Where Do We Go From Here?

It sometimes seems like a bad dream–an America governed by a deeply corrupt cohort of incompetents and fools, led by a President who is clearly insane. Not simply criminal and stupid, but quite obviously untethered to reality, and currently busy waging a senseless war and destroying the world economy.

I remember Watergate, and while Nixon may well have been as malevolent as Trump, he was a lot smarter. He understood how government worked, and the geopolitical context within which the country existed. Most importantly, when his corruption became public, Republicans in Congress withdrew their support and told him to resign.

What happened to America in the years between Nixon and Trump? What has led Congress and the Supreme Court to enable, rather than restrain, consistent lawbreaking from the executive branch? What brought us here–and how do we extricate ourselves from the downward spiral?

Last October, Paul Krugman addressed that first question, noting the degeneration between then and now. After all, Nixon, who “was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump,” had been repudiated by his own party.

Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms.

How did we get here? How did we go from a time of substantial overlap between the parties–an overlap that allowed Democrats and Republicans to work together on many problems– to today’s polarization? Krugman reminds us that much of that former “bipartisanship” and overlap was on economic issues, and attributable to the fact that the South still voted Democratic. The Dixiecrats, “politicians who were economically conservative and anti-civil rights” caucused with the Democrats. “Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, that faction has switched parties.”

Indeed, that racist faction now dominates the GOP, which–as I have frequently noted–looks much more like a White Christian nationalist cult than a traditional political party. And evidently, taking the country back to a time when straight White Christian males dominated is more important to that cult than economic prosperity and competent governance. The centrist, bipartisan bloc that forced Nixon out no longer exists.

Data shared by Krugman and others traces the result of the Dixiecrats’ move into the Republican camp, a move that left the  Democratic Party dominated by Northern Democrats who–despite Republican allegations–remained ideologically pretty much where Democrats had been since 1950. Meanwhile, Republicans have moved very far to the right.

These changes have produced asymmetric polarization. While the de-Dixiecratted Democratic Party broadly looks like a center-left European party, the GOP doesn’t look like the European center right. Instead it looks like Germany’s AfD or Hungary’s Fidesz, extremist parties with a clear authoritarian streak.

Krugman acknowledges Trump’s personal depravity, but says that it’s the nature of today’s GOP that is responsible for the decline of American democracy.

The transformation of the GOP can be attributed to a number of things: extreme income inequality, the power of the plutocracy, the “left-behind” areas of the country, the ability of people to live in curated realities thanks to the Internet…all of these factors have contributed, but above all is the racism that has always been America’s original sin. Whatever the relative contribution of these causes, I agree with Krugman that the threat we face is much bigger than Trump and his clown show of an administration, and it won’t be magically cured by his departure–fervently desirable as that departure is.

I don’t have any “cure-all” for what we need to do once these venal and despicable people are ousted, but I have become convinced that repair of our republic needs to begin with an American version of the Nuremberg trials. It isn’t enough to defeat the GOP at the polls, as critical as that is. We need a full, public display of what this administration has done–a display that even the propaganda sites cannot obscure. The sheer extent of the wrongdoing has operated to mask much of the corruption, venality and bigotry. Nuremberg-like trials offer us a roadmap, a place to begin what will be a difficult recovery.

It helped Germany, and it can help us.