The Republican Party Isn’t Cracking Up. It’s Getting Even Stronger.

By Jeet Heer,

Roy Moore and other Bannonite extremists won’t doom the GOP.

As The New York Times reports, “Republicans are confronting an insurrection on the right that is angry enough to imperil their grip on Congress, and senior party strategists have concluded that the conservative base now loathes its leaders in Washington the same way it detested President Barack Obama.”

All this talk of insurrection within the GOP is leading some pundits to predict the demise of the Republican Party. Conservative radio host Charlie Sykes worried that, per the title of his recent Time column, “Roy Moore signals the end of the Republican Party.” The GOP “is locked in an endless feedback loop as it tries with diminishing success to placate its most bombastic voices,” Sykes wrote. “The most obvious consequence is their inability (so far) to legislate.

These predictions of Republican doom have a certain superficial plausibility. It’s hard to imagine how the GOP can remain a viable national party if it embraces figures like Moore even as the American public becomes much more socially liberal. While Moore might win in red-state redoubts like Alabama, surely his virulent homophobia will make the GOP as a whole toxic in most of America? Such speculation make sense in theory, but isn’t borne out by recent political experience. The Republican Party isn’t cracking up under the stress of increased extremism; in fact, it seems to be getting only stronger.

The Tea Party helped the Republicans capture the House of Representatives. GOP extremism didn’t stop the party from winning the Senate in 2014. And Trump ran the most openly racist national campaign in decades, but won a commanding electoral college victory. If the Republican Party is on the verge of a crack-up, it’s a very strange one indeed that sees them gaining a stranglehold on all three branches of government.

There are very good reasons to suspect that the Republican Party will survive whatever problems the rise of Moore-style extremism will create. Ever since the North defeated the South in the Civil War, America’s two-party system, fostered by a first-past-the-post voting system and the need to build electoral coalitions, has been remarkably stable. Despite the efforts of a myriad of third parties, most American voters think in binary terms, as if the only option is Republicans or Democrats. This means that voters are quick to look past flaws and keep voting for their side: The Republican Party has survived the Great Depression, Watergate, the Iraq war and the Great Recession of 2008 because, at the end of the day, they have enough voters who prefer even a flawed GOP to the Democrats.

What’s striking is that this so-called war between the establishment and the populists always ends in the same way: with the establishment absorbing elements of the populist agenda to win elections. Seen in this light, these so-called insurgencies or civil wars never really hurt the Republican Party. Rather, they give it more energy by riling up the base. The gamble that Bannon is making is that religious extremism will create a more powerful GOP. Alas, there’s no reason to think Bannon is wrong.

More From New Republic: