On the Fall of the Republican Party

 

On the Fall of the Republican Party

January 14, 2022

 

For well over one hundred fifty years there have been two major political parties in this country. The Democratic Party arose in the decades before the Civil War. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 after the collapse of the Whig party. Anti-slavery former Whigs formed the new Republican Party specifically as an anti-slavery party. Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was the first Republican president. He was not originally strongly against slavery. At first to him the Civil War, which began very shortly after his inauguration in March, 1861, was not about abolishing slavery. It was about preserving the union. But on January 1, 1863, using his power as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Though we call Lincoln the Great Liberator, his Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery everywhere in the country. It said that enslaved persons in states or areas of states that were then in rebellion against the United States shall be, as of January 1, 1863, “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, done by a Republican president, the Civil War came to be about the abolition of slavery everywhere in the country. After the north won the Civil War there followed in the former Confederate states a period known as Reconstruction. During that period the Republicans generally supported the rights of formerly enslaved persons while the Democrats generally opposed federal intervention into the internal affairs of those states.

Reconstruction continued until shortly after the presidential election of 1876. In that election the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden got more votes than did the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes; but the electoral votes of some states were contested, and it was not clear who actually won the election. In the Compromise of 1877 the Democrats conceded the presidency to Hayes in return for the Republicans agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the southern states, thereby effectively ending Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln had sold out the Black people of the south in order to get their man Hayes elected president.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century the Republican Party had become a conservative party of big business and the wealthy. But in 1901 Republican vice president Theodore Roosevelt became president upon the death of president William McKinley. Roosevelt, though he was a war-loving imperialist, was in some ways more progressive than were most Republicans. In particular, he set out to bust the large trusts that controlled the country’s economy for the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the country’s working population.

Roosevelt served as president until 1909. He was succeeded by the Democrat (and horrible racist) Woodrow Wilson. After Wilson a series of colorless Republicans served as president. When the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began in 1929 Republican president Herbert Hoover’s response was tepid and ineffective. He ran for reelection in 1932, but he lost to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, an distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt.

The next Republican president was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was of course a war hero, having commanded American troops in Europe in World War II. He was a moderate conservative. He sent federal troops into Arkansas to enforce the racial integration of the public schools, but still his eight year presidency was relatively uneventful. During his term of office the marginal tax rate on great wealth was as high as 95%. Under Eisenhower the (mostly white) middle class grew and prospered.

The next Republican president was Richard Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s vice president. He lost the 1960 presidential election to Democrat John F. Kennedy, but he was elected president in 1968. We can date the decline and fall of the Republican Party to Nixon’s term in office. The Democratic Party had been the party opposed to Reconstruction after the Civil War while the Republican Party supported it. From Reconstruction through the presidential election of 1964 the southern states had been the “solid south,” always voting for Democrats because the Democrats had ended Reconstruction. The Democrats accepted their presence and support despite every last southern Democrat being a racist and segregationist. However, in 1948 that situation began to change. The Democratic Party was slowly morphing into the champion of civil rights for Black Americans. Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those federal laws were aimed precisely against the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow south.

Nixon won the presidency in 1968 by doing essentially two things. He lied to the American people about having a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and he adopted what he called the “southern strategy.” Nixon saw that he could flip the states of the solid south to the Republicans by exploiting the disaffection of southern whites with the Democrats for supporting the civil rights of Black people. Though he was certainly personally a racist, Nixon did not publicly say overtly racist things. Instead he advocated “states rights.”  States rights was a dog whistle for allowing the southern states to continue their discrimination against Black people without federal interference. Southern whites heard Nixon’s advocacy of states rights as meaning he would interfere in their efforts to keep Blacks as second class citizens less than the Democrats would. The 1968 election was complicated by the third party candidacy of George Wallace, the overtly racist and segregationist governor of Alabama. In that election Wallace won the formerly Confederate states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Nixon won the formerly Confederate states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. The only formerly Confederate state the Democrats won was Texas.

Nixon’s presidency of course ended in the disaster of the Watergate affair. Nixon was a deeply flawed man, and some of us knew that he was when he ran for president in 1960 and again in 1968. His paranoia and hatred of his political opponents led to the scandal that forced him to resign the presidency in August, 1974. Nixon had managed to turn the solid south from the Democrats to the Republicans using dog whistles that said he would let the southern states continue to discriminate against Black people. For the most part the southern states have been solidly Republican ever since. The growing partisanship of the American people and American politicians was evident in how long it took virtually any Republican politicians to turn against Nixon. Vice President Ford, who became vice president after a different scandal had forced Nixon’ vice president Spiro Agnew to resign, succeeded Nixon. He was a decent if not a particularly visionary or charismatic man. He made a great many people angry when he gave a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon.

