it would do well to learn from Luther’s inability to control the revolution he somewhat unwittingly inspired.
.. The Lutherist reformers spurred the bloody peasant revolts; Burkean liberals yielded to radical revolutionaries; Girondins yielded to the Jacobins until in turn the Jacobins ate their own; the Mensheviks yielded to Bolsheviks and catalyzed the deaths of nearly 100 million people. And here on the American right, the Bannonites see our current “establishment” and vow to “burn it down,” without having any real idea how or what to build on the embers.
.. Luther originally posted his theses while expecting his mission to be within a long and honorable tradition of reform within the existing (Catholic) church.
.. Before Luther died, the church’s own Council of Trent had begun its deliberations, which in effect led to acknowledgment that Luther had been right about the abuse of indulgences and other clerical corruptions.
And 500 years later, what became his signature theological doctrine, “justification by faith,” was largely (if with slightly different emphases) affirmed by the Catholic Church itself.
.. (Luther, for example, believed that while the Eucharistic bread and wine did not physically change into the body and blood of Christ, it still contained, spiritually and fully, Christ’s “real presence.” Karlstadt went farther, saying that the Eucharist was merely symbolic.)
.. When well over 100,000 peasants died in a fruitless quest for greater rights, Luther was aghast at what he had wrought (while strongly denying that he was the instigator).
.. For the last 30 years of his life, the disputatious Luther was in constant battles, largely unsuccessful, to control the forces both theological and cultural that he had unleashed. He argued not just against the pope’s hard-liners but against earnest reformers such as Erasmus who wanted to hold the church together; he argued on the other side against Protestant radicals such as (in addition to Karlstadt) Zwingli, Calvin, Muntzer, and the Anabaptists ..
.. He brought to the masses a belief that individuals of any class were commissioned to think about and understand the deepest questions for themselves, with the “freedom of a Christian” leading inevitably to a popular taste for, and later an insistence on, political freedom as well. (The political theories associated with the Enlightenment clearly owed much to seeds sown by Luther.)
As G.O.P. Bends Toward Trump, Critics Either Give In or Give Up
Despite the fervor of President Trump’s Republican opponents, the president’s brand of hard-edge nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party, and those uneasy with grievance politics are either giving in or giving up the fight.
.. The Grand Old Party risks a longer-term transformation into the Party of Trump.
“There is zero appetite for the ‘Never Trump’ movement in the Republican Party of today,” said Andy Surabian, an adviser to Great America Alliance, the “super PAC” that is aiding primary races against Republican incumbents. “This party is now defined by President Trump and his movement.”
.. Many of those who remain will have to accommodate the president to survive primaries from the pro-Trump right.
.. governor races in Virginia and New Jersey and a special Senate race in Alabama — Republican candidates are mirroring Mr. Trump’s racially tinged campaign tactics.
.. Many of their voters prefer the Trump way.
“We’re not an element,” said Laura Ingraham, a pro-Trump talk show host. “We’re the party.”
.. Ms. Ingraham .. the conservatism of market-oriented internationalism simply has little mass appeal.
“There’s no constituency for open borders, endless war and these international trade deals that are skewed against the United States,” she said.
.. As for the limited government pitch that defined Mr. Flake’s career, Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, scoffed.
.. “It’s very nice. But it’s a theoretical exercise. It can’t win national elections.”
.. “We have a leader who has a personality disorder,” said former Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, “but he’s done what he actually told the people he was going to do, and they’re not going to abandon him.”
.. “I don’t think the rank-and-file Republican believes that corporations are people,” said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign who has also worked with Mr. Bannon.
.. For now, though, the vision for a more populist-nationalist party sketched out by Mr. Bannon is being won as much through intimidation as through actual purges in Republican primaries.
.. “The message they’re sending is: The way to survive is by accommodating him, changing their tone and professing loyalty to Trump,” said William Kristol.. former Representative Tom Tancredo, who was shunned by the Bush-era Republican Party for his harsh anti-immigration views, is considering a comeback bid for governor in 2018... Mr. Graham believes that the president is not as wedded to some of his nationalist policies as his supporters want to believe.
“The best thing that could happen to Trump and the future of the Republican Party is for Trump to fix a broken immigration system,” Mr. Graham said.
.. Establishment Republicans are attempting to convince Mr. Trump that “if you join with Bannon, you cut your own throat,” Mr. Graham said, because it could lead to an impeachment effort by a Democratic-controlled Congress.
