Whatever happened to Romney Republicans?

I’ve got some bad news for you on Geert Wilders.
After Mark Rutte stepped down as Prime Minister and leader of the mainstream conservatives in order to fulfill his dream of sucking up to Trump as secretary general of NATO, his successor decided to campaign on being mean to asylum seekers and other immigrants.

Wilders party got to be the largest in the election because voters who were into being mean etc. Preferred the real deal over Ersatz.

One year later, the new government (with Wilders party as the largest coalition partner) has crashed, delivering nothing.

Unfortunately, it seems that Rutte’s successor is once again trying to out-culture warrior Wilders, this time by dunking on pro-Palestine protesters and trying to outflank the (pro-greater Israel) Wilders.

Chances are Wilders will only lose a few seats. The mainstream conservatives are really, really bad at politics when they have to punch to the right in order to win.

To top it off with a Badenoch-like twist, Rutte’s successor is herself an asylum seeker. Her family are Kurds who came to the Netherlands from Turkey when she was 6 or 7.

It’s all very depressing.

I don’t understand why people keep assuming right-wingers are low information or uneducated voters. Romney and his voters have always been like Trump. They just thought it was gauche, or they had felt comfortable saying what they really believed and valued. These people are adults who are choosing who to be. There is the impression conservatives are uneducated and marginalized when their base has been local gentry, upper classes and just people of all races, education, income who are reactionary. In the US the conservative leadership who portray themselves as know nothings are all highly educated with post graduate degrees from the ivies. I think over the past 30 years, at least, there’s been so much discussion about understanding why people turn conservative or fascist. Republicans voted for a republican and a dog bites a man.

There is not too much we on the left can do about this, except to encourage centre-right supporters to punish conservative parties when they line up with fascists. Any other suggestions are welcome.

One thing that centre left parties can do is to continue to attack the far Right – and specifically to attack it from the left. This, admittedly, is a high-risk strategy: while it may drive votes away from the far Right, it is likely to drive them into the arms of the centre-right, who will also be making hay out of the centre-left’s revelation of its “radical”, “sectarian” nature. The alternative, however, is to turn a blind eye to the far Right, in the hope of profiting from the inroads it makes into the centre-right’s voter coalition, and we have seen how that ends.

We have seen how that ends, in fact, quite recently. During the July 2024 election campaign, the current British Labour Party leadership limited its attacks on Reform UK to a few joking or dismissive remarks,, concentrating its fire on the Conservatives. To make matters worse, Labour’s attacks on the Conservatives were generally coached either in terms of “competence” and “delivery” or in terms of the Conservatives’ own politics – which is to say, they were attacks from the right.

In the short term this strategy amply paid off: rather than draining back to the Conservative Party once the election had been called, Reform UK’s support grew from 11% to 14% during the campaign, ending by splitting the broad right vote so thoroughly that Labour won a landslide majority on little more than a third of votes cast. Sadly history – even psephological history – doesn’t stop the day after an election: over the next year support for Reform UK went right on growing, peaking at 30%. Support for the Conservatives was flatlining at 23% through the election campaign, and it’s been flatlining ever since.

The OP is about the centre-right, not the centre-left, but I think it’s important to remember that the left and right poles of mainstream politics support each other, and to an extent define, even constitute each other. If the centre-left, for whatever reason, legitimates the far Right – even for purely opportunistic reasons – that will have knock-on effects on the centre-right and the whole political spectrum. So, guys, don’t do that, OK?

But what can the Left – those leftists who aren’t running a major political party – do about it? The trouble is, there is a substantial current within the centre-Left which defines itself primarily against the Left (or, as they see it, the ‘extreme Left’, ‘the Trots’). Although its political programme is vague and undefined, their position is just as dogmatically ideological as any Leftist’s: their answer to any challenge or novel situation is for the party to move Right – and if it doesn’t work, that just shows that the party needs to try harder and move further Right. I don’t know about Australian or US politics (I’ve never been entirely sure what the Democratic Party is, outside an election year), but I do know that that current is in charge of the British Labour Party at the moment, meaning that there’s little hope of the leadership drawing any real lessons from its recent experience. What can the Left do? I’m not sure, but a first step is to see the situation clearly.

