Tag Archives: GOP

Trading Places

Many, many years ago, I joined a Republican Party that no longer exists. I was attracted to it–despite its longtime extreme-right “fringe”–because its rhetoric and philosophy was mainly that of classical liberalism: limited government, the rule of law, and the social contract.

Limited government, by the way, is not the same thing as small government–classical, 18th Century liberalism stood for limiting the ability of government to intrude into areas of citizens’ lives where government doesn’t belong. Determining where to draw that line has always been subject to debate, of course, and the GOP of my time was, admittedly, too often willing to pass intrusive  laws against “sin,” and resistant to necessary business regulations.

Back then, however, most Republicans took pride in the party’s history: the party of Lincoln had been the anti-slavery party while the Democrats had ruled the South and defended the ownership of some humans by others.

Over the years, America’s two major parties have essentially traded places, and I am only one of the many Republicans who realized that the party had morphed into something that had very little in common with the one we’d originally joined.

I thought about just how complete that switch has become when I read a recent column comparing Jared Polis, the Governor of Colorado, with Ron DeSantis of Florida, by Jennifer Rubin.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a 2024 presidential aspirant, has told cruises how to run their businesses. And he has threatened to raise taxes on Disney in retaliation for speaking out against the hateful “don’t say gay” bill. These are things you might expect from a petty authoritarian such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban or defeated former president Donald Trump, who threatened companies that didn’t kowtow to his administration.

Now, DeSantis wants to go after the board of directors of Twitter. “We’re gonna be looking at ways the state of Florida potentially can be holding these Twitter board of directors accountable for breaching their fiduciary duty,” he bellowed on Tuesday.

In response to DeSantis’ assaults on businesses in his state, Colorado’s Jared Polis tweeted

Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector are driving businesses away. In CO, we don’t meddle in affairs of companies like @Disney or @Twitter. Hey @Disney we’re ready for Mountain Disneyland and @twitter we’re ready for Twitter HQ2, whoever your owners are.

The GOP pooh-bahs who constantly talk about “freedom” clearly don’t understand what freedom is. (Hint: it isn’t “freedom” to refuse a vaccination so that you can infect your neighbors, or “freedom” to pick on people of whom your church disapproves.)

Rubin defines it properly.

Polis also understands how powerful “freedom” can be — freedom to run your company, freedom to raise your child (and seek legitimate medical care for them), freedom to choose not to give birth to a child, freedom for teachers to teach about civil rights without being sued, freedom to cast a ballot in the most convenient way for each voter, freedom to learn math. It’s remarkable how much control the GOP wants to exercise over every aspect of Americans’ lives and the economy.

Indeed, in abandoning classic liberalism (limited government, the rule of law, etc.) in favor of an authoritarian, theocratic model, Republicans have defied an essential feature of democracy. This is what scholar Yascha Mounk describes in the Atlantic as “the recognition that there is a sphere of life in which everybody should be able to do what they like without having to worry about anyone else’s opinion.” Having decided that America’s identity is White, Christian and straight, the MAGA right now spends an extraordinary amount of time and effort stretching the power of government to boss around everyone else.

Classical liberalism limited the role of government to actions necessary to protect citizens from others’ wrongdoing. Government could–and should–prevent businesses from dumping toxic waste in the river or cheating customers; government should prevent the selfish or heedless from harming others.

Barry Goldwater famously said that government didn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom (he won an award from PFLAG, the LGBTQ rights organization.) Today’s Republicans are intent upon invading both.

Looking back, I think it’s fair to say that the GOP of my day believed in over-restraining government. (When Nixon established the EPA, it was seen in some quarters as a betrayal of Republicanism.) Today’s version, however, has totally abandoned any respect for freedom, civic equality and the rule of law.

DeSantis, Abbott and their ilk define “freedom” as the right of businesses to support their hateful policies and the right of citizens to obey their dictates.

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From Here To Autocracy

Increasing numbers of Americans are worried about the erosion of democracy. Most of us–this writer included–feel powerless to do much about it; we follow the news, and bemoan what seems like the inexorable drip-drip-drip of melting democratic norms.

One of the most recent drips was the spectacle of GOP incivility and bullying during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As I heard the posturing and antics of Cruz, “Miss Lindsey” and others, I couldn’t help recalling Dick Lugar’s explanation of his vote for a Clinton nominee (I no longer recall whether it was Breyer or Ginsberg); although he had  some philosophical differences with the nominee, Lugar said something along the lines of, ” Absent serious and well-founded concerns, a President is entitled to his choice.”