The decline of the Republican Party began with Nixon, but all appearances at the time to the contrary notwithstanding it gained speed during the presidency of former B-movie star and governor of California Ronald Reagan. Reagan defeated incumbent president Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. George H. W. Bush was his vice president. With Reagan the federal government became even more the tool of the wealthy than it had been before. Reagan began the series of deep cuts to the tax rates of wealthy Americans that has continued under Republican presidents ever since. Under Reagan greed became socially acceptable. Reagan gave Americans permission to care only about themselves and perhaps their closest family members. Selfishness, always a problem for Americans because of the strong tradition of individualism in our culture, became a civic virtue. Many foolish Americans think Reagan was one of our best presidents. In truth he was one of the worst. The country still has not recovered from the “me first” culture he created or at least encouraged.

After Reagan and before 2016 there were two other Republican presidents, Reagan’s vice president George H. W. Bush for one term and Bush’s son George W. Bush for two. Reagan had set the Republicans on a course of advocating what was called supply side economics. Its advocates liked to use the metaphor “a rising tide raises all boats.” When he ran against Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 H. W. Bush had called Reagan’s economics “voodoo economics.” Yet he knelt and kissed Reagan’s ring to get his party’s vice presidential nomination after it was clear that Reagan would head the Republican ticket in 1980. We heard no more from him about “voodoo economics,” though as president he did once sign a bill that raised the tax rate on wealth at least a little bit. That he did is probably the reason he was not reelected in 1992. That’s how deeply the country had bought Reagan’s lie about a policy that supposedly raised all boats but that in reality only raised all yachts.

H. W. Bush lost the 1992 election to conservative Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas. As president Clinton signed welfare reform and other legislation that Republicans loved and many Democrats despised. He was succeeded by George W. Bush, who besides making himself a war criminal with his totally illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iraq, continued the Republican way of slashing taxes for rich people, thereby driving the up the federal debt and assuring that there would be no money for truly constructive domestic programs. After W. Bush there was the eight year presidency of Barack Obama. During his term of office a Republican controlled Congress, and especially a Senate led by obstructionist Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, stopped Obama from doing much of anything constructive.

Whereupon we come to the presidency during which the Republican Party truly ceased to a legitimate American political party and became a cult of personality for a man who was arguably the worst president this country has ever had. The once great Republican Party became the cult of personality of sleazy New York real estate speculator and television personality Donald Trump. Trump has always been a shameless self-promoter. He claims to be immensely wealthy and to be a great businessman, but he has filed for bankruptcy many times. Three of his properties filed for bankruptcy in 1992. Three other of his properties filed for bankruptcy individually in 1991, 2004, and 2009. He has a reputation for hiring subcontractors for his real estate ventures, then refusing to pay them. He appears at least to have benefitted from the investment of dirty money from Russia that has been laundered through his real estate holdings. It is unclear whether he knew the source of that money. He has defaulted on so many bank loans that now only Deutsche Bank, itself a somewhat questionable operation, will lend to him. He has been married three times and has cheated on all three of this wives. He paid off both a porn star and a Playboy model to keep them from talking about the sex he had had with them. He is misogynistic and racist. Before he ran for the presidency in 2016 he had never run for any office and had no experience in public service whatsoever.

 That Donald Trump was wildly unqualified for any public office much less the presidency was obvious to some of us and should have been obvious to everyone. But Trump is a showman. He played a successful business man on television for years. He can whip up a crowd of supporters more effectively than American politician since George Wallace, with whom he is sometimes compared. He will tell a crowd anything he thinks they want to hear or that he thinks will benefit not the nation but himself. He is an inveterate liar. He may be amoral, but he is certainly a-truthful, if I may use that neologism. He lies so much, sometimes in ways that can easily be found out, that I can only conclude that Trump does not operate within the categories true and false. The only categories he knows are “beneficial for me” and “not beneficial for me.”

