The once readable Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal has fallen sadly out of touch with current politics. Her WSJ stuff is behind a paywall, but is quoted in The American Thinker, and frankly, she embarrasses herself. Here is how AT puts it:
Noonan declares in her lede paragraph that if "Trump Republicans" nominate the former president next year, "they will have ended the Republican Party." That there be no mistaking her comment as mere figurative remark, she declares in the following paragraph: "I mean it literally. The GOP will disappear as a party. Meaning the primary national vehicle of conservative thought and policy will disappear."
Where has she been? The Republican Party to which she makes reference "disappeared" in 2016 when it turned down Jeb Bush & Co. and instead nominated Donald Trump. And it isn't coming back in any form with which she will be comfortable.
You remember what Ronald Reagan said about how the Democrats went off and left him behind? The GOP has done that to Noonan, and she just can't get over it.
Trump may go the way of all flesh, at his age it's normal for this to happen. But the GOP has moved on to represent blue collar and rural American populists and Noonan's readers have become soccer mom Democrats. She might as well just "out" herself and join them.
This sort of shift is a very American thing to do. Time was every white in the South was a Democrat and every black was a Republican. Today those are exactly opposite. Remember the Reagan Democrats who became Republicans? A whole bunch more made the switch with Trump, while a bunch of former Republican reliables in the suburbs became Democrats.
In parliamentary systems it is shifting groups of splinter parties forming coalition governments, in our system it is shifting coalitions of interest groups sometimes changing parties. Might as well label it "the American way."
