Vt. Republicans face a choice

By David Moats

Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.

Vermont Republicans are in a bind.

One wing of the Republican Party has remained loyal to former President Donald Trump. Vermont delegates to the Republican National Convention dutifully joined national Republicans in giving him another chance at the presidency.

Gov. Phil Scott — never a Trump fan — has refused to follow what may be the party’s march toward an electoral cliff. Nobody knows what will happen in November, but during this unusual election year, one senses a historic pivot, and if Republicans experience electoral disaster, it may be the non-Trumpian remnant that survives to rebuild their party.

I arrived in Vermont in the 1970s, too late to get to know two of the most prominent Republicans of the era. Deane Davis was governor from 1969 to 1973, and he had died by the time I got into journalism here. But he was a beloved figure, a lawyer, judge and insurance executive. As governor, he helped pass a sales tax to balance the state’s budget, and he was a champion of Act 250, the state’s landmark land-use law.

The other beloved Republican whom I never met was George Aiken, governor and longtime U.S. senator. Aiken was from the liberal wing of the Vermont Republican Party, which meant he was willing to take on the power companies when he was governor. And as an elder statesman in the Senate, he was among those who advised President Richard Nixon that the United States ought to declare victory in Vietnam and get out. He was also among those counseling Nixon to resign after Watergate had wrecked his presidency.

It is impossible to imagine either of these revered figures supporting the Republican Party of Donald Trump. They were not nasty. They did not lie. They knew what honor meant.

That goes for other Republicans whom I have had the privilege to get to know, including Robert Stafford, Richard Snelling, James Jeffords and Jim Douglas. Today’s governor, Phil Scott, is of this lineage. They would not call their opponents nasty, crazy and stupid. They would not heave falsehoods onto the political stage.

Call it the moderate wing of the Republican Party. It has always had to battle elements that, going back to the World War II era, cozied up to Nazis and then fomented paranoia about Communists. That was a different lineage, which included Sen. Joe McCarthy, the red-baiting progenitor of McCarthyism; the virulent anti-civil-rights conservatives among Democrats who migrated to the Republican Party; and Barry Goldwater, right-wing candidate for president in 1964, who laid the groundwork for the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

In more recent decades, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich pioneered a no-holds-barred conservative politics that led to the Tea Party rebellion of 2010, and the present anti-government Republicans who have immobilized the U.S. House.

Moderate Republicans have tried to hold back the encroaching tide of nihilistic, anti-government conservatism. George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney — these were the candidates of the establishment. And yet during the 2010s, right-wing forces gained influence, driving successive House speakers from office until the House became virtually ungovernable. The culmination of this movement was Donald Trump, who is linked to Joe McCarthy by Roy Cohn, the sleazy lawyer who was adviser to both, and whose guru Steve Bannon has said he is emulating Vladimir Lenin in his quest to destroy the state.

The turn of events that has made Vice President Kamala Harris the Democratic candidate for president, shockingly, seems as if it might be able to hold back the tide of Trumpism. President Joe Biden turned it back in 2020 and has achieved much of what he set out to accomplish. But the harsh reality of the aging process has cut him short.

It will require energy and the projection of conviction and power to stand up to the renewed Trump movement and its promises of revenge, and it was obvious during that infamous debate in June that Biden didn’t have them. Now Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have injected conviction and power into the race, giving the Democratic Party renewed hope.

Harris has declared that America must not go back to the dysfunction and hatred of the Trump years, and it’s hard to believe that any but the hard core of the MAGA movement would want to. Moderate Republicans and independents in Vermont and elsewhere may see the Harris candidacy as a form of deliverance from the grip of Trumpism. Some Republicans say they will never vote for Trump. Officeholders such as Scott may believe that reticence on the question is advisable.

Republicans in the 1950s were afraid to stand up against McCarthy because he was able to marshal his brand of suspicion and lies to ruin lives. Even President Dwight Eisenhower, a beloved figure, was slow to denounce him. That is, they were afraid — until they weren’t. And then McCarthy was revealed as a sham, who was able to deploy his demagogic methods only until he was forced to stop.

Now the momentum appears to be with Harris and Walz. A lot can happen between now and November. A lot has happened just since June. The rapid pace of history as it happens leaves us today with that feeling of vulnerability deriving from the knowledge that the decisions of a few people on the national stage will have world-changing consequences.

For Vermonters, the memory of Republicans such as Davis, Aiken, Stafford, Jeffords and the rest ought to sustain those who hope for a rebirth of their party. If one wing of the party was riding high at this year’s Republican convention, Phil Scott’s wing will still be there if Trump tumbles to defeat in November. If the Democrats maintain or strengthen their hold on power, it is important that the loyal opposition reconstitute itself as a worthy opponent.