Should one wish to seek out a pearl or two of political wisdom from the Republican perspective in the Centennial State, Dick Wadhams and Sean Duffy would certainly be near the top of any list. Both gentlemen have written recently in these pages about the lamentable state the Colorado Republican Party finds itself in. Their columns are well worth reading, and succinctly describe just a few of the state GOP’s entirely self-inflicted organizational difficulties.

Duffy wrote last month on the odd but predictable penchant of the current state party chair, Dave Williams, to attack fellow Republicans (such as his Congressional bid foil, Doug Lamborn) with a kamizake-like fervor; Wadhams wrote last week about the suicidal madness of the state party’s plan to withdraw from the primary elections. On top of all that, the state party is broke.

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The Colorado GOP’s dysfunction has not gone unnoticed at the national level; both pieces were, quite appropriately, quoted in Jim Geraghty’s latest missive in National Review. The problem is not unique to Colorado. Similar misadventures are happening to the GOP apparatus in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota as well – all, as Geraghty points out, notably swing states (well, with the exception of Minnesota – Mr. Geraghty was rather optimistic considering the place that elected Al Franken to anything as a “swing state”). In each case, the issue has been the hostile takeover of the party organization by firebrand Trump-adoring populists, away from traditional establishment types. As Geraghty put it brilliantly: “If Republicans are disappointed with the results of the 2024 elections – for the fourth straight cycle, mind you – a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections.”

Conservative-leaning political parties, especially during the past 100 years or so, have long needed to deal with disparate factions. Conservatism is not – not supposed to be – an ideology. It is the politics of reality, the antithesis of rigid ideological dogmatism. This invites a pretty broad range of vocations.

The approach adopted by the firebrand populists to deal with this, among other things, is to transmogrify the standard-bearing party into an ideology, with all of the dogmatic inflexibility that entails. The resulting litmus or “purity” tests that are imposed – e.g. loyalty to Donald Trump – are both inaccurate and imprudent. Inaccurate, in that a solid conservative can, for example, hold Trump in great disdain on fundamentally conservative grounds; imprudent in that the strategic damage can be significant. If, as in Colorado, a plurality dislikes Trump or is not energized by whatever the chosen litmus is – or even repelled by the rhetoric associated with it – that makes the cause of winning elections a lost one.

It is one thing if whomever we are talking about is a true heretic – the GOP would be as well within its rights to censure from its ranks Bernie Sanders or Alger Hiss as the Democratic Party would be to expel Barry Goldwater or St. Augustine. But the true liberal Republican is largely a thing of the Rockefeller-past (Kevin Priola left the party on his own accord, and at the national level, if the best example of a “liberal” Republican we can find is John McCain or Liz Cheney, we are pretty philosophically sound).

This is not a strictly American phenomenon. Right-leaning parties around the world, especially in Europe, have had to contend with how to adapt. There have traditionally been three options: 1) move to the left, becoming functionally indistinguishable from the liberal opposition, as happened to a large extent in the UK and Germany; or 2) encourage the formation of an ostensibly hard-right populist rebellion that may enjoy short-term successes as a new, shiny, entertaining thing, but generally grows unappealing to voters in the longer term, for the same reason as the left does; the reformist, burn-it-down-and-start-over excess gets grating.

There is a third option; Spain and Greece, for instance, just opted to reject radical populists both left and right and embrace instead traditionally conservative, establishment parties. It seems to be a winning approach. While Britain’s milquetoast, Labour-lite Conservative Party loses ground, as do unmoored hard-right populists in both Europe and here, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s mainstream conservative party won in Spain by offering voters an adult alternative to both liberalism and populism.

Yes, establishment Republicans can be boring, staid and unexciting. But after bouncing between the chaos of Trump, and the society-rending leftism of Biden, perhaps a boring, staid and unexciting adult in the room is in order.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.