The Romney GOP Rises From Its Grave

The Republican Party needs to figure out what it is again. What’s the point? What are we doing? Since the disaster of this year’s midterm elections, a bunch of extremely tedious Vichy Republicans have called for a return to principles, which is apparently just a set of negative references: Something something Putin something something.

But it’s never at all clear what they mean. Is it this?

Return to Republican principles, and make sure that companies have access to plenty of cheap imported non-citizen labor? Deporting illegal immigrants too hard is a violation of Republican principle?

This is just incoherent: Trump coddled enemies, which is bad; for example, he went to war against Iran, which is bad. And criticizing allies or pursuing our own national interest when we don’t share goals with other nations doesn’t amount to “abandoning” them, a point that would be too obvious to make in a discussion with anyone but Mitt Romney. It’s also shamefully stupid for any Republican to flatter the empty noise about “ICE brutality,” in the context of a leftist war on the normal enforcement of the laws governing immigration and naturalization that were passed by Congress. Do you believe in the rule of law, or do you not? If you reject the lawful removal of people who came here illegally, you don’t and can’t.

What is the moral and intellectual core of Romney’s argument, other than gormless preening? Romney spent six years in the Senate, by the way, 2019 to 2025, and you can go see for yourself what he did about those “mountainous deficits” he hates so much while he had the power to vote on federal spending. We must have had a balanced budget during the period when the nation was guided by Mitt Romney’s principles, right?

The search for principles by a reaction to a laundry list of events is a failure before it starts: We should get back to principles and stop deporting people so much like all that stuff in Minnesota. That’s … not it. Capitulation isn’t principle.

A serious search for principles requires a search for a healthy society and the reasonable means by which to achieve it. It starts with a foundational question about how America should work. What are good and bad ways to live? What’s a worthwhile life, what are healthy communities, and what role should government play in shaping them? What are the limits of that role?

Americans have done this before. The Republican Party was born in a series of discussions about actual principle, with an explicit effort to address foundational values. At Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854, and then at the first state convention in Jackson, Michigan that same year, the one held “Under the Oaks,” and then at Pittsburgh in 1856, at the first national convention, the people who created the party spoke about the way they wanted the country to work. They were firm, clear, strong, and serious.

The Free-Soilers of 1848, including Northern Democrats who would mostly go on to merge with the new Republican Party a few years later, diagnosed slavery as social degeneracy. Men lived by coercing labor from others, they argued, in a condition that echoed the behavior of European aristocrats with serfs. “Resolved,” they declared, “That in the judgment of this Convention, Congress has no more power to make a Slave than to make a King.” In a republic, there can only be citizens; differentiated identities and stratified power relationships were poison to a nation of independent free men.

That diagnosis of feudal degeneracy echoed, and men fought to clearly establish the conditions of life in a republic. You can find the resolutions of the 1854 Michigan state convention held “Under the Oaks” here. For example: “That in view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government and against the schemes of an aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased, we will cooperate and be known as Republicans until the contest be terminated.”

Declaring that slavery was “a great moral, social and political evil,” the Republican delegates of 1854 produced a long list of reasons. Some of them will surprise you, like its “tendency to relax the vigor of industry and enterprise inherited in the white man.” That was their principle, derived from religion: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” Ashley Wilkes may very well have been wonderfully elegant, Scarlett, but somebody show that man how to work a plow.

So they were Republicans, the very first Republicans said, because they refused to live in a country in which some men were citizens, but some men were slaves and some men were effectively aristocrats who lived by having others do their labor. In a republic, men would be independent of mind, morally upright, and fed by the work they did with their own hands. The founders of the Republican Party knew their politics because they knew who they were, and who they meant to be. They understood, and discussed explicitly among themselves, how they intended to live. Imagine this party turning into Nikki Haley complaining that business can’t get enough cheap foreign labor.

We need to get back “Under the Oaks.” If the Republican Party is going to mean anything at all in the 21st century, there has to be a floor: a set of minimum expectations that have to be met. We can debate what all of those expectations might be, but several seem to be immediately clear.

First, Democrats are the party of the technocracy, the social-managerial “new elite” born in the Progressive Era that draws status from its effort to direct society. They’re the Dr. Fauci types, and they’re the people who expect you to obey the Dr. Fauci types. In California, for example, 12-year-olds can get STD medications and abortions without parental knowledge or consent, a fact the state’s morally insane policymakers shout from the rooftops. Social workers and credentialed professionals direct the lives of children, and parents can stay out of it.

The Republican Party has to be the other thing, the party of personal autonomy for adults and and family-directed choices for children. It has to stand for the right to set the course of your own life, and for the life of your family. With the exception of child abuse, as transgender mutilation for minors obviously is, this can’t be negotiable.

Second, the Republican Party has to recognize a distinction between the role of the public and private sectors, government and private enterprise. Corporations are instruments of the state, but the intertwining of state and corporate interests has become obscene. Regulatory capture destroys the free markets that sit at the center of so much RINO rhetoric.

Among many other examples, a Republican Party that refuses to repeal Obamacare is meaningless and empty, tolerating the use of law and regulation to direct the substance of a corporate product that’s supported with government subsidies. Where’s the free market in that? A “free market” party that won’t take on the absurdly named Affordable Care Act doesn’t deserve the support of its voters. No repeal, no Republican Party.

And third, the Republican Party should stand as a guardian of a high-trust society, a country that can leave the front door unlocked and safely let children play unsupervised for a while. You can’t have a high-trust society with a flood of Somali-run Quality Learing Centers, or a sprawling homeless industrial complex of NGOs that keeps making money vanish to no apparent effect. The massive, obvious, and ubiquitous social services fraud in American cities is destroying the country. The Trump administration, led by Vice-President J.D. Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, is addressing the assault on social trust with clarity and forceful effort. They’re Republicans.

This means that Republicans who complain about deportations being too mean and depriving companies of cheap labor shouldn’t really be welcome in the party, but you already knew that.

An entire fake leadership class is poised to lead the Republican Party back into managed decline. If the party has a future, it will have to come from the leadership of Republican voters, who will have to know and say what kind of party they intend to have. Romney-style whining about Mean Donald Trump is noise, and we don’t have time for it.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.