It is shocking – absolutely shocking – to discover that a model minority named “Avik Roy” is opposed to the transformation of the Republican Party from a conservative party to a nationalist party:
Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.
But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.
“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”
Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.
“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.
This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.
But this is not why the Republican Party will die, it is why the conservative movement has lost control of the Republican Party, and why the conservative movement will die. Since when was the primary objective of the Republican Party, the USA, or the Constitution “a true commitment to equality for all Americans”, particularly in a world where “Americans” can be born anywhere? And it is nonsense to claim a political party should be driven by a commitment to something that does not exist; Roy might as reasonably decry the failure of the Republican commitment to unicorns.
The irony, as usual, is that Roy is practicing the very identity politics he decries. He’s opposed to American nationalism because he isn’t an American, he’s just a paperwork facsimile. And he’s wrong, of course, because the Democrats are not going to dominate American politics, because the more the demographics shift against white Americans, the more strongly they are going to be forced to band together in their own self-interest and defense.
The reality is that Roy is going to become a Democrat, just like all the other so-called conservatives whose identity is non-white. Because people like him have been practicing identity politics all along, they’ve just been doing so under cover of equalitarian ideology.