Remember Romney’s comment about the 47% takers? The Romney Republicans never viewed anyone who’s not wealthy as worthy of any assistance and if you look at OBBBB. you see the natural successor of Romney’s position.

Even the rural voters who support Trump are often pretty well off.

A lot of Trump’s support is based on pure greed, without any regard for even the moderate proximate future.

It seems clear that in most, if not all, cases, the fascist Right have been using immigration and xenophobia as the thin edge of the wedge, and then expanding from there. Global warming (more palatably referred to as ‘climate change’) is going to make that far easier and more widespread as the equatorial zones become increasingly uninhabitable and masses of humanity try to move outward (mostly northward, given the distribution of landmass on the planet). When that happens, expect fascism to expand to just about everywhere, as northern populations resort to increasingly lethal means to deny entry to refugees.

It really is pretty much over, I think.

@4
+1
In her own inimitable style, I think nastywoman has pretty well nailed it.

” they have come to hate ‘the woke’ even more – and just don’t take that too seriously or as least not as seriously as Trump who actually FIRST – or always wanted to run as a Democrat – and only after the Democrats rejected him for being blackballed by every serious golf club – and a very funny and GREAT US President made a lot of fun of him (-‘and that’s what keeps me up at night’)”

Its revisionist history at this point, but the republicans wasted the potential of a Romney candidacy by running him in 2008 (hey, lets run a private equity robber barron in the teeth of the global financial crisis, that will surely work). Because of that failure, the party was ripe for a big step-right which as it turned out resulted in Trump I.

The well documented failure of the Democrats to not force Biden to step down and hold a proper primary that would have produced a candidate named “anyone not Harris or Biden” was what produced Trump II….and so here we are.

In Denmark it seems the operation by the Social Democrats to out-xenophobe the xenophobic right has succeeded, at least in political and power seizing/keeping terms.

PM Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats leads her second government since first appointed in 2019, and the right side (nominally) of the political spectrum is in severe disarray having been splintered into 6-7-8 parties none of which is claiming more than 10% of the vote.

The previously highly powerful right-populist DPP in particular has been shattered into a shadow of its former self. This is largely achieved by appropriating its policies wholesale though. But it looks to me Starmer is attempting something similar, only less successfully. Maybe less credibly?

engels 8:

“Most everyone other than apologists and professional contrarians would agree at this point that President Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his whims are policy and his will is law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/opinion/trump-miller-immigration-ice.html

“Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/opinion/trump-los-angeles-ice-strongman.html

“More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html

Why is it so hard to understand that several things can be true at the same time: Trump can be a fascist (Bouie talks of autocracy and tyranny; whether he would endorse the label fascism I don’t know but the NYT certainly wouldn’t allow it printed) and also share some of the economic goals of the traditional Right; Trump can be an unprecedented constitutional crisis and also draw on ur-American ideological and political traditions. These are not mutually exclusive. And similar things can be said about Hitler and Mussolini. Only the historically illiterate can deny this.

My family moved from Saskatchewan to Houston in 1959, where we encountered, among other things, segregated bathrooms, and the infinite variety of racial slurs that were common back then.

Since then, I’ve watched voters in the US elect Nixon a second time, Reagan a second time, Bush II a second time, and Trump a second time, not to mention last Democratic president wax nostalgic about his segregationist pals in the Senate, and the Democratic presidential candidate from the election before talk about “superpredators,” in support of a frankly racist and stupid crime bill.

I’m going to go with this one: “Or has he simply allowed them to reveal themselves (or at least their worst selves) as the racists and fascists they always were?”

I think expecting center right folk in the US to exert themselves to punish fascism and racism is delusional. They haven’t done it yet.

I’m with Engels at 10, assuming we can do anything more than hunker down and try to protect people more vulnerable than we are at the moment.

Face It. Trump Is a Normie Republican

Of course, there are two possible interpretations here: a) Trump is a normie Republican, and therefore is not an extremist, or b) Trump is a normie Republican, and therefore is an extremist – faites ce que vous voulez..