As bad as Trump is personally, his policies, actions, and inactions as president are worse. He continued the Republican policy of cutting taxes for their wealthy donors damn the consequences. He rolled back every environmental regulation he could. He alienated our country’s long-standing allies and cozied up to the authoritarian Vladimir Putin of Russia, whose operatives had interfered in the 2016 on his behalf. He pandered to the murderous, despotic Kim Jong-un of North Korea. When a mob of white supremacists held a demonstration in Richmond, Virginia, that turned violent he said there were fine people on both sides. No, Mr. Trump, white supremacists of any sort are not fine people. He stacked the federal bench with right-wing ideologues, the ones on the Supreme Court apparently about to overturn Roe v. Wade. The one thing Trump did of which I can approve is actually something he didn’t do. He didn’t get us into any new wars. He holds the high honor of being the only president impeached twice. Sadly he was convicted in neither of his trials in the Senate.

As bad as nearly all of Trump’s policies were, the way he handled, or rather mishandled, the biggest crisis of his presidency was orders of magnitude worse. In late 2019 we began to hear about a new virus that was infecting people in China. That virus, now usually called COVID-19, COVID, or just the coronavirus, spread around the globe with astonishing speed. By March, 2020, the people of this country started to cease their usual activities. This country and the whole world were in the grips of a global pandemic unlike anything seen in this country since the Spanish Flu pandemic at the end of World War I. We isolated ourselves as much as we could. When we had to go out we wore masks and tried to stay at least six feet away from any other person. We were following the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s leading public health agency, an agency Trump would come to disparage and ignore. Nonetheless, the coronavirus spread through this country like wildfire. It wasn’t always lethal by any means, but it was lethal in enough cases that tens of thousands of Americans were dying of it. The nation’s hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients.

As all that was going on Trump cared only about how the pandemic would affect his chances of reelection. He said COVID-19 was just like the common flu. It isn’t. He pushed cockamamy  treatments for infection. He said use bleach. He pushed drugs that the experts said were useless against the virus. Trump’s response to the pandemic was as bad as Ronald Reagan failing to do anything to address the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. It was shameful. It isn’t possible to say how many of the over eight hundred thousand American death COVID-19 has caused are his responsibility, but it must be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands. Even without his dereliction of duty when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was one of the worse presidents this country has ever had, probably the worse at least since the Civil War. Even if otherwise he had not been one our worst presidents, with his dereliction of duty when faced with the pandemic he certainly became one of them.

Yet, inexplicably at least in terms of decent explanations, Trump still controls the Republican Party. He has reduced it to being the personality cult of Donald Trump. It no longer stands for anything, good or bad, except Donald Trump. Republican politicians who spoke the truth about Trump when they ran against him for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination now grovel at his feet. They kiss his ass because they are terrified that he will support someone else the next time they have to run in a Republican primary. There is among us a significant number of fanatical Trump supporters whose proclivity for violence cannot be overestimated. Most of them are white men terrified that demographic changes in this country mean that white men are losing their control of the country’s economic and political mountaintops that they have nearly exclusively occupied since the country’s origins in the early seventeenth century.

Now we come to the disgraceful (at best) way Trump’s presidency ended. Even before the 2020 election Trump was telling what became his Big Lie. He said that the only way he could lose the 2020 election was if the election were “rigged.” When he lost the election he shouted again and again that he had really won it. He tried very trick in the book, and many that weren’t in any book, to overturn the results of that election. He sent hack lawyers, including the thoroughly disgraced Rudy Giuliani, into courts in swing states that had voted for Biden in an attempt to get the court to overturn or even reverse the outcome of the election in their state. Those lawyers could present not one shred of evidence in support of Trump’s claim that massive voter fraud had cost him the election. They were laughed out of court, sometimes being severely chastised by a judge for filing a frivolous lawsuit. He tried to get Republican controlled state legislatures, like the one in Michigan for example, to ignore the vote of the people and send Trump electors to Washington. None of them did. And through it all Trump kept repeating his Big Lie: I really won this election by a landslide and my victory has been stolen from me.

On January 6, 2021, Congress met in joint session to carry out its constitutional duty of receiving and counting the electoral college votes of the various states. Trump saw that action of Congress as his last chance to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He knew that Vice President Pence would preside at that session in his capacity of president of the Senate. He pressured Pence incessantly, saying that Pence had the legal authority to reject the electoral college ballots of the states, that he could declare the election invalid and send the matter either to the Supreme Court or to the House of Representatives for resolution as the constitution provides for cases in which no candidate has a majority of electoral votes. Pence had no such authority, and he knew it. Reports suggest that he very nearly caved in to Trump, but in the end he did the proper, legally correct thing, and did not try to stop Congress from accepting the electoral votes as the states had submitted them.

