One of my biggest faults (as my husband, children and multiple others will confirm) is impatience. It manifests pretty much everywhere–reading a mystery, I want to skim over the clues and get to the part where it’s solved; watching a rom-com, I am anxious for the concluding kiss … I can share all kinds of other examples.
Which brings me to my frustration with the slow-motion disintegration of the Republican Party.
I’ve been predicting the demise of the GOP for at least the last twenty years. Back in “the day”–before the party morphed into a White Christian Nationalist cult–I focused on the growing rift between what we then called “country club Republicans” and the culture warriors that were fringe then, but who now control the party. The country club contingent was composed primarily of business people who were focused on economic policy and tended to see the fringe folks as useful worker bees with a nutty agenda that could safely be ignored once the election was won.
The divorce between those two incompatible factions has taken a lot longer than I once predicted, but today’s MAGA reality has accelerated it.
A couple of years ago, a Washington Post column focused on the widening gulf between corporate America and today’s GOP. The columnist began by pointing to those ubiquitous television ads with their “stream of multicultural and often mixed-raced families buying cars, taking vacations, planning their retirements, doing laundry and laughing at the dinner table.”
You don’t watch television? Just pay attention to the pop-up ads when you surf the Web. See the smiling faces — the sea of Black, Brown, tan and golden faces — that make it clear that corporate America knows that scenes of White families are no longer the only aspirational groupings that make customers want to open their wallets.
The column described the diverging goals of the GOP and corporate America as “two very interesting but very different branding exercises.” It then addressed the increasingly uneasy partnership between the two branches of the party.
For years, these two campaigns allowed both sides to maintain their mutually beneficial arrangement. In recent days, however, the two branding campaigns have collided over the most basic question in our democracy: Who gets to vote and how? Which brand will emerge from this collision in better shape is already a foregone conclusion. But the reason may have less to do with right and wrong than profit and loss.
Under the old arrangement, corporate America would reliably deliver huge sums of money to GOP campaigns and causes, and Republicans would deliver lower taxes on income and capital gains in return. If big companies did not endorse everything the party stood for, they remained mostly silent in service of their bottom line.
As we know, the GOP has morphed into a White, largely evangelical and largely non-urban cult hostile to immigration, science, foreign engagement and Black people. Meanwhile, much of corporate America has evolved in a very different direction. Business sees its interests and bottom lines enhanced by immigration and dependent upon science. Foreign markets give companies a stake in global affairs, and as America’s demography has diversified, so have their target markets.So that increasing gap between business and today’s version of the GOP has continued to grow.
The finally accelerating divide between business and the GOP is not the only sign that the party is disintegrating. Intra-party divisions became significantly more pronounced after Trump’s election.
We are seeing more primary battles between the MAGA Republicans aligned with Trump and the few remaining, more traditional incumbents. Those challenges have not only weakened party cohesion, but have frequently resulted in the nomination of candidates who are considerably less electable in general elections.
During the Trump years, the GOP has gone from differences on policy issues to the abandonment of policy (not to mention the constitution) altogether, making it abundantly clear that GOP candidates are running solely to exercise power, not to govern–to “be someone” rather than “do something.” Internal fights are no longer about policy, but about devotion to Trump and the autocratic MAGA movement; those fights have led to situations in which state and local Republican parties have censured or even expelled members who have deviated from MAGA obsessions.
The disintegration of a once-respectable political party is finally speeding up, but political inertia is still providing drag. Meanwhile, the damage being done to America is enormous. Today’s Republicans have demonstrated that they cannot govern, but they can–and have–brought governance to a halt, delaying and/or killing critical legislation.
The only thing that will accelerate the death of the GOP and the creation of a substitute center-right party is a massive loss in November.
I’m impatiently waiting…
Me as well, Sheila. Very impatiently.
I have no doubt that the political system is going to radically change. With the infusion of radical religious beliefs marinating sociocentric politics is not something that’s sustainable, compatible nor appropriate in a secular or secularist society.
