What Happens if Trump Loses?

Could this be the end of the Republican Party as an institution?

The question that’s received the most attention lately is what happens if Trump wins. I find the inverse question more interesting: what happens if he loses?

If Donald Trump loses this election—particularly if he loses badly—it’s possible the Republican Party as an institution could collapse.

It’s been so long since a party institutionally collapsed, we’ve come to think it’s impossible. I’m not saying Republican voters are going anywhere. A party collapse doesn’t make the people who supported it disappear. The issues they cared about also don’t magically go away. If anything, those voters will become more important, and their ideas more intensely contested than before. What would happen is the container we call the Republican Party would cease to exist as an institution, unleashing the people and ideas it contains into America’s political bloodstream outside the structure of the party.

Donald Trump is the only remaining thing holding this party together. When he’s gone, what’s left to hold this coalition and machinery up?

WHAT IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

What exactly was the old Republican Party of William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and Mitt Romney?

The version of the Republican Party we all used to know was built between the 1930s and 1960s around an idea called fusion conservatism, more commonly called today modern American conservatism. This ideology was the creation of a man few people remember, a writer for William F. Buckley’s political magazine National Review named Frank Meyer.

Republicans faced a difficult problem in the 1950s. When Franklin Roosevelt created his New Deal coalition, he didn’t only remake the Democrats. He chased all the people who disliked his new philosophy into the only political alternative, the husk of Hoover’s dying Republican Party. These new Republicans didn’t start with a lot in common, except for the necessity to somehow work together to stop the spread of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Many of them hated each other’s beliefs, almost as much as they disliked New Deal liberalism.

Republicans did fine as a coalition on the defensive facing down the common threat of the Democrats. They did less well agreeing on any affirmative agenda. They all opposed Democrats for entirely different reasons—Ayn Rand libertarians, free marketers, religious traditionalists, Burkeans, and anti-communists. The religious conservatives and traditionalists particularly despised the libertarians, who they saw as perhaps even more unrooted, utopian, and godless than the New Dealers.

Enter Frank Meyer.

Meyer was a former communist turned conservative—not uncommon back in those days—who wrote for Buckley’s National Review. The crowd at National Review wanted to find some way to unite this ad hoc coalition against New Deal liberalism into a powerful force. Meyer wasn’t a politician but brilliant strategic thinker who kept strange hours, mostly working out of his home in the middle of the night and sending his edits into the office. He realized the task was to somehow convince the rowdy group of factions thrown into this alliance that they were in fact all part of one common group. The tool he invented to do this was fusion conservatism.

Fusionism cleverly asserted that all the principles this squabbling opposition cared about were in reality a single idea. It claimed a free society required virtuous people to succeed. Virtuous people required political liberty to flourish. This meant liberty and virtue weren’t really opposing ideas, but complementary parts of one idea—conservatism. The factions against the Democrats were all were followers of the same common ideology. This piece of intellectual magic transformed America.

Meyer’s fusionism became the common philosophy of Buckley’s magazine, which became the bible of a new generation of Republicans. The crowd at National Review then took their ideas into worldly politics, engineering the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president to advance their movement—they started by writing articles praising him, ghostwrote his book Conscience of a Conservative around their ideas, launched a draft Goldwater campaign, and finally when they pulled him into the race unleashed an army of young conservative activists to fuel it. This created a new political force, the Conservative Movement, built entirely around Meyer’s fusionism.

By Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Meyer’s and Buckley’s philosophy was one of America’s two major political philosophies.

The Conservative Movement’s fusionism became the glue holding the Republican Party together. It institutionalized what began as a disorganized counter-reaction against a man and program—FDR and his New Deal—into a common agenda and ideas. It convinced millions of Americans with very different views they were in fact factions following a common philosophy—conservatism. That supported a political machine of candidates, think tanks, writers, activists, and consultants capable of wielding power.

This coalition is now dead.

