Mitt Romney’s Tragic Ambivalence
Rolling out the announcement that he won’t run for re-election, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has framed it as a passing of the torch. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” he said in a video statement. “Frankly it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.” He clearly means this as a rebuke to the 80-year-old Joe Biden and the 77-year-old Donald Trump, neither of whom, he said, “are leading their party” to confront the major issues facing our country. “The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.”
The problem with this argument is that Romney despises the next generation of Republican leaders. He’s watched the transformation of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio into a Trump lackey with disgust. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” he told McKay Coppins, author of a forthcoming Romney biography. He’s similarly contemptuous of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri for indulging the lies that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. I doubt he’s a fan of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz or the hucksterish presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.
Besides, as Coppins reveals in an Atlantic excerpt from his book, Romney himself thought of running a third-party campaign for president in 2024, deciding against it only out of fear that it would throw the election to Trump. So as much as I believe that America is stagnating under the death grip of the gerontocracy, I don’t think that’s why Romney is bowing out. Rather, he’s given up on a second Senate term because his brand of stolid, upstanding conservatism has become obsolete, replaced with a conspiratorial, histrionic and sometimes violent authoritarianism. His reluctance to say so clearly, at the cost of breaking with his party definitively, is evidence of something tragic in his character.
We know what Romney really thinks because of the access he offered Coppins, with whom he met weekly, giving him diaries, private papers and emails. “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” Romney told him.
When Romney gave a speech at the Utah Republican Party’s convention in 2021, he was prepared for boos, but emerged shaken by the sheer intensity of the red-faced fury that confronted him. He was, writes Coppins, afraid of his own constituents. “There are deranged people among us,” he said, and in Utah, “people carry guns.” After Jan. 6, Coppins writes, Romney spent $5,000 a day on security for his family.
But Romney isn’t using the announcement of his coming retirement to warn the country against the danger of a right-wing movement that routinely resorts to threats of violence. He certainly isn’t defecting from the Republican Party for the remainder of his time in the Senate. Instead, by putting age at the center of his argument, he’s setting himself above the fray, pretending that both parties are equally at fault in bringing the country to this perilous pass. Romney has shown far more decency and courage in response to Trump than almost all his colleagues, but in this case, he’s still pulling his punches.
There’s something Hamlet-like in Romney’s temporizing. He wants to defend the party of his revered father, the liberal Republican George Romney, but he’s often been hesitant about striking at the venal interloper who’s taken it over. During the 2016 campaign, Romney gave a speech warning of the “trickle-down racism” a Trump presidency would bring, an echo of George Romney’s refusal in 1964 to endorse Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Yet, as ABC News reported, even though Romney didn’t support Trump himself, he “said that he wouldn’t be spending the next six months trying to convince anyone not to vote for Trump.”
It’s possible that Republican leaders, had they acted quickly and decisively in 2016, could have thwarted Trump before he’d consolidated his messianic hold over the party’s base. But Romney, like other establishment Republicans, underestimated the autocratic threat posed by Trump, or overestimated his party’s patriotic fortitude. It’s a mistake he would make again.
After Trump was elected, Romney evidently thought he could save the Republican Party from the inside, abasing himself in a bid to become Trump’s secretary of state. Entering the Senate, he tried to chart a path for a post-Trump conservatism while ignoring Trump himself as much as possible. While promising to speak out about Trump’s worst excesses, he wrote in The Washington Post, “I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault.” (For that, he had the pseudonymous Twitter account Pierre Delecto, where he could applaud squibs about Trump’s moral depravity and evident unfitness.)
Romney deserves our admiration and gratitude for being the sole Republican to vote to convict in Trump’s first impeachment, and then for voting again to convict him in his second. After a lifetime as a loyal Republican, it must have been extraordinarily difficult to break with his partisan allies.
But he must understand that the problem isn’t only Trump, but Trump’s party, which is also his party. There is no telling what sort of impact it would have if the last pre-Trump Republican nominee for president quit the G.O.P. and worked for its defeat — maybe hardly any. But given the stakes, what excuse is there for not trying? “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce,” Romney told Coppins. He should be less coy in sounding the alarm.
The Road From Mitt Romney to MAGA
This from Paul Krugman:
For the basic story of the Republican Party, going back to the 1970s, is this: Advocates of right-wing economic policies, which redistributed income from workers to the wealthy, sought to sell their agenda by exploiting social intolerance and animosity. They had considerable success with this strategy. But eventually the extremists they thought they were using ended up ruling the party.
Before I get into that, let me take on the widespread myth that Romney lost the 2012 election because he was the victim of a smear campaign, and that Democratic nastiness radicalized the G.O.P., paving the way for Donald Trump.
If you remember the 2012 election, which I certainly do, you know that Democrats portrayed Romney as a plutocrat whose policies would hurt ordinary Americans while enriching the wealthy. And this portrayal was … completely true.
In particular, Romney was a strenuous opponent of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which was enacted in 2010 but didn’t take full effect until 2014 — an especially cynical position since Obamacare was very similar to the health reform Romney himself had enacted as governor of Massachusetts. If he had won in 2012, he would almost surely have found a way to block the A.C.A.’s rollout, which in turn would have meant blocking the large reduction in the number of Americans without health insurance after 2014.
But back to the history of the G.O.P. For a generation after World War II (which Donald Trump recently said Joe Biden might lead us into) we were still a nation shaped by the legacy of the New Deal. Under Dwight Eisenhower the tax rate on the highest-income Americans was 91 percent and roughly a third of American workers were unionized.
And Republicans largely accepted that state of affairs. In a letter to his brother, Eisenhower wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again”; while there were a few conservatives who thought differently, “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Republican Party increasingly came to be dominated by people who did want to roll back the New Deal legacy. Frontal assaults on major programs, like George W. Bush’s 2005 attempt to privatize Social Security and Trump’s 2017 attempt to demolish the A.C.A., generally failed, and were rejected by voters — Democrats retook the House in 2018 largely because of the backlash against Trump’s assault on Obamacare. But tax rates at the top came way down, the power of unions was broken, and income inequality soared.
Why didn’t Republicans pay a big political price for their hard right turn? Largely because they were able to offset the unpopularity of their economic policies by harnessing the forces of religious conservatism and social illiberalism — hostility toward nonwhites, L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, immigrants and more. In 2004, for example, Bush made opposition to gay marriage a central theme of his campaign, only to declare after the election that he had a mandate for the aforementioned attempt to privatize Social Security.
Big-money donors attempted a similar play when they poured cash into the DeSantis campaign early this year. It’s doubtful that they shared Ron DeSantis’s obsession with being anti-woke, but they thought (wrongly, it seems) that he could win on social issues and then deliver tax and spending cuts.
But eventually the forces that economic conservatives were trying to use ended up using them. This wasn’t something that suddenly happened with the Trump nomination; people who think that the G.O.P. suddenly changed forget how prevalent crazy conspiracy theories and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Democratic electoral victories already were in the 1990s. The current dominance of MAGA represents a culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.
And for the most part, Republican politicians who probably weren’t extremists themselves went along. For a while this may have been because MAGA was still delivering the right-wing economic goods. Bear in mind that despite all the talk of “populism,” Trump’s main policy achievement was a big cut in corporate taxes. But non-extremist Republicans also, and increasingly, gave in out of fear — for their careers and perhaps even their safety.
It’s to Romney’s credit that he finally reached his limit. But he did so very late in the game — a game that people like him basically started.