It’s unfortunate that those individuals who live in the Bible belt, or so-called Bible belt, are so susceptible to the manipulation of a political party along with their religious cohorts. And you’re absolutely correct when you can see those storm clouds forming to the west, there is an awareness of the undeliverable promises that are constantly made but never kept.
There Will be a certain continuation of fawning after the uncouth and unqualified to join the good old boy country club, us against them, hold the line against those others, those invaders, but the number will undoubtedly shrink.
The cultural and ethnic mixing is a natural evolution to secular society. And when the younger ones are marrying or, just shacking up, with individuals that their folks never even imagined, that’s going to change a lot of thinking. In South Carolina, there are so many white grandmothers pushing strollers with little mixed babies. Now those grandparents have a different viewpoint on people that not so long ago, we’re considered others, and enemies of the status quo.
I noticed the same thing in Tennessee, these white southern grandmothers doting on these little mixed babies. When it’s their blood running through those cute little baby veins, it’s kind of hard to form that hatred or to keep it stoked. Eventually, those overt religious bigots are going to go the way of the dodo. How long will it take? Who can say, but the hand is absolutely writing on the wall. And so many of these folks are learning how to read it. When those babies are mistreated as they grow up, the rift is going to increase in that Bible belt society.
No one really wants their own flesh and blood to be discriminated against in any form or fashion. This is going to bring about the demise of many of the carpet baggers, and, it will be painful for many still. But eventually it will happen, and religion, the cause of so much angst and conflict worldwide, it’s going to be banned by the secularist governments.
Spot on. The Republican Party never even produced a party platform in 2020. They’ve shown an inability to govern and are devoid of political ideas to make this country better. Clueless, mean-spirited and all about scoring political points. It needs to go the way of the Whig Party.
Yes. The disintegration of the Republican party can’t come soon enough. Too bad SCOTUS is so fundamentally corrupt and will not speed the process by getting the orange hairball behind bars before November.
It is, though, somewhat ironic that the corporate money machine is directing itself toward THE PEOPLE WHO BUY STUFF, while the MAGA idiots try to stop anything good happening to those same buyers. Oh, what a comedy…
The fringe maga cult must be rooted out from within the party. A good start would be for the rest of their party to ostracize the crazies and exclude them from any critically necessary committees.
For any readers on this blog that don’t live within or near Rep Banks’ NE Indiana district, please tell everyone you know to vote for ANYONE but Banks for senator. He is one of the most evil and self-serving liars within the maga crowd in DC.
You say that the increasing gap between business and today’s version of the GOP has continued to grow which supports diversity, etc. While industry recognizes they need to court diversity, I wonder how many of those who work in industries buy into the advertising campaigns.
What was that book…Strangers in Their Own Land.
The present Red Party is drunk on ownership and in denial that within the country’s borders, everything is jointly owned by who is on the Deed and the government under the Constitution of the United States of America.
Trump thought that he could change the intent of the Constitution by using the now persuasive, pervasive entertainment media and changing the staffing of the Supreme Court to look more like the Pope’s College of Cardinals.
We must stop him in his tracks to remain who we are: Americans. World leaders. The bastion of democracy. Under the government of, by, and for we the people.
It’s really that simple. And hard to do because our vaunted education system has not kept up with its responsibility to teach civic literacy. So we, the people, have to close that gap.
From your keyboard to God’s ear.
Saw a Karnacky breakdown of all of the polls. I wondered what world the respondents lived in when I saw that 55% thought tfg would be better for the economy????
Corporations don’t have a soul and will support MAGA as long as they support cutting their taxes or reducing regulations—anything to increase their bottom lines.
Remember, they hide their donations within the dark money PACs so consumers can’t protest against them.
What frightens me is voters still want Trump no matter what trouble he finds himself in within the justice system. #Scary
The Kochs spent decades and billions of dollars taking over the GOP at the state and federal levels. The dark money system is protected by SCOTUS and allowed by the IRS. As long as it makes financial sense to back MAGA Republicans, corporate USA will find a way to keep it going, especially if voters support it.
