David Frum, ex-Bush speechwriter (bio here), is asking no one in particular, “Can conservatives learn?”
From the 2022 midterms, he means. It’s a serious question. He says, “Through the Trump years, the Republican Party has organized itself as an anti-learning entity. Unwelcome information has been ignored or denied.”
After cataloguing MAGA’s many electoral failures, starting with Trump’s loss of the 2016 popular vote (see complete list here), Frum argues that “every way you can measure, 2022 was a crushing repudiation—not only of Trump personally or of Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was corrupted, but of the larger Republican Party.”
That’s because the Republican Party and Trump have become nearly indistinguishable. A further sign of voter repudiation of Republicans’ non-inclusive agenda: A record number of Muslims won elections (see story here).
More than anything, it now seems, people were worried about democracy under siege. Last week, voters across America sent the GOP a memo. It reads like this:
“Every last one of the candidates running for offices to control elections in swing states who endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election went down to defeat, as did up-ballot election deniers such as Blake Masters in the Arizona Senate contest and Lee Zeldin, who ran for governor in an otherwise good Republican year in New York.
“A Democrat won a Trump district in Washington State from a MAGA Republican who, having primaried the moderate Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler out of the seat she won in 2020 by 13 points, drove away GOP voters by blaming the January 6 attack on the FBI and defending the attackers as ‘political prisoners.’
“Supporters of abortion rights won all six contests where the issue was on the ballot: Kansas in August, then California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont in November.”
The Reader’s Digest condensed version reads: WE’RE FED UP WITH YOU.
Frum’s more detailed analysis of that memo goes like this: “It’s hard to miss the strong smell here of a thorough repudiation, up and down the ballot, of the post-Trump Republican Party, of the January 6 insurrectionists, and of a cultural agenda that seems to many Americans regressive and repressive.”
And while not mentioned by Frum, threatening civil war, brandishing guns, talking about “building more gallows,” and terrorizing election workers didn’t help, either.
Back to the question, will Republicans learn from it? If, as Frum believes, the GOP needs less of everything authoritarian and reactionary, and more of democracy and modernity, which Republicans have resisted — it’s unlikely. Early evidence tends to confirm this.
So far “stolen election” rhetoric is muted (although not absent), and election offices aren’t being stormed (only picketed). But their other rhetoric — not least talk of impeaching Biden — indicates they’re more likely to double down on what got them here.
So MAGA isn’t dead, just despised, and still a force for electing Biden and a Democratic Congress in 2024 again.