Tag Archives: GOP

My Mother Was Right

I was the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a Republican and my father a Democrat–although they did hammer out their differences before most election days, in order to avoid, as my mother put it, “cancelling each other out.” 

My mother’s identification with the GOP was based almost entirely on her fiscal conservatism, and she frequently expressed concern about what was then the “crazy fringe” of the party, which she accurately saw as racist and anti-Semitic. She worried about what would happen if the fringe became more powerful, more a part of the party’s mainstream.

She was right to worry.

The party with which my mother and I once identified is long gone, subsumed into that angry and hate-filled fringe. And now, as the saying goes, the chickens are coming home to roost. Republicans who still retain the ability to understand that blatant bigotry isn’t a good look are reacting to the public anti-Semitism of some of the MAGA movement’s most prominent members.

As Charlie Sykes put it, the MAGA Right sowed dragon’s teeth for years, and is now horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon.

Sykes was addressing what has been termed a MAGA “civil war” over the increasingly open and vicious right-wing antisemitism of the Trumpian Right. That warfare increased when Kevin Roberts, the current president of the Heritage Foundation, announced that the Foundation was standing by Tucker Carlson, who had just platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

As some of us warned a decade ago, the problem of Donald Trump was not merely Trump himself, but the mouth-breathers he was bringing with him — the winking permissions he granted to the movement we once called the Alt-Right. For ten years, he’s brought them into the mainstream; applauded them, encouraged them, dined with and defended them. He shattered the guardrails; dismissed the gatekeepers; and opened the sluices of bigotry.

That reality is what frightened my mother so many years ago, and it’s what makes so much contemporary political debate irrelevant. That irrelevance is especially notable in the constant hand-wringing over whether the Democratic Party should be “centrist” or “progressive.” What that debate ignores is the nature of the center in today’s political world.

A perceptive essay from Lincoln Square honed in on that question.

Where, though, is the center between right-wing authoritarianism and freedom and democracy? As the “Republicans” careen ever farther off the pavement, across the right shoulder, through the guardrail, into the ditch off the right side of the road, the “center,” if that is taken to mean the midpoint, is pulled from the middle of the road ever farther to the extreme right. Should Democrats, then, seek to be in the center by offering “Fascism Lite” as an alternative to full-blown fascism?

The essay quoted Yeats’ famous poem, asserting that “the “rough beast” Yeats envisioned has already been born. “It could not be clearer that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  “Where is the center in such a time?”

Where is the center between the First Amendment and a government that seeks to control speech, assembly, and the media and is filled with Christian nationalists who want to establish a state church? Between the rule of law and a president who asserts, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States”? Between protecting the right of all citizens to vote and seeking to repeal the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander to an absurd degree? Between consumer protection, environmental protection, scientific and medical research, and countless other government functions and maintaining the social safety net created in the 1930s, 1960s, and since and striving to “Take America Back” to the 1920s, the first Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, or even farther? Between a president ordering the prosecution of anyone he does not like and equal application of the law? Between corruption on a previously unimaginable level and honest government? Between a fact-based examination of our history and making up a past to suit the ruler? Between government of the people, by the people, and for the people and government of the people, by an unchecked leader, and for the billionaires? 

As the essay concluded, the center is not always in the middle. The GOP fringe has been planning the current takeover since the 1970s. And as it has moved the party farther and farther to the right, the center— the midpoint between two ends — moved in the same direction.

Today, to be “progressive” is to be “woke” to that reality–and to refuse to move to that far-right midpoint.

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Will We See A Dummymander?

I have a theory. Bear with me…

Trump is clearly concerned that Republicans will lose the House–and even, possibly, the Senate–in the 2026 midterm election. Because he’s Trump–aka stupid– and because he always opts to cheat rather than compete, he is pressuring Red state Republicans to engage in mid-cycle gerrymanders that he believes will add “safe” districts in those states and protect Congress from a Blue midterm victory.

My theory is that–rather than a traditional gerrymander–we may see what has been dubbed a “dummymander.”

Let’s look first at Texas, where state officials who bow to every Trumpian command have already completed their obedient mid-cycle redistricting. Several observers have pointed out that those revisions incorporate assumptions based upon data from the 2024 election–an election in which a larger number of  Latino voters than expected supported Trump. Current polling suggests that those voters have changed their minds–and that far from building on that incursion, Trump is now deeply underwater with Latinos in Texas. Republicans in that state are now worried that the new districts that mapmakers drew to be “safe”–based in large part upon data reflecting that unusual (and fleeting) Latino vote– are actually likely to make several existing districts competitive. 

Here in Indiana, the reluctance of several Republican lawmakers to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander has been attributed to integrity (stop laughing!)– to the acknowledgement of those lawmakers that doing Trump’s bidding would constitute a wrongful and arguably unlawful “rigging” of the electoral system. Perhaps some of the members of Indiana’s pathetic super-majority do actually have consciences, but I think their reluctance is more likely based upon a recognition that Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering has already reached its demographic limit.