But, don’t forget, corporate America hedges their bets by supporting the Democratic Party as well, which has pulled the DNC toward the right. We don’t have an opposition party to the Oligarchy. Both parties and the unions cater to the oligarchy. The handling of the railway strike by the Democrats was a clear sign to workers.
Lastly, the legacy media continues supporting our failing two party system. They give voters the illusion they can choose between a corporate-backed party and a “people-centric” party. If the legacy media were honest across the board, it would force the hands of both parties, but as long as they need advertisers, it won’t happen anytime soon.
In my perception, the collusion between the traditional “country club republicans” and the white Christian nationalists goes back more than four decades. I clearly recall in the late 1970s discussing the rising “right wing Christians” with friends, who laughed and told me that these people were just harmless loonies. I disagreed and saw that their forced entry into the right wing political arena was quite dangerous.
The traditional “party of big business” people knew exactly what they were doing, and they still do know. They saw that they no longer could command enough voters to keep themselves in office and to maintain their stranglehold on all the riches, so they sold out to the vast army of religious whackos, who provided the large voting block which they needed. All they needed to do was to acquiesce with the hatred and discrimination against everyone who was not white, not straight, not Christian, not male, etc. The chickens are beginning to come home to roost from this Faustian bargain, but in today’s world, the religious loonies are calling the shots to the “country club” group. We shall see how long this nasty bedfellow situation will last. Whenever the “country club republicans” collectively have had enough (when the effects of the political religious group have hit the wealthy in their bank accounts), they certainly will pull the plug on all of them. The only question remaining for me is how to accelerate the process of encouraging the wealthy elites to kick the religious loonies to the curb.
The demise of the Republican Party has now become a fait accompli.
As Robert Hubbell’s newsletter notes today, at mid-day on Monday Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor urging the passage of the bi-partisan immigration bill. Six hours later in private he told his Republican colleagues to filibuster the bill. As Hubbell states, “(o)n Monday, Trump squashed McConnell like a bug. He humiliated McConnell before the world. He ordered McConnell to dance like a marionette and McConnell did so without a peep.”
It is clear the obituary of this party can now be graphically written. In writing this obituary, Hubbell notes that while one may debate the exact time of its demise, but it will be important to remember that “(i)n killing the bipartisan bill they demanded in the first instance, congressional Republicans surrendered their constitutional authority under Article I to a failed insurrectionist seeking reelection to escape four criminal indictments.”
The future of the GOP is morbidly fascinating to me. What will happen _after_ Trump? He may win this year, but (barring the discarding of your current constitution) that’ll be 4 years. (And, PLEASE, let him not win.) If he loses, I doubt he’ll be fit enough to run again. I think he’ll remain a force within the party for his life thereafter, though, if for no other reason than he can’t help himself from seeking gratification in the limelight.
But, he is very much a religious leader to many of his base, and holds sway over them in some bizarrely hypnotic way. I’d be surprised if any other candidate can capture them in the same way. Especially, I suspect if anyone _did_ capture them that way, they’d be so crazily extreme that they could not be considered a legitimate option for anyone else. I can’t imagine the GOP surviving that. Instead of topping out at 45% of the electorate and relying on turnout (or its converse), I think they’ll be topping out at 35-40%, and that won’t be enough to be competitive. Then, I think, they’ll splinter for good.
It gives me some hope to think on it.
Nancy, I am glad that you highlighted Jim Banks’ offensive style, his stink. This is because i was prepared to post the following in a comment here:
From Liz Cheney’s “Oath and Honor:”
In Cheney’s book, as she considers the people that McCarthy had initially appointed to the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan.6th attack the U.S. Capital, one of whom was Banks, she writes thusly about him:
“Banks made clear that he did not intend to operate in good faith. Instead, he would attempt to blame the Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi, and the Biden administration(which did not yet exist January 6) for the invasion of the Capitol.
