The lesser of two evils: how much should be expect of Never-Trump Republicans?

A claque of high-profile Republicans has appeared at the Democratic National Convention this week but they have had to undertake an arduous political journey

As the Democratic National Convention rumbles to its final stages in Chicago, I read a piece by Joe Perticone on The Bulwark’s Substack entitled “Democrats Welcome Disaffected Republicans With Open Arms”. It described how some Republicans who find Donald Trump beyond the pale “have found a new home and presence” at the Democratic Party’s jamboree, and noted that several had been given speaking slots: former conservative pundit Rich Logis, political strategist Ana Navarro, former Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, ex-lieutenant governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan and one-time White House press secretary and director of communications Stephanie Grisham. As Perticone says, these disillusioned GOP stalwarts and former Trump supporters are:

being welcomed with open arms by Democrats who view them as key validators for their case against the ex-president. They are being hailed as embodiments of the case Harris is making that voters should put country over party.

It is very much not my intention or desire to regulate the consciences of politicians and political commentators, especially those thousands of miles and an ocean away. These are strange, disrupted times, and the tectonic plates of American politics have been shifting since at least 2016—arguably much earlier—and have not stopped moving yet. I often say, paraphrasing Elizabeth I, that I do not make windows into men’s souls (though admittedly a partner once said to me “That’s literally all you do”).

I have said before that I have always been a Conservative, or at least for as long as I have had some kind of awareness of politics and different political ideologies. I’m not politically tribal in an exclusionary sense: probably more of my friends are non-Conservatives than otherwise, I don’t seek political alignment in friendships or relationships, I don’t dislike, discount or avoid people who have different political views from me. I am very much not part of the “Never Kissed A Tory” school of thought (or its flipside), and I’m always happy to talk about what I think with people, open-mindedly and reasonably, if they’re willing to do the same. Conversely, there are some people with whom I align quite closely ideologically who make me deeply uncomfortable.

On the other hand, I am very much attached institutionally to the Conservative Party. I’m not the sort of disruptive, iconoclastic type who would as soon see something burn to the ground after it’s served its useful purpose as seek to preserve it. That is in itself a function of my being a Conservative, a Tory, and I come back as I always do to Enoch Powell’s definition of a Tory as “a person who regards authority as immanent in institutions”. He went on to say:

I had always been, as far back as I could remember in my existence, a respecter of institutions, a respecter of monarchy, a respecter of the deposit of history, a respecter of everything in which authority was capable of being embodied, and that must surely be what the Conservative Party was about, the Conservative Party as the party of the maintenance of acknowledged prescriptive authority.

That has great resonance for me, as does something else Powell said in a speech at Shipley in February 1974: “I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me… it is something I cannot alter.” It happens, or rather it is no coincidence, that I have never cast a vote for another party, nor can I easily imagine doing so.

Returning to Chicago, this does not mean I am bewildered by the actions of these Republicans who have turned their backs on the current circumstances of their party. Indeed, I feel the wrenching pain it must, or may, have caused them, and appreciate the strength of feeling they must nurse to have undertaken such a drastic action.

(Of course, Powell himself took a similar journey in 1974 when he not only decided not to seek re-election as MP for Wolverhampton South West and left the Conservative Party but advised the electorate to vote Labour in the general election that February, on the grounds that the Labour Party promised renegotiation of the United Kingdom’s entry to the European Economic Community. Formal accession had only taken place in January 1973 and it was for Powell the overriding issue of the election, far outstripping party loyalty. Yet it was not easy: in that same 1974 speech I mentioned above, someone in the audience shouted “Judas!” Powell shot back “Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!” The intensity of his expression is almost agonising.)

I certainly hold no brief for Donald Trump. I regard him with unremitting contempt as a person, an erratically mendacious, morally empty narcissist who sees the world as a succession of past and potential grievances. He is crude, sour, aggressive, vain and spiteful, recognises no limitations on his own behaviour and is unable to accept any reverse or defeat as anything but chicanery. As for his state of mind, it baffles and concerns me in equal measure: I wrote speculatively about his thought processes earlier in the summer, and described him as “intellectually unsophisticated, poorly informed and essentially incurious”, someone who “betrays no sense of an internal intellectual landscape of any sophistication, let alone a hinterland”.