But these arguments cause the early Trump enthusiasts only to roll their eyes. The party establishment, these Trump backers say, wants to govern as if the election never happened.
“They still think the election was about Trump’s personality,” Ms. Ingraham said. “It wasn’t. It was his ideas.”
Steve Bannon Vows ‘War’ on His Own Party. It Didn’t Work So Well for F.D.R.
Nearly 80 years later, President Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has declared a “season of war” to push out problematic Republicans in midterm elections, just as Roosevelt tried to do to balky Democrats. But Roosevelt’s purge backfired. Not only did he fail to take out his targets, but he also emboldened them, all but dooming his domestic program for much of the rest of his presidency.
Whether Mr. Bannon’s purge will be more successful has become the consuming question in Washington these days.
.. said he might rein in Mr. Bannon’s planned assault on Republican incumbents. “Some of the people that he may be looking at, I’m going to see if we talk him out of that, because, frankly, they’re great people,” Mr. Trump said.
.. he called three incumbent Republicans —
- John Barrasso of Wyoming,
- Deb Fischer of Nebraska and
- Roger Wicker of Mississippi
— to assure them of his support in next year’s midterm elections.
.. voters resented the intervention and repudiated him by re-electing nearly all of his Democratic rivals.
.. “His attempt to purge the party of conservative Democrats proved to be a serious mistake,” said Robert Dallek, whose biography “Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life” will be published next month. “He lost every primary contest except one, and 60 percent of the country disapproved of his purge.”
.. Roosevelt’s purge was part of a desire to force a party realignment.
.. In those days, both parties had liberals and conservatives. Roosevelt in effect was trying to make the Democrats the more uniformly liberal party while leaving the Republicans as the conservative party. He would fail, but in decades to come, that realignment would eventually occur on its own.
.. “His goal was two responsible, unified parties to replace, as he said, ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ parties,” said Susan Dunn, a Williams College historian and author of “Roosevelt’s Purge,” the definitive book on the 1938 election. “To me, Trump’s purge is only about vindictiveness. He wants to strike out at and defeat the people who have dared to criticize him.”
.. Mr. Rove, who has sharply criticized Mr. Bannon’s efforts. “The lesson is it’s better to try to influence by encouragement than by opposition,” he said. “It’s important to keep focused on the main things people want you to keep focused on — what are the big issues of the day? And don’t let your personal pique guide your political actions.”
.. The confrontation came to a head when he sought to pack the Supreme Court by adding as many as six more justices to seize control of the bench, an idea that provoked fierce opposition in both parties and ultimately collapsed.
.. Roosevelt put together a team to organize a campaign against the conservative Democrats. The newspapers called it the “elimination committee” and labeled the campaign Roosevelt’s “purge,” a reference to Stalin’s terror in the Soviet Union.
.. He took on conservatives like Senators Walter F. George of Georgia, Ellison D. Smith of South Carolina, Millard E. Tydings of Maryland and Guy M. Gillette of Iowa. Mr. Smith, a fierce segregationist known as “Cotton Ed,” despised Roosevelt and referred to the New Deal as the “Jackass Age.” But Mr. Smith and the others won anyway.
.. “The good news for history,” he said, “is that this embarrassment taught him an important lesson: Don’t get too far out in front of the American voter, a lesson he applied just two years later as he carefully laid the groundwork for America’s entry into World War II.”
Dear Men: It’s You, Too
he denounced the “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”
..McCain and Bannon are the antipodes of the Republican Party.
- The institutionalist versus the insurgent.
- The internationalist versus the America Firster.
- The maverick versus the ideologue.
- Above all, the hedgehog versus the honey badger.
The hedgehog, said the Greek poet Archilochus, knows one big thing.
.. On Monday McCain called America “the land of the immigrant’s dream,” and said: “We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil.”
To a large and growing segment of the G.O.P., which thinks magnanimity is for losers, these statements amount to a form of treason.
.. The honey badger, by contrast, will do anything to get what it wants. It is wily, nasty and has as much use for honor as a pornographer has for dress.
.. For the honey badger, it’s whatever works: anti-Semite one day; Israel’s make-believe champion the next. Bannon is the most revolting operator in American political life since Roy Cohn.
.. The goal isn’t to win elections but to purge the party and remake it in Bannon’s image. He wasn’t kidding when he told historian Ronald Radosh in 2013 that he’s a “Leninist.”
.. serve as a rallying point for a Republican Party that can save itself from dishonor, win its share of elections, and stand up to the honey badgers who mean to pillage it.