The GOP is on its deathbed [View all]

[n2doc]

Lawrence Martin
LAWRENCE MARTIN
WASHINGTON
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL


You can get a lot of takers in this town for the proposition that the Republican Party is in its death throes, that the radical outliers have taken over, that it will go the way of Canada's old Progressive Conservatives.

This will be Donald Trump's big legacy piece; crushing the establishment Republicans, finishing the process he began in the Republican primaries. There is a lot of sentiment supporting the notion that the Grand Old Party has had its day, that it is time American conservatives moved on. But moving on in the hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant, protectionist manner of a Mr. Trump is a course Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan could scarcely have imagined.

Trump is isolating himself from important power centres with his approach to governing

We should recall that few saw the demise of the old Canadian Tories coming. Only nine years before their collapse in 1993, that party won 211 seats, the most in Canadian history. But populist and nationalist movements at the provincial level took hold. The populism fomented in the West, chiefly Alberta, under the Reform Party banner while nationalism soared in the province of Quebec with the Bloc Quebecois. Those insurgent forces captured 52 and 54 seats respectively in the 1993 election while the Progressive Conservatives fell a staggering 209 seats short of their 1984 tally.

The forces that took down Canada's grand old party are arguably stronger today in the United States. There's already been a dress rehearsal here, coming in the form of Tea Party insurgency in the GOP beginning in 2009.

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