In a statement announcing his appointment to the January 6th Committee, Banks claimed that speaker Pelosi had ‘created this committee solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda.’ He made it clear that he had no interest in the truth, and that the would not be objective. For Jim Banks it was purely political.” p.207
For Banks, as for Jordan and McCarthy, and, apparently, for all the MAGA crowd, truth, honesty, and oath to the constitution were/are irrelevant. Hopefully, that is where they will all go.
the right wing evangelicals are being a main stay of support of their own. like the Mormon religion and its rules on governing its flock, and ,the bank that finances the flock, keeps that machine where they want it. capitalism at its ,er, best? the evans are there also. they loan and keep stakes where banks wont touch the flock . its become a closed sect,unless your a trumper. if agent orange keeps piling on his manifesto of condem and kill. like a gun bill he may be rejected at thepolls. his big mouth may be the play that others are deciding that new york minute may become his quicksand. the media is sponsoring his come back, with little to no accounting of trumps lies..social media, and its bots paid by the likes of pete thiel and his buddies,keep the dreams going. if the time has come,in my world of no social media,and face to face discussions with locals, its long past to make a change. the hostile news of this country has decided to support a world of right wing agantology over the real world of where it will go. if our democracy is to be held in check by the left wingers,then its past due to get into some ones face and spell out how their own freedom will diminish,the first hour this ass wipe and crew is re_elected.. after all hes braging about his first day, use it to dimminish his party and its idioligcal standings. if trump looses, make every damn republican standing admit to their facist attempt to distroy America. people say thanks for your service, yea right…prove it..
We all may want to consider telling our GOP neighbors, friends and family that the small income tax cuts they received from tfg’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was temporary – it expires on December 31, 2024. However, his massive tax cut for corporations and the wealthy was made permanent.
If he had been re-elected in 2020 the very small temporary tax cut for most people would not have harmed him politically, but it won’t harm him in this election either unless the maga crowd and all other republicans are told that their tax cut is ending.
The Republican Party has already gone the way of the Whigs from whose ranks it began in 1854; we are merely witnessing the aftermath, i.e., its total disintegration. It is not a pretty sight to have to see what is happening as factions within that now defunct party fight one another over what is left to fight about since there are no “spoils.” They have, like their predecessor Whigs, committed political suicide. Debate and compromise? Forget it.
That group brought it on themselves when their leadership allowed a fringe group of Christian Nationalists and a presidential traitor to gain control over their members. The new owners of the party have no platform and have announced that they will have no platform for the upcoming election. Apparently the idea is not to tell the polity what they plan to do (other than tax cuts for the rich) so they don’t have to defend such positions during the pre-election campaign. The choice voters have in going to the polls is between Democrats who are trying to govern for all the people and candidates of the so-called Republican Party who have given their views over to a felonious psychopath, a shadow president, who proposes that we rid ourselves of our Constitution and immunizes himself from prosecution for the murder of political opponents.
Big Tent versus dictatorship? Such a stark choice! VOTE!
Quick off-topic comment on the Appellate Court decision that Trump has no immunity for murdering political opponents > Perhaps the judges realized that if Trump were given such dictatorial power to commit felonies judges would be next on his execution list if they did not do his bidding.
Uh oh…
https://www.abc57.com/news/indiana-state-police-investigating-potential-election-fraud-in-st-joseph-county
I read today that the Republican Party is having financial difficulties. Music to my ears!
Maurya kind of summed it all up – It all reminds me of the tale of the scorpion and the turtle (or frog if you prefer that version), except the big corporations may be immune to the bite. The rich got their tax breaks and created the myth that taxes are theft and should NEVER be raised, so if violence and hatred have escalated, what do they care.
Of course, many other Republicans of the non-County Club variety still would vote for a turnip with an (R) by their name. They have slowed what should have been the demise of the infected GOP and will likely continue to do so.
I see that Victoria (if you don’t support me you are a socialist) Spartz decided that she will run again — and will likely win in her “Red” district. She was very strong in her support for Ukraine, but — well, Glorious Leader said no deals (and wants Putin’s aggression to succeed), so ,,,,