This makes him staggeringly ill-suited to be president of the United States. He respects no laws or limitations, seeks only what is advantageous to him at the precise moment he considers it, and judges subordinates primarily on the strength of their personal loyalty to him. He will say anything at any time if he thinks it will serve his case, and I genuinely wonder if he distinguishes between truth and falsehood in the same way that most people do, given the facility with which he will tell preposterous, provable lies. That combination of self-interest, unabashed mendacity and an expectation of total obedience is absolutely toxic in a political leader, let alone one with the sole authority to use nuclear weapons.

If I were a United States citizen, I would not be voting for Donald Trump.

Yet someone challenged me a few months ago to take that declaration to its logical conclusion. The American political system is essentially binary, certainly as far as the presidency is concerned, and the choices are Republican or Democrat. It has been that way since 1856, when James Buchanan, a Democrat, beat the Republicans’ first ever presidential candidate, John Frémont, and only the election of 1912 has threatened to upset the order: former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, running as the candidate of the Progressive Party, came second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson and beat his own GOP successor, William Taft, into a poor third place.

Given that binary, there are two stages of anti-Trumpism: there is not voting Republican, thereby denying Trump your support, and there is the further step of voting for his opponent, who until a month ago we thought would be President Joe Biden but we now know will be Vice-President Kamala Harris. In any other election, a disaffected Republican might reasonably sit on his or her hands and refuse to support the party. This year, however, many feel—with some justification—that a second Trump presidency would not just see the implementation of policies with which they disagree, but a fundamental assault on the political system and the constitutional order of the United States.

(Here is not the place to argue the case out, but let me just say briefly: Trump continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election, despite no convincing evidence to the contrary; he sought to prevent the result of that election being ratified and, at best, stood by while an armed insurrection took place at the Capitol; he implied that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, should have been executed; he has referred to his opponents as “vermin”; he has said he will not be a dictator “other than day one”; he has suggested he will use the justice system to pursue his political enemies; he believes it should be illegal to critise Supreme Court justices who rule in his favour.)

If Trump is a clear and present danger, then, it is surely not enough merely not to vote for him, but there is a duty to vote for the candidate most likely to beat him, and that can only be Kamala Harris. I see the logic of this. I think, for example, that former national security advisor John Bolton’s intention to write in the name of former vice-president Dick Cheney instead of voting for Trump is something of an abdication of responsibility: it is nothing more than an abstention. It is, arguably, worse than an abstention as it is dishonest. The logical case is sound: if Trump must not be president, then it follows that Harris must be, because she is the only alternative.

I am in no way endorsing Kamala Harris as president. She seems to me to have been a rather lacklustre politician on the national stage, first as senator for California and then as vice-president, and she communicates in a simplistic, disjointed way which suggests a superficiality of thought. I think some of her policies are damaging and some are simply empty, and I have no wish to see them implemented.

Under any other circumstances, I would not be voting for Kamala Harris.

Fortunately, I don’t have to face the moral dilemma that many Republicans are facing. But it is that dilemma that was what struck me about the Republican guests at the Democratic National Convention, and highlighted where I think I part company from them. I completely understand not voting for Trump; I understand feeling an obligation to underscore that by voting for Harris; but I do not think I would then be able to go on stage at the “other” party’s convention and enthusiastically endorse Harris. That Trump is a dreadful proposition does not make her a good candidate, and I think she is actually quite a bad one, for whom I might have to vote faute de mieux, for fear of finding something worse, to use Belloc’s words.

The argument, I suppose, is that of Harris’s election is vital for the survival of the republic, then there must be no length to which you will not go. It is, in a way, like Powell’s decision to call for a Labour vote in 1974: for him, the cause of sovereignty, and of getting the United Kingdom back out of the Common Market if at all possible, was so important that party loyalty simply paled by comparison. His rigidly logical mind processed that series of decisions inexorably, if uncomfortably, and he could not have chosen any other course.

In the end, like most writers, I suppose, I am really talking about myself when I talk about other things. For those who have strong institutional political loyalties, there is a substantial gap between denying your usual support to “your” party because it has committed some political solecism so catastrophic that you cannot in all conscience tick its box on the ballot paper; and explicitly seeking its defeat by embracing another party or candidate, even one to which or whom, under normal circumstances, you might be vehemently opposed. That is a journey which Logis, Navarro, Kinzinger, Duncan and Grisham have completed, and I do not criticise them for it. But we should be careful, I think, in expecting every Republican to follow suit.

