The Pathetic "Good Republican"

Future Senate candidate Mike Gallagher delays his box office debut

Next quarter marks nine years since Trump came down the escalator. The decline of the “Good Republican” over nearly a decade has been consistent, but intermittent. More like an elevator that lets occupants off with varying levels of dignity and courage at each floor: the Original Never Trumpers on the top floor, the “Grab ‘em by the…” floor, the Vaccinated Republicans floor, the January 6th floor, etc.

This poetic, methodical descent would make Dante chuckle.

Another passenger exited last week, with the much-lauded Rep. Mike Gallagher announcing his resignation from Congress. This leaves Speaker-in-name-only Mike Johnson with just a one-vote margin, meaning a functioning government is just one flipping GOP House member away (instead of the full Flip Five campaign).

More on that potential later. It is important to sit with the Gallagher story.

Three Options for the “Good Republican”

Like most of the potential “Good Republican” saviors, Gallagher quit.

As Bill Kristol asked when the news broke,

“Is it too much to ask the decent ones, or the ones who’ve rediscovered decency, to stay and fight?”

The rediscovery rarely works. Why?

As we laid out in Only One Option Left, the Good Republican

“narrative is built upon a myth: the idea that defeating Trumpism requires honorable leaders who act dishonorably most of the time, but reactivate their principled superpowers when democracy needs saving.”

A useful framework to analyze the options facing the “Good Republican” was delineated in a June 2021 debate at the Niskanen Center titled A Time for Choosing: The Center-Right’s Three Options for Saving American Democracy. Those three options:

1. Stay in the Republican Party and fight its anti-democratic forces from within;

2. Form an independent, center-right third party; or

3. Join and strengthen a moderate-to-conservative faction within the Democratic Party