Breaking down the GOP candidates, what is crystal clear that they can be divided by the year they represent. There are the 2024 GOP candidates, and there are those at the cutting edge of 2005. Those include Chris Christie, though he’s not at the cutting edge of anything. He’s more of a blunt, gooey instrument. There are three 2024 candidates – Don, Ron, and Vivek. And there is everyone else, losers who somehow got it into their heads that this is still 2005. But it’s not 2005, and the two top contenders are both 2024 Republicans. Everyone else is a footnote, except Chris Christie, who is like four footnotes.
What does it mean to be a 2005 Republican? It means you have tried desperately to wish the last decade or so away. A 2005 Republican wants to focus on the stuff in the Jeb! comfort zone. How about tax cuts for big corporations? Lots of interventionist foreign policy stuff, and a certain inclination to use our military without a lot of deep thought. Also, there are always hack cliches about “empowerment” and “unity.”
What this obsolete mindset ignores are the issues that GOP voters are actually concerned about. The problem for the 2005 Republicans is that this is all icky culture war stuff, and when you talk about that all the people at the country club tend to shy away from you. It reeks of the rubes – they like their Jesus and not killing babies and not castrating kids, and all of that is so unpleasant. It’s one thing to be called a heartless capitalist or a warmonger, but a racist or transphobe? How uncomfortable is Thanksgiving dinner going to be when your former daughter Mike shows up with their special friend from Wellesley and screams that not using xick/xorp pronouns is actual violence?
So, the 2005ers want to turn back the clock to a time when these things were not discussed and were placed safely off-limits and excluded from the debate. Back then, among the establishment, there was no talk of illegal aliens, nothing about the PC that was spreading through colleges, and certainly no criticism of endless wars. But those were real issues and they festered as the GOP mandarins kept to their gentleman’s’ agreement to ignore them. Now we have an open border. Now wokeness is everywhere. Now we have this disaster in Ukraine that threatens to suck our troops into another quagmire. Great work, guys.
Trump won the nomination because he refused to honor the unspoken covenant to not talk about the things the establishment did not want talked about but that the people desperately wanted to talk about. Our people were suffering, and all they got was the GOP telling them that the numero uno priority had to be ensuring that the corporate tax rates went down a couple points. But when your job had been shipped to Szechuan by a guy who looked and sounded an awful lot like 2012 nominee Mitt Romney – hell, it could have been Mitt Romney– a bunch of milquetoast cliches was not going to cut it. Trump got that, and he won by honing in on the issues that the people cared about.
But now, a bunch of candidates seem to think that 2016 never happened. Tim Scott, a nice and amiable guy, wants to get past all this fussing and fighting and join together in a blah blah blah blah blah. 2005 is about the kind of sappy fake unity that gets Republicans rolled. 2024 is about winning. Tim shies away from unseemly brawls. The GOP base wants to have these brawls. America needs to have these brawls. Homilies about hugging will not cut it.
Nikki Haley is the same, but she’s also very annoying. She plays at being 2024, but her heart is firmly in 2005. She jumped on DeSantis for fighting Disney because she could not get her mind around defying a big corporation no matter how woke, but a key qualifier for knowing what time it is is understanding that the corporations are not our friends. They are leftist catspaws doing the Democrats’ dirty work. Give them tax cuts? We should be giving them antitrust suits and onerous regulations. It’d be fun to watch them go cry to their new Dem pals.
Asa Hutchinson could not take a stand against castrating kids because the Walmart Walton family he simps for will not have it. Mike Pence’s concern is fighting Russians as if it was still the Cold War he managed to avoid serving in. And Chris Christie is just a bloated mass of hatred for Trump and DeSantis and himself. 2005 is both his political orientation and BMI.
Love them or hate them, Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy represent 2024, with a caveat. They all address the key issues that motivate actual voters. They get that wokeness is impacting our lives – it’s not just some petty grievance but a response to an evil ideology that puts our jobs, our rights, and our kids’ futures at risk. The 2024ers take seriously what the voters take seriously, and they have been rewarded with success.
The caveat for Trump is that he’s not laser-focused on the 2024 platform like DeSantis and Ramaswamy are because he is wrapped up in 2020. His fixation on the near-past and the garbage that the establishment pulled in 2020 (and is still pulling) draws him off target. DeSantis and Ramaswamy do not have comparable baggage, and they are 100% in on the present. Whether Trump’s distraction, including his indictments, hurt him going forward is an open question, but they have not seemed to hurt him so far.
What is clear is that the Class of 2005 is getting no traction. The nominee is going to be Trump or DeSantis, and while Ramaswamy will not win he’s still getting attention. Now, there is a chance that one of the 2005ers will be the Veep. It’s obvious that Nikki and Tim are running for the second slot. It’s doubtful DeSantis would pick one of them – Iowa governor Kim Reynold, who is 2024, is a mortal lock – but Trump might. And that would be a mistake, but Trump is known for terrible personnel choices.
We may still see 2005 types in 2028 regardless of the outcome in 2024, assuming we have an election in 2028. Those 2005ers could be the impotent neutered opposition since all the 2024ers will be in gulags should we blow the 2024 general. But let’s assume America sort of continues functioning – the 2005 mindset will be done for, finished, kaput. The base will not have it, as much as the establishment yearns for it.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
My super-secret email address is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com
