The establishment is right about one thing, however. The party they thought they owned is dead, as dead as the Whigs in 1856, and a new Republican Party is beginning to emerge, one shaped by two crises that the establishment had ignored: income immobility and corruption. Compared to other First World countries, America’s rankings on both issues are mediocre at best, and this represents a betrayal of the promise of America.
Trump’s Republican Party is not so much a new party, however, as a restoration of the GOP’s original principles. At its founding, nothing was more central to the party’s vision than economic mobility, as exemplified by Lincoln’s rise from hardscrabble poverty and a single year of schooling. Read his 1859 speech at the Wisconsin Agricultural Fair or his July 4, 1861 address to Congress, and what you’ll find is a belief that one’s lot in life should not be fixed, and everyone should be permitted to ascend from the lowest stations in life, as he had himself had done. The Civil War, he said, was essentially a struggle “to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”
That’s something the Republican establishment has forgotten. Its members deny that we’re immobile; or if we are, they blame it on drug-abusing workers who as a class deserve to die out; or they say it can’t be helped, that it’s caused by the move to a high-tech world. But other, more mobile countries aren’t living in the Stone Age, and most Americans understand that we’ve become immobile. When surveyed, they report that they don’t think their children will be as well-off as they are. That’s new, and it’s transforming our politics.
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