Now, opposition isn’t even grounded in philosophical differences; it is purely partisan–and  manifests itself in ugly and (patently false) “discourse” unworthy of the Senate.

This performative exercise was a taste of what we can expect if the GOP wins control of the Senate. It was just one more “drip” on the road to autocracy.

Some months back, an essay from the Washington Post outlined the “markers” along that road.

Democracy is most likely to break down through a series of incremental actions that cumulatively undermine the electoral process, resulting in a presidential election that produces an outcome clearly at odds with the voters’ will. It is this comparatively quiet but steady subversion, rather than a violent coup or insurrection against a sitting president, that Americans today have to fear most

Five sets of actions fuel this corrosion: limiting participation in elections; controlling election administration; legitimizing and mobilizing social support for methods to obstruct or overturn an election; using political violence to further that end; and politicizing the regular military or National Guard to delegitimize election outcomes.

The essay identified 18 steps to democratic breakdown and indicated how worrisome a threat the authors considered each.

They identified the willingness of the current Supreme Court to validate efforts to restrict voting–and the inability of Congress to pass voting rights protections–is ominous omens, and found state-level efforts to control the administration of elections equally ominous. They described efforts to put officials in place who would be willing to make decisions that subvert election outcomes as one of the most concerning of all actions that contribute to democratic breakdown.

Citizens should also be on the alert for

Governors, state election boards or commissions appoint, or voters elect, chief election officials who are sympathetic to false claims of voter fraud and willing to use their position to undermine confidence in election results, create new voting regulations or interpret election rules to partisan advantage.

We need to keep an eye on the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, “where Republican candidates who publicly supported partisan audits or other actions to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election are now running for secretary of state or other statewide offices.”

The essay also warned against the “Independent State Legislature doctrine”–a doctrine that would move the country back toward the Articles of Confederation. (It was recently endorsed by creepy Indiana Senator Mike Braun.) That doctrine

interprets the Constitution as enabling legislatures to make final determinations about the outcomes of federal elections. A blueprint for such an effort appears in a memo drafted by attorney John Eastman after the 2020 election to try to convince Vice President Mike Pence that there were legal grounds to overthrow the election results. This would provide social backing for courts ceding power to the states to control elections.

Since the article was focused upon elections, it didn’t explore the multiple other dangers posed by this particular doctrine–including the fact that its adoption would  facilitate elimination of most civil liberty and civil rights protections in states where Republicans control the legislatures.

The essay also wanted readers to be aware of well-funded and organized efforts to draft model laws and file legal briefs that support the engineering of election outcomes; of incidents of overt coordination between law enforcement officers and militia groups; and   politicians voicing support for the use of violence and political intimidation in service of political ends.

Political elites undermine accountability for prior acts of political violence in ways that decrease perception about the costs of future violence. Making statements minimizing the Jan. 6 attack, obstructing efforts to investigate it and failing to punish politicians who supported it would fall into this category, as would punishing those politicians who support investigations.

There’s more. If you want to elevate your blood pressure, click through and read the whole thing.

And do everything in your power to get out the vote–and to protect the mechanisms for counting the votes that are cast.

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The Fundamental Disconnect

The headline on this post isn’t intended as a double-entendre; fundamentalism is, admittedly, disconnected from reality, empiricism, science and (often) common sense, but the disconnect I’m referring to is the one highlighted in that recent roundtable published by the New York Times that I’ve been referencing.

The discussion centered on the takeover of the Republican Party by its fringiest elements, and it began by considering the vast difference between Democratic and Republican strategic foundations. The Democrats–according to the Opinion writers participating in the Roundtable–are operating on the belief that political success means trying to enact widely popular policies and then running on that basis. As the moderator noted, that certainly isn’t the Republicans tactic.

The thing that strikes me about these Republican bills is that they’re staking ground on some things that are not necessarily popular with the majority of voters. That would seem to suggest to me that there’s political risk in doing them, but instead these laws have been copied from G.O.P. statehouse to G.O.P. statehouse. Why do you think that’s happening, in your view?

To which Ezra Klein responded, I think accurately:

So I think there are a couple of levels you can think about these bills on. One is to think about what you might imagine as the modal Republican strategy for a year like this. Every Republican could spend the next couple of months just saying, “Huh, gas prices are pretty high, aren’t they?” And that would be it. They would win the midterms. It would be done.

