Is The Republican party REALLY "dead" ?

With all giddiness , Patrick J. Buchanan said this week : "Bush Republicanism Is Dead and Gone" (1)>>How about the rest of the Republican party ? Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East. Trump seemed to scandalize the collective consciousness of professional Republicans with his Saturday debate performance in which he launched a full-throated assault on Bush Republicanism. Trump repudiated all three pillars of Republican globalism: namely, military adventurism, immigration multiculturalism, and trade globalism. Credibly , the Rolling Stone Magazine of 2008 prophetically stated :

"The failure of the administration of George W. Bush — and the accompanying crisis of the Republican Party — has caused a political meltdown of historic proportions. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Bush enjoyed the greatest popularity ever recorded for a modern American president. Re­publicans on Capitol Hill, under the iron rule of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, fattened their coffers through a fearsome operation overseen by corporate lobbyists and GOP hench­men that functioned more like an empire than an old-fashioned political machine. "Republican hegemony," the prominent conservative commentator Fred Barnes rejoiced in 2004, "is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."

From Reaganism to Trumpism?

With (2)>>Donald Trump almost certainly the Republican Party’s candidate for president, pundits in and out of the conservative movement are predicting devastating effects for the party.The combined might of the Republican Party’s best and brightest—16 of them at the outset—proved, in the end, helpless against Trump’s unorthodox, muscular appeal to the party’s voting base. With his sweeping, 16-point victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary, and the surrender of his major remaining rival, Ted Cruz, Trump was pronounced the presumptive nominee by the chair of the Republican National Committee. The primary was over—but for the GOP, the reckoning was only beginning. FOX News perfectly stated :

"On Sunday, Douthat wrote, “In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.”Yes, exactly. The Republican Party is dying because the GOP in DC has gone corporate and K Street. They attack any Republicans who dare hold them to their promises. They’ve gone to war against Heritage Action for America, Club For Growth, the Madison Project, etc. They’ve blackballed any political consultant who does work for outsiders."

What’s happening to the Republican Party is different in many ways, of course. But what we saw in the 2012 primary — the attempted rejection of Mitt Romney by populists desperate for an alternative — and what we’re seeing now in the polls are their worst nightmare . People just did not see it , they voted Obama back in , which created a paradox . If Romney would have won out the election in 2012 . We right now would be electing Romney for his second term . The Republican party would have faired much better in that alternative. A chief concern among congressional Republicans is whether Trump will be a strong enough candidate in the November election to ensure that the party maintains control of Congress. The Trump coalition, which appeals to both the hardest part of the hard right and to a lot of disaffected working-class economic moderates, seems to stem from the Tea Party . It's VARY odd that the GOP jumped to avoid Trump . (3)>>The Trump rhetoric is strangely mirroring the last years of the anti- Obama dialog which the GOP congress has spewed out . ”  Trumpism is the antithesis of Reagan-ism , the GOP follow " Reagan"  the myth.But is the Republican Party actually crumbling? Political parties are powered by coalitions that alternately work together and compete for dominance, and no party is inherently stable. There can also be gradual shifts, however, that fundamentally reshape political parties and the coalitions that constitute them. Trump has certainly shaken up the GOP—whether the rift in the party is beyond repair remains to be seen.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 (1)>>How about the rest of the Republican party ? At first glance, the collapse of the Republican Party seems rapid and unex­pected. When viewed within the larger context of American history, however, the party's breakdown looks familiar, even predictable. As in earlier party crackups — 1854,1932,1968 — the demise has involved not a single, sudden explo­sion but a gradual unraveling followed by a sharp and rapid deterioration amid major national calamities. If Bush and the Republican majority in Congress ac­celerated the demise of Ronald Reagan's political era with their assault on tradi­tional American values and institutions — including the rule of law itself — it is a decline that began two decades ago. (2)>>Donald Trump . Trump's numbers in national polls when matched up against Hillary-are SO CLOSE . We could have a landslide unless there is a major get out the vote movement for the GOP- something they do horribly.Trump is disqualified for the presidency by his erratic temperament, his ignorance about public affairs and his scary sympathy for authoritarianism.  Like "Crooked Hillary" , Trump has a few skeletons in his chest  . Donald Trump "seems terrified to release his taxes" because they may reveal his true net worth, his donations to liberal causes, or something even seedier, Sen. Ted Cruz suggested on Meet the Press. It’s important to note that Trump hasn’t been charged with any illegal activity, and it’s reasonable to argue that he was unaware or even a victim in some cases. But Cruz has a point that the mogul has been linked to the mob for decades. Trump was first tied to the mafia in the 1980s, when a $7.8 million subcontract for Trump Plaza was awarded to S&A Concrete, according to Fortune. The company, as Cruz correctly says, was partially owned by Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family.Trump himself acknowledged as much in a December 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal, admitting that S&A Concrete was "supposedly associated with the mob."(3)>>The Trump rhetoric. Donald Trump’s policy agenda may or may not represent a wholesale rejection of latter-day Republican orthodoxy. But what he’s selling, purloined slogan and all, is the same old Reaganite promise of a Golden Age restored. It’s as empty now as it was four decades ago.