Tag Archives: GOP

A Must Read

A friend who knew me many years ago when I was an active Republican recently sent me a link to an open letter written by political novelist Richard Patterson, to friends he identified as “mainstream Republicans whose mainstream has run dry.”

The letter is not one of those tiresome partisan screeds that we see–and will undoubtedly continue to see– throughout this (interminable) election season. He begins by acknowledging the reasons his friends disagree with both Clinton and Sanders, and the fact that the Democrats and their candidates are far from perfect.

But to compare the two parties at this time in our history is to indulge in false equivalency. For rationalizing the GOP’s pathology by responding with a partisan tit-for-tat is not adequate to the circumstances. The sins you perceive in Democrats are the usual ones — misguided policies, ill chosen means for dubious ends, and the normal complement of rhetorical dishonesty and political squalor. However mistaken you may find Clinton and Sanders on the issues, their debate is addressed to the world as it exists and therefore open to a sensible critique. The squalor to which the GOP has sunk, an alternate reality rooted in anger and mendacity, transcends mere differences in policy, threatening the country with profound, perhaps irreparable, damage.

This is not simply about Donald Trump. For Trump is not the result of forces which will come and go, but of a deterioration within the Republican Party that has been accelerating for years. The GOP has become a Frankenstein monster, assembled from dysfunction, demagoguery, myopia and myth, nurtured in a fever swamp where lies and hysteria kill off reason. Nothing better will arise until you help drive a stake through its heart.

In the remainder of the article, which really, really is worth reading in its entirety, Patterson traces the evolution (okay, devolution) of the GOP. He notes that his own Republican friends–like so many of my own– are not like the extremists who occupy that “fever swamp.”

Patterson documents the increasing rage of a GOP base that had been repeatedly promised an end to abortion, defeat of gay rights, and implicitly, the continued dominance of White Christian Males–only to see that none of it had been delivered. He then catalogues the response of the GOP establishment to that anger:

The GOP countenanced a race-based birtherism directed at our first black president, giving Donald Trump a political foothold. It nurtured xenophobia that targeted all Muslims at home and abroad. It pretended that illegal immigrants were poisoning our economy. It aped the mindless masters of talk radio and trafficked in conspiracy theories. It embraced Tea Party dead-enders who claimed that shutting down the government, at whatever cost, was the only answer.

In Congress, the party resolved to deny Obama reelection by grinding the legislative process to a halt, then blaming him for gridlock as if its tactics played no role. Political polarization polluted foreign-policy — as when all 300 Republicans in Congress turned the Iran deal into a political wedge issue, shunning the careful consideration it deserved in favor of shrill and simpleminded denunciations. In the world of the GOP, our many and complex problems had but one misbegotten cause: that Barack Obama was president.

So-called mainstream Republicans competed to fan the flames of outrage, poisoning political discourse. Typical was the establishment’s darling, Marco Rubio, who claimed that Obama was not simply wrong, but trying to destroy America as we know it. Republican politics became not faith-based, but hate-based.

There is much more. If you don’t read anything else today, click through and read Patterson’s letter in its entirety. Especially if–like me–you remember a much, much different, much more responsible, much saner GOP.

It’s Sunday. You have time.

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Maybe We SHOULD Run Government Like These Businesses…

Political Animal had an interesting item a few days ago, pointing out that American businesses are increasingly uncomfortable with the supposedly “business-friendly” strategies being pursued by the GOP.

It isn’t just business’ pushback against retrograde anti-LGBT measures, either; recently, 51 New York millionaires asked Governor Cuomo to raise their taxes, and there has been a mass exodus of large corporations from ALEC–mainly as a response to that organization’s denial of the reality of climate change.

Most recently, several corporations have expressed concern about participation in this year’s GOP convention–at least, if Trump looks likely to be the nominee.

