What assassinations say about our politics
Acts of violence often either create or expose a vacuum in a political party or movement.
Political assassinations often either create or expose a vacuum in a political party or movement; the tragic death of Charlie Kirk is no exception. With President Trump in a second and constitutionally final term in office, the question of who the most likely successor is to lead the Republican Party and/or the MAGA movement is not just an academic one. Kirk certainly would have had as much sway as anyone in a post-Trump future.
There is no evidence that the Republican Party will return to what it was before Donald Trump rode the gold escalator to first announce his presidential candidacy 3,744 days ago. Trump owns the Grand Old Party just as much as he owns that Trump Tower building. The current Republican Party bears no resemblance to the one that nominated and helped elect his five post-World War II GOP predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and both George Bushes, as well as nominating Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
It seems that the closest thing to a core value of this new and decidedly populist version of the GOP is the belief that the average Joe or Jane possesses more wisdom and knowledge than any expert on any subject, the school of hard knocks is preferable to any degree from any Ivy League or state university, and that the term “liberal arts education” is an oxymoron. The irony, of course, is that a billionaire Ivy League graduate from New York City is the architect or, at least, the chief builder of that movement.
There has been a partisan realignment—not one that puts either party in a dominant position, but one that has significantly changed the composition and temperament of each party. The GOP now skews downscale and Democrats more elite. The old conventional wisdom of Democrats being the party of the working men and women and Republicans being the party of the country clubs is now an outdated anachronism.
In the late 1960s, David Nolan, a libertarian activist frustrated by the traditional view of politics on a single, horizontal, liberal-to-conservative spectrum, conceived the Nolan Chart. It depicts a square turned on one corner. The corner on the left represents liberalism, the one on the right conservatism, the top represents Libertarians, and the one at the bottom authoritarians. A much smaller square in the middle represents centrists. The idea was that one axis represented personal freedom, while the other depicted economic freedom. Another way to view it is a compass, with the four cardinal directions of North, East, South, and West replaced by Libertarian, Conservative, Authoritarian, and Liberal.
It is an intriguing perspective, but it doesn’t easily lend itself to our current Trump blend of populism and grievance politics.
This last week has been difficult for anyone remotely connected to electoral politics. It’s difficult to find anything resembling a silver lining, other than, for some of us, the sentiments of Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. Watching him over the last few days has been refreshing and a bit nostalgic, reminiscent of a time before talk radio, cable news, and social media coarsened political discourse.
Some might say that there is an opening for a candidate with a message like Cox’s, but if there is, it certainly would not be in either party’s primary. Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz’s comment on X that Cox “could win all the electoral votes with this message in 28" certainly wouldn’t boost him in a GOP primary. Personally, I have long been resigned to the belief that any politician whom I really liked and thought worthy of being president could never win a party nomination on either side.
When we had two broad-based political parties, one center-left and the other center-right, each was ideologically and geographically diverse, with considerable overlap between the two. Each had internally moderating influences that kept words, actions, and policies from straying too far into a ditch on the left or the right. Few on either side viewed the opposite party or ideology as an existential threat to the country or to democracy. That was also, not coincidentally, when the United States was widely considered to have arguably the most stable democracy in the world. That thought is laughable today.
Both parties have huge problems; those facing the self-doubting Democrats these days are more obvious and immediate, but Republicans have their own difficulties that, in the long run, are just as challenging. Chief among them: The party now revolves around a single person who functions like a magnet, a force of attraction to some but repulsion to others.
For Republicans, as 2028 gets closer, the question will be who has a personality type that could effectively replace Trump’s. While Vice President J.D. Vance certainly seems to have a leg up on Secretary of State Marco Rubio in terms of resonating with the majority of those in MAGA, neither seems to be interchangeable with Trump, nor does anyone else. That’s what can happen when a party becomes dominated by a single person.
In a painful closing of a circle, Tuesday is the special election in District 34B of the Minnesota state House of Representatives to fill the vacancy created by the last major U.S. political assassination, that of Melissa Hortman, who was the Democratic leader in that state’s House before she, her husband, and their golden retriever were gunned down on their doorstep on June 14. Her death took the Minnesota House from an even split of 67 to 67 to a one-seat advantage for the GOP. The district votes strongly Democratic, making it more likely that the Minnesota House will go back to 67 to 67, presumably going back to the power-sharing agreement in place before her death.