What do I mean by that?

After the last legitimate redistricting, I had coffee with a political science colleague who had examined the data the Republicans had used to draw their district lines. He noted that they hadn’t added any new safe districts, and attributed that decision to the fact that the populations of rural Indiana–the source of GOP dominance–have been thinning out. As a result, there simply weren’t enough reliable Republican voters to support creation of an extra “safe” district–doing so would endanger incumbents in the current districts.

The emptying out of rural Indiana has continued.

Furthermore, there’s another defect in the data our Republican overlords use to draw those district lines. As I’ve frequently noted in these posts, gerrymandering is first and foremost a voter suppression tool. The current, presumably “safe” districts are home to a number of Democrats, Independents and unhappy Republicans who simply haven’t been voting–they’ve been convinced that their votes wouldn’t make a difference, a conclusion supported by the lack of a Democratic candidate in many of those districts. (Disengagement from the democratic process isn’t unique to Indiana–the number of Americans who failed to vote in the last Presidential election was larger than the numbers who voted for either candidate–a shameful statistic.) A new gerrymander would begin with the use of data incorporating the absence of those disaffected voters from the polls.

But as investment advisers like to remind us, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

In this case, thanks to the Trump administration’s ongoing war against democracy and the Constitution, millions of Americans have become newly engaged. Indeed, evidence of that sizable public blowback is what has prompted Trump’s gerrymander push.  The millions of protesters insisting that America has “No Kings”–see you there tomorrow!– and the millions of Americans who participate in the growing number of weekly spontaneous protests aren’t likely to stay home next November. Assuming Democrats and Indiana’s newly active Independents give them a choice, a lot of those so-called “safe” districts won’t be safe.

My theory is that even the dimmer members of Indiana’s GOP super-majority have figured this out, and that their reluctance to do a mid-cycle redistricting isn’t just based upon the likely negative public reaction to such in-your-face cheating, although that does worry some of them.

It’s based upon a recognition that–as they say in those rural precincts–pigs get fed, but hogs get slaughtered.

 My theory (and yes, my hope) is that a mid-cycle redistricting, if it occurs, will turn out to be a dummymander.

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An Insider Analysis

America’s “chattering classes”–to use Molly Ivins’ apt phrase for the pundits who pontificate on our social and governmental aches and pains–come in two broad categories: inside and outside.  Commentary by members of both groups ranges from puerile to perceptive, but I think there is a special value in the observations and regrets of former Republicans who belong to the “old too soon, wise too late” category.

Stuart Stevens is one of the “Never Trump” Republicans who have reacted to the current assault on constitutional democracy by reassessing their own complicity with the darker elements of the party’s history. Stevens published a recent essay in Lincoln Square that confronted today’s realities with insights derived from his years as a GOP strategist, and several of those insights speak to many of us who once believed the party’s rhetoric.

Stevens began by posing a question we’ve all asked: How did this happen? How did we get to a place where a major American political party is controlled by one man–a man who doesn’t have to worry about Republicans in Congress exercising their governing prerogatives?

To call it partisanship is to call Ebola an airborne virus like the flu. It’s both true and woefully inadequate. The level of subservience in the Republican Party is unlike anything we’ve known in American politics. Running for office is often humiliating, inevitably exhausting, rarely enjoyable. You must suffer fools to an enormous degree and do so while feigning interest and appreciation. All of these Republican Senators and Congressmen endured the dehumanizing gauntlet of election only to come to Washington and do what? Whatever it is Donald Trump requires.

Stevens looks back at the devolution of the GOP over the decades, and finds a system that increasingly “rewarded compliance and punished independence. The path to advancement was to go along, to wait your turn.” And he acknowledges the party’s growing reliance on racism.

Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has operated as a homogenous white party, with non-college-educated white voters the dominant subgroup…. To win an election, you had one simple task: appeal to white voters. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Over the last fifty years, no Republican has been elected to the House of Representatives, Senate, or won a governor’s race who did not win the majority of the white vote.

One of Stevens’ most perceptive observations is aimed at the numerous pundits and political operatives who constantly bemoan what they see as the Democratic Party’s lack of messaging savvy. As he notes, it’s much easier to message to a monolithic base than to the wildly diverse voters who range from disaffected Republicans to Democratic socialists.

It’s often said that Republicans are better at messaging, but it’s a false standard. It’s easy to stage a successful concert for an audience that likes the same kind of music. It’s much more difficult to do the same for a crowd that enjoys very different types of music.

That homogeneity has allowed the GOP to create what Stevens calls “a top-down hierarchy.”

