The Republican Party is Illegitimate

 

The Republican Party is Illegitimate

March 6, 2021

 

We have only one legitimate political party in the United States today. It is the Democratic Party. The Republican party has become illegitimate. The Democrats have policy positions the purpose of which is to help the American people. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats are far from perfect. They aren’t nearly progressive enough, but they care about and seek to serve marginalized people. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats stand for a living wage for all people, the Republicans don’t. The Democrats want unemployed people to receive enough to keep body and soul together. The Republicans don’t. The Democrats take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. Far too many Republicans don’t. The Democratic Biden administration is attacking the pandemic aggressively. They may actually get it under control. The Republican Trump let it rage unopposed for nearly a full year. The Democrats are willing to conduct foreign policy in coordination with our traditional allies. The Trump administration nearly destroyed those relationships and made other nations justifiably suspicious of American intentions. The immigration policy of the Democrats is not what it should be, but at least they don’t want to exclude people because of their race or religion. One of the first things the Republican Donald Trump did as president was try to stop all Muslims from entering the country. The Democrats will still spend far too much money on the military, but they may spend a little bit less than the Republicans would. Democratic President Biden is actually leading the nation. Republican President Trump never did. With the Democrats in charge at least some worthwhile things will get done. Under the Republicans nothing constructive has gotten done for decades.

The Republican Party has no policy proposals that would do anyone any good except the economic top 1% of the country. They are the party of white supremacy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, and just about everything else that’s wrong with this country. They ponder to only two groups, all those people in all those negative categories I just listed who are afraid and angry, and the immensely rich and their big corporations. They are not fiscal conservatives. When they’re able to do it they run up massive federal deficits, not because they’re spending money on anything worthwhile but because they keep cutting taxes for the very people who don’t need tax cuts. When the Democrats create deficits by spending money to help people the Republicans scream bloody murder about how horrible deficits are. To them deficits caused by their tax cuts for the rich are perfectly acceptable. The Republican Party is illegitimate because it has no plan for helping the American people and no desire to have one.

The Republican Party is radically obstructionist. Under President Obama their senators would vote against anything Obama proposed just because it came from Obama. They probably did that partly because he was Black but mostly just because he was a Democrat. They weren’t about to give him anything he could claim as a success, not that their obstructionism cost him reelection, which is what they were trying to do. That strategy came from Mitch McConnell, and he’s doing it again under President Biden. The Republicans in the Senate won’t vote for anything that comes from the Democrats.

The national Republican Party cares about only one thing—power. All they want to do with power is benefit rich people and destroy the environment in the process. Their power comes from the money rich people give them and the fact that ordinary people keep voting for them though they do nothing to benefit ordinary people. They pander to everything ordinary people get wrong in order to convince them to vote against their own self-interest. They’ve been doing that for a long time. One way that they do it is to pander to evangelical Christians’ opposition to legal abortion. Conservative clerics have whipped up a frenzy among their people about abortion with the spurious claim that human life begins at conception. Those people want to make abortion illegal for everyone in virtually every situation. Some Republicans politicians share that view. Others, like Donald Trump, have no personal convictions about the matter but play to the opposition to abortion in the Republican base in order to get votes people would not otherwise give them.

The Republican Party didn’t get this way overnight. The illegitimacy of the Republican Party has been developing for decades at least. I suppose we could trace it back at least as far as Herbert Hoover, who did nothing and wanted to do nothing to counter the Great Depression that was destroying the lives of millions of people. I’ll start however with Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964. He was a racist, or at least he was perfectly willing to let southern racists continue their inhumane system of Jim Crow segregation. Had he won he might well have gotten us into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He lost the 1964 election badly to Lyndon Johnson, although that may have had as much to do with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 as with anything else. In 1968 Richard Nixon, another Republican racist, devised what he called the “southern strategy.” That strategy, ultimately successful, was to get racist white southerners to switch from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans. Nixon knew there was only one way to do that. He had to appeal to southern racism without saying outright racist things. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but Nixon pulled it off.

White southern racists had voted for Democrats starting in 1876 because the Democrats ended the Republican-led Reconstruction and let those southerners create the Jim Crow system of racial segregation along with debasement and disempowerment of Black citizens. Starting at least by 1948, however, significant parts of the Democratic Party began to advocate for civil rights for Black Americans. In 1948 the Democratic National Convention adopted a relatively strong position in favor of civil rights for Black Americans. The entire Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation walked out in protest. In 1964 the Democrats enacted the Civil Rights Act of that year. A year later they passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those statutes were arrows to the heart of Jim Crow, and white southern racists knew it. They voted for Nixon in 1968 and made him president. They have mostly voted for Republicans ever since because the Democrats became the party of civil rights. The Republicans claimed to be the party of “states’ rights,” a dog whistle for letting states be as racist as they wanted to be. The Republican Party has never become a party firmly committed to civil rights.

The Republicans have used opposition to legal abortion as a pivotal issue in their effort to maintain power in the states and at the national level. In 1973 the US Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade, which held essentially that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion at least during an unspecified early part of her pregnancy. The Republican Party has been using the abortion issue to gain and exercise power ever since. They pander to Americans who may genuinely oppose abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision. They keep promising to overturn it, but they never have. Many Republicans have genuine moral principles against abortion, although they don’t always take into account all of the consequences of outlawing it. Others like Donald Trump have no personal convictions on the issue at all but use opposition to Roe v. Wade to hold onto the support of people whose other interests they disregard at will. The Republicans have promised for decades to reverse Roe v. Wade. So far they haven’t done it, although the current Supreme Court, which the Trump administration has had the opportunity to pack with rightwing extremists, may eventually do it.