The Republican Party will never go back to fusion conservatism as it’s motivating force. Many of the most passionate advocates for this philosophy who rose in politics because they were the smartest intellectual warriors for this conservative machine—people like David Brooks, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Andrew Sullivan—have all but abandoned the party they supported. That these figures are no longer even considered “conservative” tells you that “conservative” no longer means what it meant over our entire lives. There will no doubt be more Nikki Haley style campaigns cheered on by a shrinking group of holdouts, but the Republican Party is never going back to what it was.

Since the Republican party is no longer united around fusion conservatism, what now holds it together? Naturally, Donald Trump.

INSTITUTIONALIZING POLITICS

A political party is an incredible thing. It’s essentially a national Fortune 500 company without any income reliant on pleasing customers for support. It’s much more than a single political campaign, or even political movement. A party has to win half the nation over decades. It’s amazing it ever works.

To function, a party must become a powerful institution. This requires two things:

• An Identity. A party must create and maintain a compelling identity that attracts half of diverse America to its cause. This is its philosophy, its ideology, or its brand. The identity is the thing motivating individuals not just to support the party, but to join it—saying not just “I support” Republicans or Democrats but I am a Republican or Democrat.

• A Structure. A party must create a national structure around its philosophy and ideas. This means a complex machine turning the ideas into action that can perpetuate itself for decades. This structure is bigger than just the people sitting in a few Washington offices. It includes local volunteers and leaders in every community in every state. It includes networks of think tanks developing agendas and ideas. It includes activists and interest groups attached to the party. It supplies a pipeline of candidates and armies of professionals and staffers working for those candidates. It creates and supports policy wonks and writers committed to promoting the party’s cause. This is the party machine, and it must be bigger than any candidate.

  Structure means party leaders work for the party much like CEOs of public companies work for their corporations. They’re powerful leadership employees working for something with interests bigger than themselves. These leaders have power but they’re still employees. They’re drum majors standing in front of the parade, and if they want to stay out front they must go where the parade is supposed to go. Leaders work for parties; parties do not work for their leaders.

Donald Trump never pledged loyalty to a party, did not adopt one as his identity, nor did he come out of own’s machine. Trump isn’t an employee of the Republican Party beholden to its philosophy, agenda, interests, or activists. He represents himself, and the people who support him support him and not the party he leads. His voters care about a lot of issues, and they support him because they think he will do what they want on those issues. However, they support him to do the right thing on their issues, not the party. They support the party only because he’s leading it. He alone promised to give these people what they wanted.

Trump successfully broke the old Republican party identity and machine, and thus broke the party away from fusionism. He brought new issues and a new tone and new supporters. What he didn’t do is consolidate his new direction. He didn’t institutionalize it. He didn’t hire rooms of intellectuals to turn MAGA into an identifiable ideology. He didn’t get a bunch of policy thinkers to design an identifiable agenda. He didn’t anoint lieutenants Americans could rally to as other representatives of his movement. There isn’t an activist program training young MAGA activists. He didn’t create a pipeline of new blood. Trump didn’t create anything that can live beyond him the man.

This was clear during the failed Ron DeSantis campaign. DeSantis thought he could position himself as the heir to Trump’s party by adopting the same issues. He learned the hard way this wouldn’t work because there was no clear agenda, ideology, or movement people agreed to follow. There was no policy book everyone agreed was the agenda, no common political ideology everyone subscribed to. There was no institution you could go to and get its blessing and support. The only way to win support was to either be, or follow, Donald Trump.

If support for Donald Trump has become the uniting spirit of the Republican Party, what happens when he’s gone?

Who are his successors? What is the agenda? What boxes do people need to check? What are the institutions people need to ascend? If Donald Trump loses this election, he will disappear from politics. He’s not running again when he’s 82. He also isn’t going to spend the remainder of life fostering a movement, building institutions, grooming lieutenants, and finding successors. If the old Republican Party is dead, and the current party is united only around this man, what will unite Republicans when Donald Trump is gone?

Or is the Republican Party like Ross Perot’s Reform Party, not a party institution but a container for one man that cannot survive when he leaves the scene?

WHAT A PARTY COLLAPSE LOOKS LIKE

There have been two great party collapses in America’s history, the Federalists and the Whigs. Both followed a common pattern.

