The Republican Party no longer has room for a Colin Powell Republican

On Oct 18, 2021

“I believe I can help the party of Lincoln move once again close to the spirit of Lincoln,” Powell said, a line that was, in the words of The New York Times, a “clear reference to the issues of race, opportunity and social welfare that had him at odds with ranking conservative Republican ideologues who threatened fierce resistance to his candidacy.”

By the time of Powell’s death on Monday from complications of Covid-19, his 25-year-old pledge to transform the Republican Party into a diverse coalition organized around opportunity and social welfare seems deeply quaint — a hope unrealized as the GOP moved well beyond the extreme bounds of what even Powell could have envisaged two-plus decades ago.

Powell’s personal journey from potential — and much-coveted — Republican presidential candidate in the mid-1990s to pariah within the Trump-ified GOP tells the story of how the party went from one that recognized the changing face of America and the need to adapt its policies as a result to one organized around the often-intolerant views of a single man who, it’s worth noting, spent less time as a Republican than Powell did.

At the time of his death, in an acknowledgment of how far the party had moved away from his views, Powell no longer considered himself a Republican.

“I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican,” Powell told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this year. “You know, I’m not a fellow of anything right now. I’m just a citizen who has voted Republican, voted Democrat, throughout my entire career, and right now I’m just watching my country and not concerned with parties.”

Powell’s separation from the party he chose back in 1995 when both sides coveted him as a candidate in the wake of his star turn as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War had been a long time coming.

Powell voted for Barack Obama in 2008, calling him a “a transformational figure … a new generation coming onto the world stage, onto the American stage.”

Powell said at the time that the GOP had “moved more to the right than I would like to see,” but added that he still considered himself a Republican.

When he endorsed Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, Powell hinted at his growing disillusionment with a party that was growing in a direction far from the one he had hoped. “I think I’m a Republican of more moderate mold and that’s something of a dying breed, I’m sorry to say,” Powell said at the time. “But, you know, the Republicans I worked for are President Reagan, President Bush 41, the Howard Bakers of the world, people who were conservative, people who were willing to push their conservative views, but people who recognize that at the end of the day you got to find a basis for compromise. Compromise is how this country runs.”

The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 — a man who aggressively positioned himself against the very establishment figures that Powell modeled his version of the GOP after — wound up being the final straw for the retired general.