I want to talk about three separate things that to me aren’t separate.
We are in a crisis on the southern border. It is a disaster. El Paso, Texas, is the latest city to be overwhelmed. This Monday, from the New York Times: “After nightfall on Sunday, hundreds of migrants stepped across the Rio Grande . . . a caravan of people mainly from Nicaragua whose crossing was among the largest in recent years along the West Texas border.” More than 50,000 illegal immigrants from Central and South America came in October alone. Some are sent to detention centers or shelters for a short time; most are released to disappear into America. In Del Rio, Texas, last year, 9,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, camped under a bridge. Rural counties are declaring a “local state of disaster.”
It’s all so dangerous. The fentanyl the drug cartels are bringing over the border is killing more Americans each year than we lost in Vietnam. Anyone can cross. In the year ending Sept. 30, Border Patrol has stopped 98 people on the southern border who were on the U.S. terrorist watch list. How many were missed?
We’re on a holiday from history again.
The Democratic Party is committed to doing nothing. The party made its position clear in the 2020 presidential primaries, when candidates ignored border security and debated only who would guarantee broader social services for migrants. The Biden administration has shown energy in only one area, changing the subject.
The Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed to stopping what’s happening at the border, but do they mean it? Are they serious? If they were they’d be trying to win support in America for broad, coherent action, right?
Here we jump to Manhattan, to the already famous Saturday night dinner of the New York Young Republican Club. Gowns, tuxedos, important national speakers, a special night. Donald Trump Jr. said Republicans must finally investigate Hunter Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the prime speaking spot, received the club’s Richard M. Nixon Award, “given to a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism.” She spoke of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol: “I want to tell you something, if Steven Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention we would’ve been armed.” She took other strange turns—“defund the FBI,” Kamala Harris dresses in boring colors. Not a “single penny” should go to “a country called Ukraine whose borders are far away and most of you couldn’t find it on a map.” She charged, “You can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target nowadays.” I’ve never noticed that at Target. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.
My point isn’t that she’s an idiot, though that appears to be true—she once called Hitler’s secret police “the gazpacho”—or that the audience, which laughed and applauded, were idiots. It is that you don’t talk like this and applaud if you are trying to win anyone over to your side. And if you are serious about making America better, you try to win people over to your side.
If the speakers at that dinner were even a little sincere about controlling the border, they wouldn’t be swanning about or beating their chests like chimps but reaching out to those who share their alarm but aren’t Trumpist. Instead, they stick with their own club, one that, at least in this instance, involves comparative wealth, a certain conception of glamour, and an insider feel. They seem to proceed as if they are all on the winning side, the side of what they all call the base. But they haven’t won a big election since 2016.
There is one way in which they very much are winners—they changed the policies and attitudes of a great party, making it more populist in domestic and foreign affairs. This was a huge win!
But they couldn’t absorb it intellectually or consolidate it politically. If you are a Trump candidate, you would do this by showing voters—not only Republicans but Democrats, independents, centrists, moderates—that a vote for you isn’t a concession that they have grown radical or extreme or drawn to peripheral issues. No, a vote for you is a vote for a regular normal person of intelligence and good faith. A vote for you is a vote to address the issues that bedevil us, in a truthful and constructive way. A vote for you is a reassertion of a preference for normality.
The Trump wing of the party can’t seem to do that. Maybe because they don’t want to win, really; they just want to feel good and have parties and say outrageous things and feel like truer Americans.
And my third item, which the New York dinner left me thinking about. It has to do with the old Republican Party of New York. I saw that party up close in the early 1990s. I would go to events at its clubs, sign books, sometimes speak. I did this because I felt sympathy for them and a tug of old loyalty. In one club the demographic skewed older and female. The women wore hats and they knew Rocky and Happy and they’d been friends with Jack Javits, and time had passed them by. They were 1960s moderate liberals who had been replaced and supplanted by people like me—Reaganites, Kempites.
Someone’s always being replaced and supplanted in politics, but those old ladies in hats—in their time they had shown some guts, swimming against the tide, not becoming Democrats in a Democratic city, an increasingly left-wing city, but staying true to their basic principles. And you have to be human, even in politics, and show respect. The Trump forces took over by about 2017 and they were brutal in their triumph—graceless, rubbing their foes’ faces in it. Some of the old ladies joined them. Some just disappeared into the city. It was all very French Revolution, a thousand Marats and Dantons overwhelming 10,000 weak and ridiculous aristos. It was also Manhattan losing to the forces of the outer boroughs and the suburbs—a whole rising wave of scrappy, comparatively less sophisticated voters who felt they’d been ignored (they had) and excluded (they had) and would now take over (they did).
But unlike those old ladies in hats, they have no idea what is important to independents, moderates, centrists and non-Republicans, and no idea how to talk to them. So they can’t win a thing statewide.
And they don’t seem to care. Because they have great parties and they’re right and they’re the real people, not big phonies in hats.
The old ladies in hats were practical. Their entire project was driven by the simple insight that politics is a game of addition. You have to reach out and persuade. They didn’t always know how to reach out; they were awkward in 10 different ways; but they knew reaching out was necessary. They weren’t dizzy and glamorous, they had dignity and were serious. And when they lost their fights within the party, they didn’t bolt, they stayed and joined the younger conservatives.
They didn’t seem it, but they were tough, and they knew how to win. Those who’ve replaced them, much less so.