Has the Republican Party Jumped the Shark?

An excellent article published in Politico this morning discussing how the Whig party selection of General Zachary Taylor – an inexperienced, unqualified, wealthy outsider with no adherence to party principles – led to the death of the Whig party (and the eventual birth of the Republican Party).

In the days leading up to the 1848 election, General Zachary Taylor was a popular man. An outsider who had proudly refused to enroll in a political party, Taylor explained that “a sense of duty to the country” forced him to overcome his “repugnance” and permit people to advance his name. He openly declined to pledge fidelity to any platform planks, and accepted the nomination to be “president of the nation and not of a party.” Taylor recognized how much Americans disliked political insiders, and placed himself above the “trading politicians … on both sides.”

Founded in the 1830s as a coalition of states’ rights conservatives and businessmen, united mostly by disgust at Andrew Jackson’s expansion of presidential power, the popular backlash they stirred against Democratic President James K. Polk was so great that the Whigs seized control of Congress during the 1846 midterm election.

Still, party loyalists mistrusted Taylor. He was crude, nonpartisan, unpresidential. And did not adhere to any party principles.

Biographer Holman Hamilton would pronounce Taylor “one of the strangest presidential candidates in all our annals … the first serious White House contender in history without the slightest experience in any sort of civil government.” Henry Clay said “The Whig party has been overthrown by a mere personal party.” Many lamented that Taylor’s popularity had trumped party loyalty and principles. His vanity and recklessness further dampened Whig enthusiasm.

Almost immediately after the nomination, anti-slavery Whigs bolted, refusing to support a slaveholding candidate. Joining various other anti-slavery factions, including those that defected from the Democratic Party, the rebels formed The Free Soil Party and nominated former President Martin Van Buren.

Blessed by an even more unpopular Democratic opponent in a three party race, Taylor won. He attracted only 47 percent of the popular vote, Democrat candidate Cass won 43 percent of the vote, and Free Soil candidate Van Buren won 10 percent.

Whigs then felt betrayed when Taylor took a nationalist approach brokering what became the Compromise of 1850. Within four years, they would be routed by” the Democrats. “Within eight, the Whig party would totally disappear as a functioning political organization.”

Just a few years after Taylor was elected under the Whig banner, the party dissolved—undermined by the divisions that caused Taylor’s nomination in the first place, and also by the loss of faith that followed it.

Will the Republican Party see a similar fate? Providing an unqualified, unprincipled candidate based on his reality show personality, facing a likewise unpopular Democrat candidate (Clinton) and two former Republican governors (Johnson / Weld) running on the Libertarian ticket – it’s possible (though I believe unlikely) that Trump can win. More importantly, the party has nominated a man that is not for Republican principles of smaller government and fiscal responsibility. He has mocked the military, believes that the US should back out of NATO and the Japanese should have nuclear weapons as a bulwark against China and North Korea. Can the party survive? Or will it dissolve in favor of a new, more principled party as the Whigs did, leading to the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln?

It promises to be an ugly and interesting election.