Revisiting the GOP's 3 x 3 existential threat one year later – – what got left out.

Back in August 2017, we ran a post of arguing that the Republican Party faced a collection of threats that taken together actually had the potential to destroy the party in its current incarnation. I didn't and don't want to spend a lot of time speculating on exactly what form the destruction might take, whether it would be a ground-up rebuilding (possibly combined with a rebranding and name change) for a third party rising up to fill the vacuum or even a split in the remaining party with the more liberal factions setting off on their own while those who stayed drifted to the right, thus making the Democrats the conservative party. Trying to predict where the pieces will fall after an explosion is a sucker's game. I'm just interested in the conditions that make an explosion possible.

With apologies to our regular readers who have seen this too many times before, here's a recap of the basic argument. Under its current system, the United States is effectively locked into a two-party configuration with one party on the left and the other on the right (I stammered a little bit as I dictated this to my laptop. I have huge issues with the traditional political spectrum, but there's no way to avoid it in this context). Furthermore, these two parties are extraordinarily resilient since it is next to impossible, under normal circumstances, for a third party to take the place of one of the main two.

If, however, you have a number of different threats to the party, each at an extreme perhaps even unprecedented level all working in concert, the likelihood of a Whig party scenario is no longer trivial. A year ago, I ran through a list of unpopular policies (healthcare, immigration, tax cuts for the rich), presidential scandals (involving money, collaboration with foreign powers, and obstruction of justice) and demographic challenges (with women, people of color, and younger voters). The range and severity of these threats appear to be something unique in American political history.

On the whole, the list has held up fairly well over the past 12 months, but there are a couple of threats that need to be added even at the risk of spoiling the nice 3 x 3 symmetry. The first is trade, which remains a real surprise for me. True, Trump talked a good protectionist game from the beginning, but he also promised to strengthen the social safety net and raise taxes on the rich. In those areas, any pretense of economic populism was instantly abandoned for conservative orthodoxy. It was only in the area of trade that those campaign promises were not only fulfilled, but doubled down on. It was also difficult to anticipate just how effective China would be at fighting back or how quickly the trade war would become us against the world.

The other omission, and this when I probably should've seen coming, was the role that smaller Republican scandals mostly outside of the administration and often on the state or local level would play. We already did a post on the subject, one which had to be updated almost immediately. This week we had yet another major development from Arkansas, again involving a member of the Hutchinson family dynasty.

Arkansas governor's nephew leaves state Senate amid charges
By ANDREW DeMILLO, Associated Press 

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — A nephew of Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson resigned from the state Senate on Friday after being charged with spending thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal expenses, including a Caribbean cruise, tuition payments and groceries, prosecutors announced Friday.

Former state Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, a Republican who wasn't seeking re-election, is charged with eight counts of wire fraud and four counts of filing false tax returns. Federal prosecutors allege that from 2010 through 2017, he used campaign money to pay for personal expenses that also included Netflix fees, jewelry, a gym membership and his utility bills. They say he tried to hide it by falsifying campaign finance reports and tax filings.

Obviously, even with the Hutchinson name attached, this is very much a local story but that does not mean it's an independent event in the larger network of the political landscape. It affects and is affected by other events on the state and national level and if I were a real political scientist, I'd be reading up on concepts like cascading failure and catastrophe theory about now.

The conservative movement created the modern Republican Party much like the deacon built the wonderful one-hoss shay, with each component carefully crafted and supporting all the rest, and while I am certainly not trying to argue by analogy here, it is entirely within the range of possibility that the eventual outcome the same.