Like a corporate headquarters laying out a marketing strategy for regional offices, a political party that needed to appeal to the same demographic for victory gave candidates no reason not to echo its message. You were graded within the party on your ability to articulate the proscribed message and penalized for being “off message.”

That process, Stevens writes, “curates a particular kind of candidate.” Those who advance are those who are willing to follow and conform. Deviation was punished.

And what about the values the GOP extolled? Free trade. The importance of character. Family values. A muscular foreign policy. Personal responsibility.

As Stevens and many others have concluded,  those supposed bedrock values turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.

When Donald Trump looked at the Republican Party, he saw through the artifice of values and understood it was a party of followers. The soul of the party was conformity, not values. The “family values” party would embrace a three-time married casino owner who talked in public about dating his daughter if he could give them power. The most “conservative” element of the party that was the fiercest opponent to the Soviet Union and an expansive Russian Federation would become the beating heart of the pro-Putin movement in American politics.

So here we are. The GOP has been bleeding non-racists and non-conformists for at least two decades. It is now–as Stevens notes–a homogeneous White cult. The problem is, in a system that privileges two major parties, the intellectual and moral collapse of one of those parties is a big problem.

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An Interview Worth Your Time

Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket recently interviewed Rick Wilson, the Never Trumper who established the Lincoln Project. The transcript of that interview (linked) is lengthy, but it really is worth your time to read in its entirety. If you haven’t that time, or the inclination, I’ll focus on some highlights.

Wilson defected from the GOP when he realized the party had gaslighted him.

All of us jaded, cynical consultants were actually the guys who really believed everything we said, like the Constitution, the rule of law, personal responsibility, and integrity. The rest of the party was like, whatever comes next that gets us to the next job, we’re going to be with it. And then Trump was that. I just decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it.

He also understands something that far too many progressives do not–that you can’t have a policy debate with a man who is totally uninterested in issues–and you can’t argue policy in a GOP that lives in its own preferred ‘reality.”

I think two things happened to the Republican Party. The first was the emergence of a separate populist conservative subculture. It came out of talk radio, and it came out of right-wing media on Fox and elsewhere. It came out of the rise of social media where people were suddenly able to pick and choose the news they got, pick and choose the world they wanted to have represented to them. Politicians suddenly realized in the Republican party that the incentive structure was to go further out, to be crazier. To raise money, you needed to be the guy who was on Fox. To be on Fox, you had to be the guy who was the crazy guy. And they’re on a hamster wheel of that. So the perverse incentive structure inside the party was the opening act of it.

Wilson notes that most Democrats don’t understand how to debate someone who is not motivated by ideas or policy preferences, and he criticises  Democrats who tend to enter the political debate by saying something like  “Check out page 74 of my climate change plan, and then you’ll be convinced.”

In what may be his most significant observation, Wilson attributes the solidity of the Republican base to the fact that “it’s not a political party anymore. It’s a cultural movement, and it wraps up nationalism, populism, fascist adjacency, white nationalism. It’s a culture, and it’s hard to convince somebody in a culture to change that culture over a policy.

Even though the things that the Republican party has done to working-class voters in the last 12 years has been horrific, and as an ex-Republican, I can tell you that it’s horrific, they still believe that the cultural thing — and that’s God, that’s guns, that’s gay rights stuff — that an awful lot of this country that are not in coastal cities, that are not college graduates, that are not folks who are politically tuned into MSNBC or CNN or Fox every day, they feel like the culture around them is changing in a way they don’t like.

Trump offered them an easy solution: “I’ll be the enemy of your enemy. I’ll hurt the people you want to hurt. I’ll hurt the people you think are hurting you.” And that offer, that deal that he made, was a culture deal. You’re seeing them play it out right now with the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing. You’re seeing them play it out in the censorship regime they’re trying to impose because a lot of the things in that culture, they are connected only to the branding of America, not to the reality. They don’t believe in a pluralistic republic based on democratic principles. They believe in a Christian nation. They believe in a nation where authority figures like Trump have power because that will make it easier to hurt the people they don’t like.

The interview also contained some hopeful observations.

Donald Trump is so much weaker than you think. He is right now 26 points underwater on inflation and prices….  right now, the economy is unspinnably bad for a lot of his voters. When you go into the grocery store or Target or Walmart or the gas station, prices are not down, and you can’t spin that away….