The Federalists collapsed during the War of 1812 after a political convention that made Federalists look like traitors. The Federalists were the dominant party in America’s early republic—the party of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton. After Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s presidencies, however, America’s first major party was now weak. Jefferson and Madison’s Democratic-Republicans had grown popular stealing its best ideas while blackening its name.

Then President Madison launched the disastrous War of 1812. Federalists opposed the foolish war their rivals launched, in part because their New England base was bearing most of the costs. The Federalists held a great convention in Hartford implicitly threatening to make New England succeed from the Union if their anti-war demands were not met. When the tides of war shifted, and America secured a peace, the party suddenly looked like disloyal traitors and the Federalist label turned toxic. Within a few years, the Federalist Party all but ceased to exist.

The Whigs’ fate was similar. As discussed previously, the Whigs were a competitive national party with both Northern and Southern wings deeply divided over slavery. When the slavery issue heated up, the Whigs fumbled the issue and angered both. By the 1852 presidential election, angry Whigs North and South abandoned the party’s candidate creating an electoral blowout. The show of weakness caused Whigs to flee a now pathetic label, so by around 1854 a party that occupied the White House in 1852 barely still existed.

Political parties are like Tinkerbell—they’re only powerful when people believe. If people believe in what parties represent and see them as inevitable, they’re nearly unbreakable. As soon as people stop believing, they can quickly crash for the same reason banks have runs. As soon as a party no longer has a purpose, or its reputation takes a hit, a few brave and principled people risk walking out, and the trickle quickly becomes a flood. Ambitious politicians and people with agendas flee an increasingly toxic label and the party collapses.

If Donald Trump were to lose this campaign badly enough, this process could come for the Republicans.

No one is now loyal to the Republican Party as an institution. The old coalition is no longer held together by its fusionist philosophy. There is no pipeline of ambitious candidates and staffers carefully climbing the party ladder. There is only a vehicle for a man, and if he were to be discredited by a loss and leave the stage, there will be nothing remaining to hold the party together. Donald Trump captured the party, tore out it’s old foundation, but didn’t build any infrastructure to outlive him

As I recently wrote, this is what I believe JD Vance was put into place to fix. His job is to create the intellectual and political infrastructure necessary to institutionalize a new Republican Party. If he becomes Vice President, he has four years to do it. However, this cannot be accomplished in a few weeks or months. It took National Review over a decade to turn the Conservative Movement from an idea into a real-world movement. I also don’t see anyone in the wings ready to pick up the torch as successor. Vance is mainly an ideas guy. Ron DeSantis is discredited after his loss. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are part of the old guard struggling to adapt. Josh Hawley is tarnished. Tucker Carlson isn’t a politician. There’s nobody in the wings.

It's important to never say never. People sometimes do emerge from seemingly nowhere. No one saw Abraham Lincoln—a former one-term Congressman and failed Senate candidate—coming out of nowhere to become our greatest president. No one saw William Jennings Bryan—a thirty-six-year-old former two-term Congressman and failed Senate candidate—suddenly capturing the Democratic nomination and remaking his party from within. Sometimes people come along at the right time. I just don’t see how it happens.

I don’t believe the Republican Party can ever go back to what it was—Ronald Reagan and fusion conservatism. With nothing holding the party together, I also don’t see how it can stumble along aimlessly for years waiting for someone to build the intellectual and political machinery it needs to stay united. Nothing is left to stop the bank run while people muddle along and wait. The party might survive and adapt—but it also well might not.

If it happens, it will happen faster than you think and the result will be political chaos. Half of America will be looking for new political homes. Old alliances will be permanently broken. All hierarchy and institutional breaks will be gone. Imagine new parties emerging. Imagine rowdy movements demanding attention. Imagine wealthy and influential people seizing the opportunity. Imagine activists seeing an opening to demand even more. Without the shackles of the party around them, the fighting will be more intense not less. If you thought the last few years were crazy, these might be crazier.

A world without the Republican Party seems unthinkable. If you look at the situation without preconceived notions about what’s possible, it actually seems more likely than at any time in our lives.

Do you think the Republican Party could institutionally collapse? Join the community in the comments.