The discomfort of savvy businesses with the increasingly radical positions espoused by Republican officeholders has led President Obama to pursue an interesting strategy:

When President Obama initiated his “pen and phone” strategy, a big part of the effort was aimed at convincing the private sector to do what Congress refused to tackle: raise the minimum wage, embrace paid family leave, hire veterans, ban the box, implement policies that mitigate climate change, expand access to broad band, etc. The President’s recent trip to South by Southwest was a call for engagement of the tech industry in addressing challenges like improving access to voting and countering ISIS recruitment strategies online. Interestingly enough, he’s had more success with these efforts than he has with Republican legislators.

If these trends continue, we may finally be seeing what some in the punditry have long been predicting– collapse of the never-comfortable alliance between the pro-market, pro- business, “country club” Republicans who are generally fiscally conservative and socially moderate (or even socially liberal), and the Religious Right extremists who have come to account for so large a portion of the GOP base.

The 2016 election may be the last for the GOP in its current iteration. We can only hope that–once the smoke clears–America ends up with a responsible, adult center-right party that can engage productively with the Democrats’ center-left philosophy, and once again give conscientious citizens a thoughtful and meaningful policy debate.

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It’s Not Just a Card–It’s the Whole Deck

Speaking of the “race card”….

As Donald Trump has continued his march toward the Republican nomination, pundits and political historians alike have tried to explain his emergence. One of the most cogent of those explanations appeared in the Guardian, in a lengthy, well-researched article tracing the trajectory of racism and political calculation in the United States.

After describing the events leading up to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the article referenced Lyndon Johnson’s well-known quote:

“I think we just gave the south to the Republicans,” he told his staff after ramming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. His aide Bill Moyers recalled the moment in more drastic terms: Johnson feared he had delivered the south to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine”, a prediction whose proof, while not yet conclusive – we are happy that Mr Moyers is still with us – has trended ever since toward prophecy.

Fast-forward to Nixon, and the “southern strategy.”

What was needed was white backlash with a kinder, gentler face. Years later, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, by then an operative in the Reagan White House, would explain the essence of the “southern strategy” to an academic researcher:

You start out in 1954 by saying ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger’.

The article details how Nixon refined the strategy and Reagan perfected it. It also describes  the way in which the GOP “establishment” used that racism to distract from a more plutocratic agenda–engaging in a “bait and switch” operation that won elections and then ignored the base that delivered those victories.

Enter Donald Trump.

While the other Republican contenders keep their xenophobia within the bounds of acceptably cruel political discourse, Trump blows it out: his racist rants play like full-fledged operas compared to the dog-whistle stuff, shredding the finely honed code that’s worked so long and so well for the GOP establishment. But that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage.

Paul Krugman has an abbreviated version of that same history in a recent New York Times column.

How does a party in thrall to a basically unpopular ideology — or at any rate an ideology voters would dislike if they knew more about it — win elections? Obfuscation helps. But demagogy and appeals to tribalism help more. Racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors aren’t things that happen now and then, they’re an integral part of Republican political strategy.

Krugman takes up where the Guardian leaves off, and completes the history of the southern strategy.

During the Obama years Republican leaders cranked the volume on that strategy up to 11 (although it was pretty bad during the Clinton years too.) Establishment Republicans generally avoided saying in so many words that the president was a Kenyan Islamic atheist socialist friend of terrorists — although as the quote from Mr. Rubio shows, they came pretty close — but they tacitly encouraged those who did, and accepted their endorsements. And now they’re paying the price.

For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created.

If we’re lucky, America won’t be destroyed in the process.

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An Intriguing “What If?”

A recent op-ed in the New York Times posed an intriguing possibility–Republican voters who are frantically looking for an alternative to The Donald might opt for Gary Johnson, a former Republican Governor of New Mexico. (At least he has more government experience than Trump.)

Johnson was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President last time, and  is likely to be their candidate again in 2016.  Supporting him would solve the biggest problem facing those who are advocating a third-party or independent presidential campaign.

The biggest hurdle anti-Trump Republicans must overcome, aside from finding a candidate willing to go into the wilderness for them, is getting on the ballot. The presidential election system is a patchwork of state deadlines and ballot requirements. Ralph Nader, who critics say helped usher George W. Bush into the White House by running as a Green Party candidate in 2000, is extremely familiar with the ballot requirements, having been booted off the Pennsylvania ballot in 2004. While Mr. Nader is happy to rail against the “two-party tyranny” of the American electoral system, he thinks starting a third-party run at this point in the election season a near-impossible goal.