Today the Republicans have a couple of other ploys they use to retain power though their policies are disadvantageous or even disastrous for most Americans. They take control of state governments, mostly by promising people lower taxes. Then they gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to give themselves disproportionate representation and therefore greater power. They’ve done that for decades. In more recent times the Republicans have tumbled to the fact that most Americans don’t like their policy positions or perhaps their lack of policy positions. So they have set out to change state voting laws to make it harder to vote. Republicans intend those laws to reduce the number of people voting, changing election laws to make it harder to vote. Republicans don’t win when there is large voter turnout. They can win only by keeping voters, especially Black and Brown voters, from voting. A lawyer for the Republican Party in Arizona recently admitted that truth  in oral argument before the US Supreme Court in a case challenging the party’s effort to reduce voter turnout in that state.

For all of these reasons the Republican Party has ceased to be a legitimate American political party. It hasn’t represented a majority of the American people for years. It neither does nor seeks to do anything to make the lives of ordinary Americans better. It gains power only by pandering to people’s  phobias and hatreds on the one hand and the economic interest of the wealthy on the other. For a political party to be legitimate it must honestly advocate policies that at least can be presented as being good for the country. The Republicans haven’t done that at least since before the election of the disastrous president Ronald Reagan in 1980. To be legitimate a political party must appeal to what Abraham Lincoln (the first Republican president) called the better angels of our nature. The Republicans haven’t done that for a long, long time.

Since the 2016 presidential election it has gotten worse. Far worse. In 2016 Republican voters made the TV showman and unethical businessman Donald Trump first the party’s presidential candidate, then made him president, albeit only because of the undemocratic way our constitution dictates that we do presidential elections. Trump, perhaps the worst president in American history or certainly one of them, tried to rule as an authoritarian who gave not a damn about the law, including the US Constitution. He tried to deconstruct the entire structure of the federal government. He made overt what the Republican Party had been doing covertly for a long time. He said there were fine people among racist, anti-Jewish white nationalists, among whom there is not and cannot be one single fine person. When it became likely that he would lose the 2020 presidential election he claimed that the election would be “rigged” against him and that massive voter fraud was the only way he could lose. When he lost that election he claimed over and over that he had really won it, by a landslide even, and that his victory had been stolen from him. He practiced Goebbels’ tactic of the big lie. His zealous, bigoted supporters began to chant “Stop the Steal!” Trump took up that phrase and urged those supporters to reverse the outcome of the election by force if necessary. On January 6, 2021, while he was still President of the United States, he incited a mob to attack the Capitol to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the results of the electoral college vote. Chaos ensued. A Capitol police officer was killed. Crass hooligans broke into the office of Speaker Pelosi, posed sitting at her desk, and stole a laptop computer. Many people who were legitimately in the Capitol that day sent texts to their loved ones to say good-bye, believing that the mob would kill them. The mob failed to accomplish any of it goals. Congress certified the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Yet violent insurrection against the government of the United States was the inevitable product of Trump’s pandering to racists and his propagation of the big lie that he had actually won the election.

The House of Representatives promptly impeached him for inciting the seditious riot of January 6. The House impeachment managers presented an overwhelming, air tight case against him to the Senate. The motion to convict passed 57-43, but the Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority to convict a federal officer in an impeachment trial. Trump got away with it. He got away with it because the Republican Party had become the party of Trump. Only seven Republican senators voted to convict. Most of them have been censured by their state’s Republican Party. A great many Republicans want Trump to be the party’s nominee for president in 2024, and they want him to win.

The loyalty to Trump among his rank and file loyalists in the Republican Party is incomprehensible, but it is real. Nearly the only thing the Republican Party stands for today other than tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans is Donald Trump. A few noted Republicans can’t stand Trump, Senator Mitt Romney being the prime example. But Trump now rules the Republican Party despite his losing the 2020 election and becoming one of the few US presidents to lose reelection when they ran for it. Right after the Senate acquitted Trump Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he accused Trump of everything the House impeachment managers had said was true of him. A short time later McConnell said that he would support Trump were he the Republican nominee for president in 2024. How McConnell keeps from getting whiplash is beyond comprehension. Very few if any Republicans politicians can stand up to Trump and hope to survive their next primary election. The Grand Old Party as it styles itself should change its name to the Grand Trump Party, for he is nearly all they stand for.

The Republican Party has been illegitimate since it made Ronald Reagan its presidential candidate in 1980. He duped Americans into believing that the US really is the greatest country on earth, which it isn’t, and that it best expresses its greatness through military might and uncontrolled market economics to benefit the top levels of Americans economically. He started the Republican Party on the road to Donald Trump with nearly catastrophic consequences for the country and the world. A political party the sole purpose of which is to put a would-be dictator back in power simply is not legitimate, yet that is what the Republican Party has become. We can only hope and pray that either the Republican Party regains its senses or that a new party arises to take its place. It is highly doubtful that either our country or the world could survive another four years with Trump as president.