| TNR’s editorial director introduces our March issue: Dear Reader, In the wake of the inauguration, perhaps the most unnerving prospect for jubilant Democrats is that banishing Trump doesn’t necessarily banish Trumpism. How will the Republican Party—upended by the former president’s flamboyant populism, his enduring appeal among low-income voters, his exuberant disregard for norms and procedures—sort and reassemble itself over the next four years? At the end of Biden’s first term, what fresh hells await us? In the new issue of The New Republic, Christopher Caldwell considers how “the party of upper-middle-class traditions and inclinations” will contend with the less well-off—that struggling portion of the country that, in 2016, Republicans were surprised to win in large numbers.
What will Republicans do for the working class? A post-Trump GOP, Caldwell argues, must figure out how to speak to the interests of the poor, but only a few politicians—Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas—have devoted much “systematic thought” to the question. Still, in Caldwell’s analysis, the efforts of these Republicans to question the ascent of tech (as Hawley has), to speak plainly and powerfully to the desire for well-paying jobs with decent retirements in stable communities (as Rubio has), and to work to bring manufacturing back to the United States (as Cotton has), may well transform the party. Yet reading Caldwell, I was struck most not by his trenchant observations about the GOP but by his implication that perhaps the key determinant of its future is less what that party does or who it becomes than what the Democrats do, who they become. Will Democrats mint themselves the party of the rich, “the party of education and prestige,” the party of the spectacularly wealthy and headstrong tech sector? At the end of the day, Caldwell suggests, Republicans may not have to contort themselves excessively to align with the working class: “Perhaps they will merely follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.” The possibility should be at once chastening and motivating. Do Democratic politicians work for Silicon Valley and Wall Street, which fund them? Or will they work for the poor and working classes, who need them? In “How the Democrats Can Create a Majoritarian Coalition,” Michael Kazin has something of an answer, arguing that the Democratic Party must unite its left and centrist wings around a simple program of economic justice or resign itself to a “spiritless future.” Read Kazin and Caldwell in the March print issue of The New Republic, where you will also find an abundance of other smart and unsettling stories: Melissa Gira Grant on QAnon and the theology of right-wing rebellion, Alexander Zaitchik on the fate of “long-haul” Covid-19 sufferers, James Robins on how the study of history can traumatize historians, and much more. —Emily Cooke, editorial director |
