Can A Freedom Party Emerge After Trump?
By Edward Hudgins

May 5, 2016 -- With Donald Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the GOP of the past is dead. It was a victim of its own internal contradictions and its abandonment of the limited government principles that, albeit imperfectly, guided it. Can a new freedom party emerge?

Trump will lead the Republicans to disaster

Pundits and Republican leaders failed to understand Trump’s appeal. He’s a foul-mouthed demagogue. He advocates policies that are economically destructive—a Mexican trade war—or impossible without a police state—deporting 12 million illegals. None of this has mattered to his supporters even though his form of populism flies in the face of GOP semi-orthodoxy. This isn’t the Goldwater-Reagan party.

Trump could well lose to Hillary Clinton this fall. The GOP could also lose both Senate and House. In the face of a new Democratic-left ascendancy, freedom activists must take both a principled and practical approach to a new party—the two are not mutually exclusive. Too many of these activists engage excessively in academic policy debates and forget that politics is about candidates persuading voters to support them and about elected officials persuading other lawmakers to back their policy prescriptions.

To be politically successful, freedom activists must connect an exciting and inspiring vision of a better future with the actual concerns of voters, engaging both the intellect and the emotions of voters.

Understanding the civil war within the GOP that allowed Trump to triumph provides a guide for a pro-freedom strategy.

Fighting about the wrong things in the Republican Party

Establishment Republicans might want to cut taxes and some regulations, but they essentially support the welfare state. They merely want to tweak it to make it more efficient. But sometimes they’ve expanded it, e.g., with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. And after winning control of Congress, they failed miserably to oppose Obama’s worst policies. Many Republican voters rightly don’t trust them and many turned to Trump as a “pull down the house” alternative.

Extreme social conservatives give priority to a religiously-motivated values agenda that usually involves limiting individual liberty rather than government power. Many see in the culture what seems to be the complete collapse of moral standards and the rise of leftist political correctness. They harken back to the social order in an older, traditional America. They jump on symbolic issues, for example, by opposing same-sex marriage. But such stands drive away socially liberal young people from the GOP.

Many social conservatives feel adrift in today’s economically stagnant America. And they rightly blame establishment Republicans... (Continue reading here.)