that view amongst those who were of the World War Two generation, although at the same time, there was a widely held belief that militarism, combined with radical nationalism, were something that was basically in the German DNA. The US, as is well known, didn't even particularly worry about letting former Nazis into the country.
The Germans themselves pretty much turned a blind eye towards this, so many of them had been in the Nazi Party. Even post-war German politicians who had spent the war in exile did, as it was the programmatic thing to do.
Since that time, however, that view has really changed. It started to in 1968 when German students rioted and exposed former Nazis in the police. Germans haven't really come to terms with it, but having been a member of the Nazi Party is a mark of shame, and it's become to be something despised everywhere, even if a person did it for practical reasons and wasn't really involved in the party.
And it should be a mark of shame.
Americans have been sanctimonious about that for a long time, but starting in the 1970s lots of Americans became ashamed, in varying degrees, of our own ancestors in regard to various things. Ironically, the backlash to that, symbolized by Confederate battle flags, is part of what brings us to our current crisis.
Ed Herschler, former Marine Corps Raider, and Democratic lawyer, who was Wyoming's Governor from 1975 to 1987. Herschler probably wouldn't have a home in today's Democratic Party in Wyoming.
I registered as a Republican the first time I was old enough to vote. The first Presidential Election I was old enough to vote in was the 1984 Presidential election, in which I voted for Ronald Reagan. The first election I was old enough to vote in was the 1982 off year election. I honestly don't know who I voted for Senator. Malcolm Wallop won, but I very well have voted for the Democrat. Dick Cheney wont reelection that year against Ted Hommel, whom I don't recall at all. I probably voted for Cheney. I know that I voted for the reelection of Democratic Governor Ed Herschler, who was one of the state's great Governors.
A split ticket.
Split tickets were no doubt common in my family. My father would never reveal who he voted for in an election. The first Presidential election I recall was the 1972 Election in which Nixon ran against McGovern, and I asked who he voted for when he came home. He wouldn't say, and I don't know to this day.
I knew that my father registered Republican, but not everyone in my father's family did. My grandmother, for one, registtered Demcrat,somethign I became aware of when we were visiting her, which we frequently did, at her retirement apartment here in town. She was pretty clear that she was an unapologetic Democrat, which made sense given that she was 100% Irish by descent. Most Irish Americans, at that time, were Democrats, and all real ones were Catholic. Reagan, who claimed Irish ancestry, woudl have been regarded a a dual pretender for that reason by many of them.
My father's view, and it remains mine, that you voted for the person and what they stood for, not hte party.
But being in a party means something, and that has increasingly come to be the case.
I switched parties after that 1984 election. I was, and remain, a conservative, but the GOP was drifting further from a conservative center in that period, and as I've noted, the election of Ronald Reagan paved the path for Donald Trump, although I won't say that was obvious then. And also, Democrats were the party that cared about public lands, as they still do, and cared about rural and conservation issues that I cared about and still do. The GOP locally was becoming hostile to them. So I switched.
Campaign image for Mike Sullivan, Democratic Governor from 1987 to 1995.
I remained a Democrat probably from about 1984 until some time in the last fifteen years. Being a Democrat in Wyoming meant that you were increasingly marginalized, but finally what pushed me out was that it meant being in the Party of Death. The Democrats went from a party that, in 1973, allowed you to be middle of the road conservative and pro-life. We had a Governor, Mike Sullivan, who was just that. By the 2000s, however, that was becoming impossible. Locally most of the old Democrats became Republicans, some running solid local campaigns as Republicans even though they had only been that briefly. Even as late as the late 1990s, however, the Democrats ran some really serious candidates for Congress, with the races being surprisingly close in retrospect. Close, as they say, only counts with hand grenades and horseshoes, but some of those races were quite close. The GOP hold on those offices was not secure.
Dave Freudenthal, Democratic Governor from 2003 to 2011.
Before I re-registered as a Republican, I was an independent for a while. Being an independent meant that primaries became nearly irrelevant to me, and increasingly, as the Democratic Party died and became a far left wing club, starting in the 2000s., it also meant that basically the election was decided in the primaries. Like the other rehoming Democrats, however, we felt comfortable in a party that seemingly had given up its hostility to public lands. And frankly, since the 1970s, the GOP in Wyoming had really been sui generis. Conservative positions nationally, including ones I supported, routinely failed in the Republican legislature. Abortion is a good example. The party nationally was against it, I'm against it personally, but bills to restrict it failed and got nowhere in a Republican legislature.
The Clinton era really impacted the Democratic Party here locally. Wyomingites just didn't like him. That really started off the process of the death of the Democratic Party here. As center right Democrats abandoned the party in response, left wing Democrats were all that remained, and the party has become completely clueless on many things, making it all the more marginalized. But just as Clinton had that impact on the Democrats, Trump has on the GOP.
Throughout the 70s and 80s it was the case that Wyoming tended to export a lot of its population, which it still does, and then take in transients briefly during booms. In the last fifteen or so years, however, a lot of the transient population, together with others from disparate regions, have stayed. They've brought their politics with them, and now in the era of Trump, those views have really taken over the GOP, save for about three pockets of the old party that dominate in Natrona, Albany and Laramie Counties. A civil war has gone on in some counties, and is playing out right now in Park County. In the legislature, the old party still has control, but the new party, branded as the Freedom Caucus, which likes to call its rival the UniParty, is rising. The politics being advanced are, in tone, almost unrecognizable.
Like it or not, on social issues the old GOP's view was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone". That attitude has really changed. Given a bruising in the early 1990s due to a Southeastern Wyoming effort to privatize wildlife, the party became pro public lands for awhile. That's change. The party was not libertarian. That's changed.
Money helped change it, which is a story that's really been missed.
Like the Democrats of the 90s, a lot of the old Republicans have started to abandon the party. If there was another viable party to go to, floods would leave. A viable third party might well prove to be the majority party in the state, or at least a close second to the GOP, if there was one.
There isn't.
So, what to do?
While it'll end up either being a pipe dream or an example of a dream deferred, there's still reason to believe that much of this will be transitory. If Trump does not win the 2024 Presidential Election, and he may very well not, he's as done as the blue plate special at a roadside café as the GOP leader. Somebody will emerge, but it's not really likely to be the Trump clone so widely expected. And the relocated populists may very well not have that long of run in Wyoming. Wyomingites, the real ones, also tend to have a subtle history of revenge against politicians who betray their interests. Those riding hiding high on anti-public lands, anti-local interests, may come to regret it at the polls later on.
The Johnson County invaders of 1892. The Republican Party, whose politicians had been involved in the raid on Natrona and Johnson Counties, took a beating in the following elections.
Or maybe this process will continue, in which case even if Trump wins this year, the GOP will die. By 2028, it won't be able to win anything and a new party will have to start to emerge.
We'll see.
None of which is comfortable for the State's real Republicans.
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