How the GOP became the party of lost causes

There are many, many things that make Donald Trump an implausible Republican presidential nominee. But one — his status as a New Yorker — has gotten relatively little attention.

The Republican Party receives its strongest support from the South — so much so that some commentators have taken to calling the contemporary GOP a regional party. And though its recent presidential nominees have hailed from many parts of the country, with the exception of Mitt Romney they have not come from the northeast. (Romney also had strong family and religious ties to Michigan and Utah.)

Yet here is Trump, the consummate blustering yankee blowhard, presiding over a party dominated by a cultural outlook rooted in the South. That outlook expresses itself in the GOP's staunch social conservatism, its anti-government instincts, and its veneration of military virtues. But it shows up in another way as well: a traditionalist tendency to latch onto lost causes and to treat devotion to them as a noble calling, almost as if publicly displaying that devotion were the main point of politics, and actually enacting change or reform in the direction of the cause is beside the point. What counts is the purity of devotion to the ideal. Governing, compromising, muddling through a process of conciliation — none of that has as much worth or nobility as taking a stand and (when necessary) going down to defeat in its name.

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This sensibility — you could call it tragic stoicism — grew out of and remains wrapped up with the memory of the immense suffering endured by the South in the Civil War and its aftermath. Out of that suffering, southerners came to look up to and be moved by the idea of standing on principle — and perhaps even more so, standing on defeated principles.

And that outlook now permeates the Republican Party. If you need evidence, just look at the platform the party seems poised to approve this week in Cleveland.

This isn't the platform of Donald Trump, who is focused on immigration, trade, and terrorism while soft-pedaling the social issues. On the contrary, this is a party still endlessly obsessed with cultural conservatism. (In that sense, it's far more Mike Pence's party than Donald Trump's.) But the GOP is not just obsessed with cultural conservatism. This is a party unwilling to think or speak about social and cultural trends of which it disapproves in any terms other than absolute rejectionism, as if nothing in the world and the country had changed in the past two decades.

In 2004, George W. Bush ran for reelection on a platform that included the goal of passing a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. It went nowhere at all. Twelve years later, same-sex marriage has been declared a constitutional right by the Supreme Court, it is legal in all 50 states, and it is supported by a majority of Americans. And how does the GOP respond? By calling in its 2016 platform for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in the U.S. Constitution.

Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.

And that's not all. The platform draft approved by delegates last week also favors "conversion therapy" for gays (RNC chair Reince Priebus disputes that the platform explicitly calls for this, though the language seems intended to tacitly support parents who want to subject their kids to this "therapy"). The draft platform holds that "natural marriage" creates an environment in which children are less likely to become addicted to drugs or be otherwise damaged. And it describes pornography as a "public menace" and a "public health crisis."

The GOP, even in 2016, is a singularly reactionary party.

I don't mean that in the polemical sense of denoting retrograde opposition to the inevitable progressive march of history. In a free society, individuals, families, churches, and other intermediary institutions should be free to pursue and live according to a multitude of competing and conflicting visions of the good. For some that will involve believing that being gay is intrinsically disordered, that traditional marriage is the only legitimate form of marriage, and that it's uniquely suited to enable children to thrive. The same goes for those who consider pornography an abomination.

But that's very different than committing one of America's two major parties to fighting for these positions in the political arena. Do Republican delegates really think the federal government should be weighing in on the merits of conversion therapy? Or declaring that children raised by gay couples are more inclined toward drug abuse? (Should the government attempt to adduce any evidence to support this contention? Or should it simply base its claims on the Bible, which the delegates also believe should be used by lawmakers "as a guide when legislating"?) And is the GOP really prepared to propose legal restrictions on pornography on public health grounds and to devise constitutional arguments to enable those restrictions to pass First Amendment scrutiny?

The answer to all of these questions, I suspect, is no. And that's the sense in which the GOP is a reactionary party. On social issues, at least, it simply looks at the world and reacts with a shriek of revulsion and a stubborn refusal to offer even a modestly productive response. It just says no — and it thinks saying no is the only admirable and honorable, and maybe even the only legitimate, response.

Because an admirable and honorable man refuses to compromise with error. He takes a noble stand and accepts his fate. Even if it brings defeat.