The pragmatic shift of the Republican Party

If the Republican National Convention was any indication, the only federal opposition to the sexual revolution in the United States has formally surrendered after decades of dogged resistance. In Milwaukee last week, from the party’s platform to the stage, commitments to the natural family, Biblical marriage, and the right to life were virtually absent. If what we saw over the past two weeks is the new Republican Party, it is almost unrecognizable—and not just because an OnlyFans porn producer addressed the crowd.

As Politico reported, nobody at the convention wanted to talk about abortion. Pro-life talking points were conspicuously absent from speeches by previously vocal pro-life politicians, which was unsurprising because at the Republican Party platform committee meeting the week before, social conservatives were deliberately silenced and the platform ramrodded through without a single amendment being considered. The 2024 platform was gutted of nearly all pro-life language, mentioning only late-term abortion (in the same sentence as support for in vitro fertilization and birth control).

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign facilitated a similar pivot on the LGBTQ issue, with the Log Cabin Republicans—an LGBTQ lobby group—releasing a triumphant statement noting that support for the sanctity of marriage had been stripped from the Republican platform and that the GOP had finally dispensed with “outdated and out-of-step language opposing marriage equality.” This move was apparently demanded by Trump himself, and surrogates such as Vivek Ramaswamy have been swift to point to the omission as evidence that the GOP is evolving away from the social conservatism that defined it for a generation.

Eric Trump summarized the shift in a revealing exchange on NBC. The host noted, “The Republican platform no longer calls for a federal abortion ban and no longer defines marriage between one man and one woman. Is this a sign your father is moving to the center?” His reply: “My father has always been there on those issues. That’s reflective of my father and what he believes in. … and my wife, Lara, who runs the RNC, and what she believes in. At the end of the day, this country has holes in the roof, and you’ve got to fix those holes and stop worrying about the spot on the wall in the basement.”

If the shift we saw this month in the Republican Party is permanent, we have lost the last political bulwark against the sexual revolution.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this. The Democratic Party has long served as the political vehicle for the sexual revolution. The Kennedy clan was sold on abortion decades ago (except for Eunice Kennedy Shriver), and the last major attempt to steer the party away from support for abortion on demand failed in 1992. Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” has long been drowned out in the bloodthirsty roar of “Shout your abortion.” The party’s new standard-bearer, Kamala Harris, actually visited an abortion center on the campaign trail. The Democrats reliably support every new iteration of the revolution, up to and including sex change surgeries for gender dysphoric children. The GOP has been the only counterbalance to the aims of the revolutionaries at the federal level.

I understand the pragmatic arguments for purging the Republican platform of commitments to natural marriage and the right to life. Who doesn’t? But those defending this approach are ignoring the fact that eliminating these commitments is not merely a political concession but a moral one. It is a declaration to the American public that these debates are over. The revolutionaries could not declare victory so long as one of the two political parties insisted that the war was not over and stubbornly insisted that articulating these admittedly aspirational truths was worth it for its own sake.

The pragmatists also ignore the fact that power provides a bully pulpit that comes with the opportunity to shape public opinion. What is orthodoxy today may not be orthodoxy tomorrow. Donald Trump himself has dispensed with many supposedly ironclad conservative orthodoxies since he took over the Republican Party. Visionary leaders can do just that—lead. Instead, the GOP’s new position appears to be the mantra attributed to the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s famed “Iron Lady,” often expressed her disdain for the term “consensus,” which she described as “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects. …What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’” As she once put it to that great American conservative William F. Buckley Jr.: “For years now, this word has reared its head: ‘consensus,’ you must have a consensus. It’s a word you used not to use when I first came into politics. We had convictions, and we tried to persuade people that our convictions were the right ones.”

She was right. We desperately need such leadership now. The future of our civilization depends on it.