In case you haven't been paying attention for the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has slumped tremendously in the polls. Several Republican senators, such as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and even John McCain of Arizona are currently in hot water. I would currently bet that Democrats win the Presidency and take back the Senate. While I am a progressive, former Bernie supporter with strong disdain for the GOP, its platform, and its politicians, I still have some suggestions to make.
1. GOP leadership must immediately repudiate Trump. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch and any other Republicans who consider themselves leaders should call him out for his racist, xenophobic demagoguery.
Conservative economists should come out and inform the public that Trump's tax plan would balloon the national debt and income inequality to unseen levels. Conservative foreign policy experts should inform the public that his rhetoric is working to spread the message of ISIS and is uneasy for our allies, to say the least. Republican leadership should then threaten to expel any members who endorse Trump. Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions and anyone else on this list who chooses to endorse Trump should be expelled from the party.
2. The GOP must become more tolerant.
The sheer effectiveness of Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan, along with building a wall along our southern border and banning Muslim immigration as his only clear policy ideas for months show how the GOP has become, in effect, a white nationalist party. The GOP has to purge racism from its ranks as best as they can while also promoting a tolerant message. This would mean that they would have to willfully lose several presidential elections, but it is a much better long term strategy than appealing to bigoted, old white men. Especially since that sector of the population is shrinking while people of color are increasing as a percentage of the population.
3. The GOP needs to embrace intellectualism, rather than castigating it.
While I disagree with Bill Buckley on a myriad of topics, I do believe he was a genius and gifted speaker. He would be rolling in his grave to see that the party that he helped craft has moved to this point. The GOP needs a new Bill Buckley, but their strong anti-intellectual message since the Reagan days means that their base would be skeptical about the motives of intellectuals anyways.
4. The GOP must Immediately separate itself from fringe conspiracy theorists.
These include Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, openly racist individuals such as Cliven Bundy and Pat Buchanan and other preachers of hate, fear, and negativity. Unfortunately, Rush Limbaugh pioneered fearmongering as the GOP's best recruitment tactic and FOX News made it mainstream. Now, fearmongering is essentially a requirement of conservative marketing.
5. The GOP must accept climate change.
Whether the party accepts it or not is irrelevant to the fact that climate change is happening. And the Pentagon, hardly a bastion of liberal thinking, believes it is a major national security threat. It is quite scary that the Republican Party is the only major political party that denies climate change.
6. The party leadership must do everything to promote candidates who have a chance of winning the presidency, such as John Kasich and Jon Huntsman.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right for political power; the Republicans can and should do the same. Huntsman and Kasich are two well-known and well-regarded conservatives who could potentially win a national election.
7. The GOP should unhinge itself from huge donors and lobbying groups.
While the Democrats do have George Soros, the GOP has a long list of big-money donors. The biggest names in political donation are the Koch brothers, so prolific that they have their own Wikipedia page dedicated to it. There's also casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, mutual fund investor Foster Friess, hedge fund manager Paul Singer and numerous others. There's also the NRA, the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (which John Oliver did an excellent special on) and numerous other groups that are too close for comfort to the Republican Party.
8. GOP leadership should do everything in their power to squish the Tea Party.
Tim Huelskamp, chair of the Tea Party Caucus, was recently defeated in a primary where establishment Republicans donated heavily to his opponent. The sooner the establishment can remove the Tea Party's antics from our government, the sooner they can be taken seriously.
9. The GOP needs to distance itself from supply-side economics.
Eisenhower and Nixon and Ford were Republicans who embraced Keynesian economics. Their administrations also, curiously enough, occurred while the economy was strong. Supply-side economics doesn't work. Even the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush and 11th most cited economist in the world, N. Greg Mankiw, listed supply-side economics under "Charlatans and Crankery" in his economic textbook.
10. The GOP needs to stop letting religion guide the party's political philosophy.
While social conservatives haven't been exactly delighted by Trump, the party leadership should use this opportunity to purge them as best as they can. Where are they gonna run, to the Constitution Party? The country's population is becoming less Christian and more Hindu, more Muslim, more agnostic and more atheistic. There is no better way to alienate these growing groups than by teaching that the Christian God is the only god.
These are just my ideas. But the GOP didn't listen to their advisors on the Growth and Opportunity Project. So why would they listen to me (or their highly paid advisors) when they can keep appealing to the uneducated, bigots, misogynists, homophobes, climate-change deniers, white nationalists, white supremacists and every other brand of charlatan and uncouth character, while being backed by Big Oil, multinational corporations and the newest breed of American oligarchs. No surprise that conservative political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein had this to say about their political party:
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
