The Divided Heart of the GOP

The Republicans have lost the White House. As the election result gradually became clear several days after 3 November – a week as excruciating and protracted as anything else this dreadful year – Donald Trump was set to depart the executive mansion one way or another on 20 January.

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Their hope is to “realign” American politics, making the Democrats the party of big business and the politically correct pieties of the coastal elite, while the Republicans become the party of the working class and of American values: liberty, family, faith.

A leading muse of this new dispensation is Oren Cass, whose think tank, American Compass, proposes a platform for a Republican Party that rejects “market fundamentalism” and intervenes in the economy on behalf of working families. Witnessing a Hispanic swing towards Trump – not just among the more conservative Cubans of Florida, but also in the rural, poor, formerly Democratic bastion of the Rio Grande Valley – Cass declared that the GOP was becoming a “multi-ethnic, working-class” party.