“It’s almost too late, unless you’re a multibillionaire,” Mr. Nader said. “Other than just a tailored two- or three-state approach, I don’t see it happening.”

There was a time, twenty or twenty-five years ago, when the Republican Party was beginning its change from a big-tent major party into the extremist, litmus-test amalgam of resentment and reaction that it has become, that the Libertarians had an opening–an opportunity to step in and gather up those members of the GOP who were increasingly uncomfortable with the party but not inclined to join the Democrats.

Here in Indiana, I knew several former Republicans who were trying to make the Libertarian Party the logical alternative–to appeal to Republicans whose “small government” rhetoric was genuine– not of the “keep government out of my boardroom but not out of my bedroom” variety–and whose anti-welfare beliefs encompassed crony capitalists as well as impoverished single mothers.

It didn’t work then, because the base of the Libertarian Party was in-your-face pro-gun and anti-drug-war. (Today, ironically, most Americans probably agree about the drug war.) Any softening of those positions would have led to a wholesale abandonment by the party’s base–but a failure to move even a bit toward more “mainstream” positions frightened off the disaffected GOP prospects.

This is probably not the Libertarian moment, either. We are seeing too many examples of what happens when government is neutered, or wholly-owned by private interests. (The water in Flint, the crumbling infrastructure in Indiana, etc. etc.) If the pendulum is swinging, it’s probably swinging in the other direction.

But the great virtue of libertarianism as a philosophy is that it forces us to ask an all-important question: what should government do? What is the role of the state?

Just as there are things that–I would argue–government must do, there are things that government should not do, decisions that government should not make. Think how refreshing it would be to have those discussions, those debates–free of the propaganda, self-dealing and hypocrisy that characterize (and attempt to mask) today’s efforts to gain power and advantage.

It’s an intriguing thought.

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Stop the World–Mike Pence Wants Off

Religion News Service reports on an interesting recent survey in which people were asked about the purported conflict between religious liberty and civil rights for LGBT Americans.

The short version? Most Americans oppose religious exemptions to LGBT non-discrimination laws.

The details?

  • 71 percent– including majorities in all 50 states and 30 major metropolitan areas — support laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations.
  • 59 percent oppose allowing small-business owners in their state to refuse service to gay and lesbian people, if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs.
  • 53 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, compared with 37 percent (including most evangelical Protestants and Mormons) who oppose it.

Even among groups opposed to same-sex marriage, support for protection from discrimination crosses all “partisan, religious, geographic, and demographic lines,” according to Public Religion Research Institute CEO Robert P. Jones.

The survey results demonstrate something that many of us have suspected: opposition to civic equality for LGBT folks is not coming primarily from religious denominations or organizations. (Click through to see the breakdown.) Anti-gay bias is primarily a political position, not a religious one, and the difference between the political parties is stark: the survey found that 74 percent of Democrats but only 40 percent of Republicans support civil rights protections for LGBT citizens.

Of course, that’s little comfort for those of us who live in blue cities located in bright red states like Indiana.

In our gerrymandered state, it would take a lot of organization, a lot of energy, and a truly superior “get out the vote” effort even to reduce the legislative super-majority enjoyed by the GOP. But those of us who disapprove of the legislature’s failure to add four words and a comma to the state’s civil rights law—and those of us embarrassed by our Governor’s homophobic and theocratic impulses—do have the opportunity to send a very clear message to the political establishment by decisively defeating Governor Pence this November.

Unlike the majority of religious folks, Mike Pence hasn’t come to terms with social progress. It isn’t just LGBT Hoosiers; his views on education, the environment and women are wildly at odds with the views of most of our citizens. His disinterest in the nitty-gritty of governing, and the damage he’s done to the state’s business climate, make him eminently beatable.

Maybe we can’t stop the world to let him off—but we can retire him and get on with the business of making Indiana a state that welcomes everyone.

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