Trump was not about to leave the decision about electoral votes up to Congress alone, not giving a damn what the constitution says. He and his people announced a rally in Washington on January 6, to be held not far down Pennsylvania Avenue from the US Capitol. Trump told people that the rally would be “wild.” Several people spoke to that crowd, including Rudi Giuliani; but Trump’s speech was the corker. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy, repeating his Big Lie over and over again. He told them that if Congress approved Biden’s election they would not have a country. He said he thought Pence would do the right thing, by which Trump meant the wrong, thing, but left hanging what the mob should do if he didn’t. He sent the frenzied crowd down Pennsylvania to the Capitol to, as he and his supporters said, “Stop the Steal.”

They very nearly succeeded. They stormed the Capitol, overwhelmed the grossly outnumbered Capitol police officers on duty there. They broke windows and smashed doors. They rifled through legislatures desks. Someone stole a laptop computer from the office of Speaker of the House Pelosi.  They physically injured Capitol police officers who tried to stop them and left some of them with PTSD. In one of the most appalling scenes from that day, one of the rioters paraded through the building with a big Confederate battle flag, a symbol of armed rebellion against the United States. The rioters terrified the senators, representatives, and everyone else who was legally in the building at the time. Elected public officials cowered in fear in the Senate gallery. Police told them to up on the gas masks that were kept under the senators’ desks. Who knew that there were gas masks under the senators’ desks? I sure didn’t. The January 6 insurrection was the first time the US Capitol had been occupied since the British did it during the war of 1812. Not even the Confederate army did it. There is simply no doubt that on that day Trump unleashed a mob to attack the government of the United States of America, the country of which he was supposedly the elected leader. He sent them to nullify the US constitution that he had sworn to protect and defend. Trump did the most shameful things any US president has ever done, violating his oath of office in so many ways they’re hard to keep up with.

And while all this was going on Trump sat safely in the White House watching the riot on television. He had told the crowd that he would be at the Capitol with them, but of course he wasn’t. By all accounts Trump watched the television, I assume tuned to the right-wing propaganda machine posing as a news organization Fox News, for something like three hours doing nothing even to try to stop the violence he had unleashed on the Capitol. The House of Representatives impeached him (his second impeachment) for instigating the insurrection of January 6, though he wasn’t tried in the Senate on that impeachment until he was out of office. Though every senator knew that Trump was guilty as charged, only a few Republican senators voted to convict Trump, and he was not convicted.

Now the entire Republican Party, at least at the national and state levels, is controlled by no one but Donald Trump. He has turned the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower into the Donald Trump Cult of Personality. How did he do it? He did it the way authoritarian and dictatorial leaders always do it, by telling a Big Lie over and over and over. Hitler’s Big Lie was that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems. Stalin’s Big Lie was that the Communist Party worked for the benefit of the country’s workers. I don’t mean to suggest that Trump is as bad as either of those two monsters were. Far from it. It’s just that he used the same technique that they used. Trump fed his Big Lie to disaffected people who were ready to lash out against what they considered to be a repressive and illegitimate government. Those people bought the Big Lie hook, line, and sinker. Though it is impossible for any half-way intelligent person to understand it, Trump’s supporters seem to believe that the Big Lie is true. At least they keep repeating it over and over again as though it were true, which of course it isn’t.

On January 20, 2021, former vice president Joe Biden was sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States. Trump and his thugs had tried to prevent the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. They failed, this time. The Department of Justice is busy indicting and trying people who broke into the Capitol that day or who in some way conspired to commit sedition against the United States in connection with that insurrection. Trump continues to repeat his Big Lie. Republican politicians genuflect  in his direction because they fear the political power of his supporters. The most fanatical of those supporters speak of starting a new civil war if Trump is not returned to power. Trump controls the once great Republican Party. Because of him it is no longer a legitimate American political party, though of course it still has immense power both in Washington, DC, and in the states. As the Donald Trump Cult of Personality it remains a serious threat to American democracy. Those of us who believe in democracy must do everything we can to stop Trumpism before it is too late, assuming that it isn’t too late already.