The ironclad determination of political analysts of america to pretend the iraq war didn’t exist continues. romney was a brutal white supremacist fascist just as much as trump – he had to be in order to be in the republican party in 2008 and take the position that the iraq war was right, was just about to succeed wildly, the wmds were about to be discovered, and after a quick second invasion, this time of iran, the american flag was about to be flown over the whole middle east (skipping of course our pro-democracy saudi royal family pals and their bonesaws of course.) enough of america had turned away from the roaring, screaming, open hatred of arabs that “barack HUSSEIN obama” could win. I guess the downside of his winning is it allowed analysts to pretend the roaring, shrieking constituency for open, vicious racism didn’t exist for a few years. but i was there. i remember.

Over the last decade most congressional Republicans inclined to oppose Trump in any way have effectively been driven out of the party and some of them have had impeccable wingnut credentials, like Thom Tillis of North Carolina who has just announced he will not run for re-election.

@11: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is said to have had something of an epiphany on her deathbed as to the damage she had done by failing to resign strategically when it was still possible, but Biden’s lack of self-awareness will allow him to go to his grave thinking the party done him wrong, instead of acting too late.

ETB @19: “Of course there are two possible interpretations here”

Indeed. At the same time, the op-ed itself seems clear about which side Bouie himself lands on:

Yes, you can attribute some of the worst of this administration to the specific authoritarian vision of Trump and his allies. But a good deal of what we have seen — and what we will see — is simply what happens when you elect a Republican to the White House.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and point out that Romney did not campaign on “dark-skinned immigrants are eating white Americans’ dogs and cats” when he ran against Obama in 2012. If people around here think there’s no difference between the dog whistle racism of pre-Trump Republicans and a campaign consisting of nothing other than wall to wall fascist propaganda right up to the promise of systematic ethnic cleansing, then I’m gonna have to disagree. Because, you know, history. Fascist rhetoric always leads to fascist violence. The project of ethnic cleansing is being realized right now by a lawless fascist paramilitary that has just been given a budget exceeding that of most armies. I do think that matters.

And if you think pointing out the above lets the pre-Trump Republicans who made Trump possible off the hook, then again I’m gonna have to disagree.

Long Island is a slightly non-representative suburb to be focusing on. Look at the shifts in vote over the past three presidential cycles: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/presidential-election-2024-red-shift.html

Most places shifted right in 2024, but the New York City area more so than anywhere else.(Notably, the Atlanta and Charlotte suburbs actually shifted left in 2024, as did a few places in the Dallas suburbs.) In 2020, most places shifted left, but New York and its suburbs were one of the few right-shifting areas (along with most of Ohio, Arkansas, Iowa, Mormon country, and the Rio Grande valley). In 2016, most places also shifted right, but suburban Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia all shifted left, as did most of California – and interestingly, the Connecticut suburbs of New York.

Comparig why Long Island has been shifting right in all three elections, while the Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Charlotte suburbs (as well as the Connecticut suburbs of New York!) have been shifting left during the same period, is going to be much more interesting than just treating Long Island as though it is representative of all of the shifts nationwide.

“There is not too much we on the left can do about this, except to encourage centre-right supporters to punish conservative parties when they line up with fascists. Any other suggestions are welcome.”

If I understand correctly, in may countries now there is a bit of a generation gap in politics where the older voters are more attached to the established parties and kind of the ‘normal’ way of doing things. The younger voters, who are very distrustful of politics are moving towards newer parties like the greens or liberals or also the far right. As a result, party systems are changing in a number of places.

I think the left can try to attract the more distrustful voters. I don’t think the group of distrustful voters is monolithic, some actually do lean far right and would be hard to convince, but some lean in other directions. I think there is a potential future in trying to engage these people and get them more involved in democracy. The far right dominates attention right now because it is flashy and because no one else seems to have a particular vision of the future. But maybe a left wing that focuses more on democracy and what citizen participation in governance could mean would be a fresh take. There are so many problems/issues that the far right doesn’t have a clue about and making any of those salient could take some wind from their sails.