His polling numbers right now are so far below where they were in the first term, and they’re so far below where Biden’s numbers were at this time in the beginning of his term, where we had roaring inflation. We’re going to go into 2026, unless there’s some unforeseen economic miracle, with an economy that’s dragging on Donald Trump pretty badly. An economy that is saying, “Okay, we tried your tariff game, it didn’t work.” And all these Republicans who backed Trump on this do not have the immunity that Trump has from reality with his voters…

The laws of political gravity still apply down the ballot. So we’re going to go in with an environment where a change election is in the wind. And a change election means that it’s not going to be, as the DCCC thinks, we’re going to fight it out over six or seven seats… We’re going to fight it out over 25 or 30 seats if Trump’s numbers continue to remain so low… He is an unpopular president, and the Republicans have defined themselves by only one thing: being Trump’s guys. They don’t represent people in a district anymore. They’re just Donald Trump’s representative from the fourth congressional district of Missouri or whatever…

He’s a boat anchor right now in terms of ratings and politics. The big bad bill is having very nasty impacts out there on rural hospitals. People are getting how bad it is. We’re in the middle of a real estate collapse in about seven or eight Sunbelt states right now, which we’re pretending it’s not happening … across the deep south in the Sunbelt, we’re about to have a real estate collapse. That is a very bad political outcome for Trump. A lot of these Republicans are also still trying to sell immigration as a net win, but it’s also destroying our agriculture system around the country and raising food prices. There are all the components here for a Democratic sweep of the House.

You really need to read the whole thing, or you can watch the full interview here.

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An Intriguing New Non-Party

I’ve frequently posted about the multiple negative effects of Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering. One of the most pernicious of those effects has been voter suppression–the tendency of Democrats and Independents who live in “safe” Republican districts to stay home on election day. If you think the result is foreordained, why bother?

In Indiana, the Democrats’ decision not to bother running candidates in many of those “safe” districts has only increased that disengagement. When there is no competition, we shouldn’t be surprised when there is minimal turnout. And Indiana has long had depressingly low voter turnout–last time I looked, we were near the bottom of all states.

This situation has produced a depressingly widespread opinion that progressive candidates (even moderately progressive, as in not committed crazies or Christian Nationalists) have no chance in Indiana. Donors who support Democrats send their dollars elsewhere; discouraged Democrats don’t bother casting ballots.  (Worse still, in many rural districts, many faithful longtime Republican voters who are unhappy with incumbent officials nevertheless cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.)

A new organization has decided that the basic problem in the Hoosier State is that lack of competition. 

The folks who have organized Independent Indiana looked at the data, and discovered that during the last couple of election cycles, over 200 candidates had run for offices in Indiana as Independents. Of that number, 52% won their races, an astonishing percentage. (In contrast, Democrats won 36% of theirs…)

The goal of Independent Indiana is to encourage and support Independent candidates–and to give voters in those gerrymandered districts a choice. 

The organization recently held an informational meeting, and I attended. After introductory remarks from Nathan Gotsch, the Executive Director, and the introduction of board members and a recent operations hire, Nathan introduced a panel consisting of three mayors who had won their elections as Independents. Their comments were enlightening. 

Tom Saunders had formerly been a Republican state representative; he is now an independent on the Lewisville Town Council. As he explained,
“I felt like my party was leaving me, and I wasn’t happy…Toward the end, my conscience wasn’t agreeing with me. I wasn’t sleeping at night, and it was time to come home.” (Many former Republicans can underscore his discomfort…) As he said, “I think I could have run as an independent and gotten elected to the legislature, but my advisors and the people who gave me money said no.” 

Saunders ran for his city council and won. He also had some harsh words for Republicans who are proposing a mid-cycle gerrymander.

“The worst thing that’s happened to the state is the supermajority where we don’t hear the other side’s concerns.”

“If redistricting happens, I think it does open it up [for independents]. If I was 20 years younger, I would [run for a larger office as an independent. My wife might divorce me, but I would.”

“Republicans need to go back 30 years and look what happened the last time they tried this. Democrats walked out, the plan backfired, and Republicans lost seats. I think it’s a mistake.”

Richard Strick, another panelist, is an Independent who has been mayor of the Republican stronghold of Huntington since 2020. As he told the gathering, “We don’t just need independent candidates. We need independent thinking in both parties — left and right officials who know when to put party aside to do what’s needed. At the end of the day, especially at the local level, it’s about delivering and getting results. People will give you a chance if they think you’re sincere and have their best interest at heart.” He enumerated the benefits of independence, noting “you don’t have to be married to an ideology. I’m 100% responsible for what I say and do.”

The third panelist was Shawna Girgis, who served as the Independent mayor of Bedford from 2008 to 2019. She pointed out that the first time she’d run, Republicans quietly told her they were glad she was in the race. “By my second and third campaigns, people were open about supporting me because they saw the results.” She also noted that running against extremists and ideologues can be a bonus: “Sometimes having people work against you is the best thing that can happen. They’re the wrong people with the wrong message, doing the wrong things consistently. That only helps you.”

You can see a video of the entire event here.

As the new Operations director noted, Independent candidates do best in states where there’s no competition–where there’s one party rule. Even people in the dominant party feel unrepresented. 

That sure describes Indiana, where polls reflect that even most Republican voters are unhappy with the Christian Nationalists and culture warriors who currently dominate our government.

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