I feel real and acute sympathy for Republicans. As late as 2021, they might have imagined that the supremacy of Donald Trump would pass, that the 45th president had taken the GOP hostage but release, with his electoral defeat, would eventually come. I think it is hard to maintain that belief now. Trump’s adoption by a crushing margin as the party’s presidential candidate this year, and his increasing sway over the hierarchy, as I wrote in The Hill in April, means that he now controls the Republican Party’s future and will seek to perpetuate the MAGA domination. For me, as someone who is instinctively sympathetic to the GOP as a centre-right party, the final symbol of defeat was Ambassador Nikki Haley’s announcement in May that she would vote for Trump in the presidential election.

Haley had contested the party’s nomination with fierceness and vigour, making no secret of how unsuitable for office she thought the former president was, explicitly calling him “not qualified to be president of the United States”; even after it was mathematically impossible for Trump to be beaten at the convention, it was still possible to imagine, if increasingly wistfully, that she might ride out the next four years and lead a counter-Trump revolution in 2027/28 to take the Republicans away from being a personality cult and back to their traditional status as a mainstream party of government. Haley may still seek the GOP nomination in 2028, but, as Karen Tumulty noted recently in The Washington Post, it will not be as a counter-revolutionary, but rather the result of “suing for peace with the MAGA base… [as] a necessary first step”.

In my political consciousness, I have seen the Conservative Party cycle through 10 leaders: Thatcher, Major, Hague, Duncan Smith, Howard, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Whoever is announced as the new leader of the party on Saturday 2 November will be the eleventh, and I still don’t know who I am even hoping for, let alone who is the most likely victor. What I have not experienced, however, is a seizure of the party by so malign and alien a force as has captured the Republican Party. I may not always have made my mark on a ballot paper with effervescent joy, but I have not yet been unable to do so: however low the Conservative Party’s fortunes have sunk, there is simply no other political party which has a world view which correlates to my own. I don’t think any of the six candidates for the leadership would represent so dramatic a caesura. So I am luckier than many Republicans.

A final thought: when the opinion polls suggested that the Conservatives might perform even more badly than they actually did in last month’s general election, perhaps winning fewer than 100 seats, there were sincere and understandable conversations about whether the party would survive. My sense now is that extinction is no longer an immediate danger, however long and arduous the road to recovery. But no political party is guaranteed to survive forever: in the United Kingdom, we have seen the disappearance of the Liberal Unionists, the transformation (some would say beyond recognition) of the old Liberal Party, the rise and fall of the Social Democratic Party and the effective disbandment of the Independent Labour Party, all within the last 120 years. I wrote about some of these groups at the end of June.

Political parties generally decline and vanish when they no longer have a sufficiently persuasive ideological offering, or when their natural electoral constituency shrinks unmanageably or transfers its support to another party. These developments can be accelerated by the emergence of new parties which have clearer messages or a more obvious appeal.

The Republican Party has brewed a kind of potency from its transformation into a Donald Trump personality cult over the past six to eight years, but cults are heavily dependent on the continuing success and plausibility of the personality. It came into being in 1854 as a coalition of former Whigs, ex-members of the Free Soil Party and anti-slavery activists in opposition to the potential expansion of chattel slavery westwards, and embraced classical liberalism and economic and social modernisation. It is therefore exactly 20 years younger than the modern Conservative Party, and, like the Conservatives, it has no automatic right to survival. The duopoly of American politics is much older than that in Britain, going back 168 years, but it need not always be that way.

If Donald Trump returns to the White House in January next year, is there a body of Republicanism which will find that intolerable, and which might think seriously about its institutional future? A breakaway centre-right group or new party, however difficult and improbable, looks no more far-fetched than an internal counter-revolution. 2028 could be a moment of truth for Republicans. If he is elected in November, Trump will have to leave the White House under the provisions of the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and will be 82 years old. He will no doubt delight in managing the succession of the GOP leadership like a more serious instalment of The Apprentice, and will certainly want to groom an heir, perhaps one of his children or their spouses. If MAGA is handed on to another candidate, it proves that the party is inextricably caught up with the cult of Trump.

I suppose those gathered in Chicago this week would tell you that the easiest way to avoid all this pain and distress is to vote Democrat in November. I do see the logic, but I see why it could be searingly difficult for some Republicans. Thoughts and prayers, comrades.