But I’m also a bit clueless too.

Whatever happened to Romney Republicans? Have they changed, or just become their worst selves?

Being in the arguably fortunate position of observing the ongoing tire-fire from a distance, I wouldn’t like to say.

However, if I may be so bold as to venture an opinion on the UK: our ruling class has always being filled with a good number of people who comfortable with systems of great oppression and exploitation, providing it keeps them in comfort and Nice Things. What has largely changed, I think, are the boundaries of acceptable cruelty without plausible deniability have expanded – and while not exactly a shock (once one has accepted that certain people are undeserving of a place to live, medicine to survive, or even food to eat, then what else might one accept as being privileges to be denied to the unworthy?) I doubt it has been spontaneous. Were I to hazard a guess, it would be that this has been largely a result of a mixture of (a) the centre to right wing ecosphere continually pushing a reactionary agenda, or at least opposing non-reactionary agendas; (b) the ruling class circling the wagons (one of the few unforgivable sins an Important Person can commit is inconveniencing their class, which is punished both quickly and mercilessly); (c) the Important People cooking their brains on social media – for all the trees which have died to further questions of Are The Kids Addicted To Their Medias, I think whatever problems – if any – cause by teenagers spending time on Twitter pale into insignificance to those cause by what happens when the ruling class have to interact with the hoi polio in a forum where they can’t control the narrative (the speed of descent into radicalisation which occurs when one of the pig people talks back to their betters has to be seen to be believed); (d) the media engaging in no-hold-barred non-stop scream fest the second anyone proposes a policy which isn’t either stomping on underclass or shovelling wealth into the trousers of the elite; and (e) that as we now enter the stage of capitalism which involves the snake eating its tail, crackdowns and tightening the screws are the only real ways forward which can still maintain (at least for a little while longer) the status quo – and so it is a case of masks and gloves off, time to turn the heat up on the class war. And even the people who don’t actively support this general direction will tend to go along with it – after all, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’.

While the US is not the UK, it may be that there are some parallels to draw?

Long Island (that is, the heart of the place, the “Lawn Guyland” part of Long Island) is a special case. As any Manhattanite can tell you, Long Islanders are not “like most New Yorkers”. Both Trumps, Fred and Donald were “from” out there on the Island, in the deepest sense of the term. Long Island will forever remain his spiritual home, even in Palm Beach, and that was reason enough for the vote.

And, if you were to believe Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind …

… then there might be something wrong with you.

“Do you expect Dilan Ye?ilgöz to lead the government formed after the election in October? Which parties do you expect to make up that government?”

Ye?ilgöz is bashing the center-left as “too left” (which it is not). She’s not bashing Wilders but has refused to enter into another coalition with Wilders.

I expect it to be near impossible to form a new government after the next elections. The easy way (center-left + center + center-right) is now being undermined by Ye?ilgöz. The center parties (left-liberals and christian-democrats) won’t do business with the looney right (either Wilders or one of the others).

It’s going to be a mess.

Ropber 30: “It might be worth considering the extent to which far-right media groups and their billionaire owners drive elite conversations in Europe – certainly in Germany and France, the countries with which I’m most familiar. I get the sense that to varying degrees, media and political elites in these countries either welcome Trump II as an inspiration for future political action”

Exactly. A large fraction of the elites are on board with and even admire Trump. The media discourse often focuses on low income people voting for Trump, which is backward. A much larger fraction of the upper than of the lower class are supporting fascism, both in US and Europe, and they matter more because they control the media and other levers of power.

Another observation: Especially the left wing discourse seems to oscillate between “Trumpism is a break with neoliberalism” and “Trumpism is just ordinary Republican/rightwing politics”. We have seen enough of this here on CT. Which is it, friends? It seems to me both of these wrong takes are just a way to avoid having to acknowledge that yes, it is fascism.

Shoutout to LFC 36.

Looking a few more decades ahead, instead of only to the next election: what NomadUK wrote at 9. I really don’t see any other outcome now given billionaire ownership of the media and the absence of a left with any degree of mass basis and vision for the future.