And instead, the Republican Party, in part due to the incentives of modern media, in part due to the example offered by Donald Trump and how he shot to prominence and then ultimately to the presidency, has become extraordinarily attention-hungry among its rank-and-file legislators. And so if you can create the next culture-war kernel by passing a really brutal piece of legislation — and these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help — then you can catapult to the center of the national debate.

So I don’t think Mitch McConnell wants to be having this conversation. I don’t think Kevin McCarthy wants to be having this conversation. I think they want to talk about how Joe Biden is a failure. But the Republican Party doesn’t have that kind of control over its own structure and its own institutional members now. And so at a time when there’s a lot of tailwinds for them, they are nevertheless pulled along by the more extreme and attention-driven members of their own caucus.

Pete, who often comments on this platform, has pointed to the powerful role of entertainment in American politics and governance, and the “attention” hypothesis would seem to confirm his observations. As Jamelle Bouie observed, it’s a strategy supported by the huge media infrastructure of the Right–not just Fox, but as he says, ” a broad constellation of outlets and different modes of delivery that allow them to, if not shape a message from its inception, then shape how its supporters receive any given message or any given piece of information.”

I used to tell my Law and Policy students that most of what I learned in law school could be reduced to a single axiom: He who frames the issue wins the debate.

Implicit in the above Roundtable analysis is a big question: can Republicans’ hysterical attention-getting frame and win the midterm debate? It’s hard to disagree with Klein and others when they say that running on policy–no matter how popular–no longer works, if it ever did.

So what should  those of us horrified by these unhinged people do?

I live in a bubble populated mostly by thoughtful, sane people. We have our policy disagreements, but if–and it is admittedly a big if–the people in my bubble represent majority opinion in America, perhaps Democrats should accept the GOP’s framing, and run against that. After all, look at what the GOP stands for in 2022: pushing gays back into the closet, forcing births, banning books, rejecting accurate history, racism (insulting  and maligning an eminently qualified Black female jurist and preventing Black folks from voting)….basically, today’s GOP stands for the embrace of QAnon conspiracies, rejection of science, and strengthening the hegemony of fundamentalist White Christian males.

If the folks in my bubble are representative of the majority of Americans–and survey research says they are–let’s accept the challenge. Let’s fight the midterm battle on the grounds the attention-getters have staked out. For once, the bottom-feeders who have framed this debate are unlikely to win.

If I’m wrong about that, we’ve really lost America.

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The Return of Anita Bryant

Most readers of this blog are old enough to remember Anita Bryant, and her campaign to “Save Our Children” from those wicked gay people.  Over the years, she’s become something of a punch line, at least in the gay community. To appropriate a line from the movie Jaws, however, “she’s back!” Not in the flesh, of course, but in the antics of state-level GOP political figures like Ron DeSantis.

The return of Republican focus on–and antipathy to–equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans was highlighted in a recent roundtable discussion among New York Times  opinion writers.

That discussion included a number of penetrating observations, and I will be posting about a couple of them in future posts. But today, I want to share what I believe are well-founded concerns about what appears to be a foundational issue for Republican culture warriors.

One of the participants in the Roundtable, Jane Coaston, addressed that issue–return of  the GOP’s assault on LGBTQ rights.

 I went back to some old Times pieces talking about the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney, because Disney started offering same-sex health care benefits in 1995. I think that for anyone who is L.G.B.T. and over the age of 30, this all seems very repetitive.

Ezra Klein, another Roundtable participant, identified a “challenge” to the strategists of the G.O.P.– he pointed out that the party has “this wave of people” who have begun screaming, “OK, groomer,” at literally any L.G.B.T. person on the internet. Despite the fact that traditional conservative outlets like National Review are warning politicians not to say things like that, “no one’s listening.”

He’s right. Bloomberg reports that Republican legislators have proposed at least 325 anti-gay bills this year, with about 130 targeting transgender rights. Twenty-seven became law in 2021;  so far this year, seven have passed.

As Coaston noted,

 These issues have to do, one, with a conceit of what L.G.B.T. people are and how L.G.B.T. people become L.G.B.T. I think we’ve seen over the last couple of days, some social conservatives who essentially argue that bills like in Florida, which keep being posited as being about sex ed — they aren’t about sex ed. There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.

Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.

Coaston made another important point about this particular part of the GOP’s culture war: the attacks on trans children aren’t separate and distinct from attitudes about gay rights generally. These “warriors” are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell. 

That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.

In this blog, I frequently note the ways in which today’s GOP is dramatically different–and far, far more radical–than the party most of us once knew. An exchange between Coaston and Klein highlighted that difference…and was chilling. Coaston characterized today’s GOP as a “secular fundamentalist religion– “QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.”

Klein responded:

Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else…

As Klein also observed, countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes–the crazies– in their political parties.

Republicans not only haven’t done that policing, they’ve become their fringe. And LGBTQ people aren’t the only ones they endanger.

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The Sad Morphing Of The GOP

Last weekend, I ran into an old acquaintance from my days in Republican politics. When the conversation turned political, this former longtime Republican ward chair said he was now an Independent –and hadn’t voted for a Republican in several years.

Anecdotes, as we all know, aren’t data, but I’ve had numerous, similar discussions with friends I made during my 35 years in Republican politics, including several former Indiana office-holders. All of them echoed my own assertion that “I didn’t leave the party–the party left me.”

The bottom line is that–whatever you want to call today’s GOP–it is absolutely nothing like the party we all worked for those many years ago.

I don’t think “regular” people–those who haven’t followed partisan politics very closely or routinely taken note of the policy positions of candidates over the years–realize just how radically different  today’s GOP is from the party of Hoosier Republicans like Richard Lugar, Bill Hudnut, and Bill Ruckleshaus. (Occasionally, when I was teaching, a student would come across my first book–“What’s a Nice Republican Girl Like Me Doing at the ACLU?”–and express shock that I’d been a Republican. I’d assure them that the GOP they saw –the only GOP they’d experienced–was a dramatically different animal from the one I’d once worked for.)

Catherine Rampell recently remarked on that dramatic about-face in a column for the Washington Post.She noted that the GOP no longer argues that free markets, rather than government, should choose “winners and losers.” Instead, for today’s Republican politicians, the role of the state isn’t to get out of the way. It’s to reward friends and crush political enemies.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham expressed the new ethos in a recent monologue threatening companies that advocated for LGBTQ rights, ballot access, racial justice and sundry other political stances that are anathema in today’s GOP.

“When Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table,” Ingraham warned. “Your copyright, trademark protection. Your special status within certain states. And even your corporate structure itself. The antitrust division at Justice needs to begin the process of considering which American companies need to be broken up once and for all for competition’s sake, and ultimately for the good of the consumers who pay the bills.”

As Rampell notes, this philosophy isn’t limited to Fox News pundits. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis–irate at Disney’s criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill–is threatening to cancel Disney’s status under a Florida law that has enabled the company to effectively govern itself within the bounds of its theme parks for some 50 years.

Similarly, last year, DeSantis signed a (likely unconstitutional) law to punish tech companies for privately determined content-moderation decisions, and another law that fines private companies that attempt to set vaccination requirements in their workplaces.

In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike.

Trump, of course, understood the Presidency as a platform for rewarding his friends and punishing his (many) enemies. And the GOP–now the party of Trump– is “attempting to codify these responses into law, using the power and weapons of the state against those who disagree with them.”

Perhaps the most striking departure of today’s GOP from the party that used to bear that name is the nature of those disagreements. Today’s GOP has no discernible economic or social policy agenda–only culture war. What was once a political party is now a White Nationalist cult waging war on non-fundamentalist Christians, non-Whites, LGBTQ people and, of course, those despised “elites” (i.e., educated Americans of any race or religion.)

So–will the sad and pathetic remnants of a once “Grand Old Party” go the way of the Whigs? The Hill recently considered the possibility, giving several reasons for anticipating such an outcome.  One was that both pro-Trump and anti-Trump folks are departing, (the former finding the party insufficiently Trumpian). Another was the fact that corporate and major donors are fleeing the party.

And why would average Americans want to identify as Republicans? Soon, they must defend a party that acquitted their president after he incited a deadly insurrection to overturn a certified election based on his “Big Lie.” The Republican identity crisis is defined by its new “membership card slogan” reading, “We stand for shredding the Constitution’s impeachment clause and nullifying lost elections.”

It’s pretty clear that something has to give. The unanswered question is: will that something be America’s constitutional democracy– or today’s GOP?

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