Splintering the Republican Party

Copyright TheDailyBeast

I grew up in a Republican family.  My father loved President Eisenhower and voted for Richard Nixon in 1960.  When the Kennedy family emerged and Civil Rights and the Vietnam War became the central domestic topics, my father transitioned to being a Democrat.  Still, many of the country's most popular politicians were Republican--Everett Dirksen, Lowell Weicker, Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield, Gerald Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge II, Howard Baker, Margaret Chase Smith.  Illinois, where I was raised, had a very popular Republican senator, Charles Percy.

I remember watching the Watergate Senate Committee hearings in 1973, and I marveled at how the four Democrats and three Republicans worked so well together.  I thoroughly admired Senators Weicker and Baker.  Weicker was a liberal Republican and Baker a moderate Republican, both of those ideologies extinct in the federal government today.  Now there are only conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate.  How did that happen?

When my father was a Republican, he was a traditional establishment Republican, who supported capitalism, free markets, less federal regulations, more individual rights, tax cuts and a strong defense.  Those were the tenets of mainstream America in the 1950's, after the dark years of World War II and the Korean War.  Then in 1964, Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was so far to the right that he was described by many as a Libertarian, and he was soundly defeated.  He was too far to the right for many Republicans, but still he espoused pure conservative views, without any association with the religious right.  He was famous for saying that he believed in the separation of church and state.  He was easily defeated by Lyndon Johnson.

Republicans returned to power in 1968 with a more moderate choice, Richard Nixon, and he was re-elected in 1972.  Although he moved the country forward in some ways, such as opening up China via ping-pong diplomacy, he turned out to be a colossal crook.  When he left office, Gerald Ford became the first president of our country who was never elected to a national office.  He lost the 1976 election by a slim margin, primarily because of a poor economy, the fall of South Vietnam and the pardoning of Richard Nixon.  But there was another reason why he was not elected.  Serious discord had arisen within his own party, brought about by his primary challenger, conservative Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had nominated the unelectable George McGovern in 1972.  His candidacy was marred from the beginning, when he failed to even vet his running mate (Thomas Eagleton) properly, and he lost 49 of the states against Nixon.  In 1976 Democrats turned to a relatively unknown Southern governor for their candidate, and Jimmy Carter was elected.  He was a moderate, smart, soft-spoken man who ran budget surpluses in three of his four years as president, but Carter was doomed for a second term because he raised taxes and was somehow blamed for the Iran hostage crisis.  It's interesting to note that the Democrats were even more divided in 1976 than the Republicans were.  Sixteen (!) people announced their candidacy for the office, and eight of them actually won primaries, including George Wallace, Morris Udall and Jerry Brown.  Carter was the best compromise candidate in a widely-divergent party.

Enter Ronald Reagan in 1980.  In his eight years as president, he set the Republican party on a course that has resulted in where the party is today--fragmented, heavily evangelical, obstructionist and angry.  Conservatives lauded his approach to economics, where he advocated tremendous tax cuts, which he said would lead to economic growth, better jobs and prosperity for the middle and lower economic classes, but his "trickle-down" plan never worked.  The tax cuts greatly contributed to the national debt, and the wealthy never allowed their prosperity to trickle down to the masses.  He ran a budget deficit in all eight years of his presidency.

In addition, most people forget what a bigoted, divisive course Reagan set the country on.  He was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, proposed a Constitutional Amendment to bring prayer back into public schools, was a frequent opponent of abortion rights, and aligned himself with notorious racists, like Pat Buchanan, Jessie Helms and Rev. Jerry Falwell.  The LGBT community still blames Reagan for doing nothing during the first seven years of the AIDS epidemic.

Consistent with these far-right biases was Reagan's belief in states rights--that a state should be able to create a law that the federal government could not interfere with if the U.S. Constitution did not explicitly contradict that law.  It is that concept that brought about the American Civil War and the secession of Southern states, which believed that their laws governing slavery should not be impacted by any federal laws.  The dramatic shortcomings of states rights have always seemed obvious to me, although the Republican party is as much in favor of states rights now as it was in the 1960's.  For instance, the party would like to see the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would throw the issue of abortion back to the states.  Several red states would then ban abortion.

All of these policies brought together strange bedfellows in the Republican party during the 1980's.  The fiscal conservatives were joined by libertarians, who pushed individual rights, and by evangelicals, who pushed religious rights.  They were also joined by all of the white supremacist groups in the country.  Think of what a strange mix that is!  Fiscal conservatives favor corporations and wealthy individuals in their economic policies, while evangelicals are often poor or lower-middle class citizens on the economic scale.  White supremacist groups are against, among other groups, blacks, and yet there are many black evangelicals.  Libertarians believe in a low, flat tax and a very low national defense budget, while fiscal conservatives would spend huge amounts on national defense.  To say the least, this was a confused coalition from the start.

In the early 2000's, the Tea Party movement gained a name, after the original Boston Tea Party ("no taxation without representation"), and a major place in the Republican party.  (teaparty.org was created in 2004.)  Originally it was created with the goals of reducing taxes and the size of the federal government, but over the last several years it has expanded into social issues, such as illegal immigration, gun control and same-sex marriage.  The movement is a mixture of libertarian, populist, conservative and evangelical activists.  They are generally considered the most conservative members at any level of government in this country.

The Tea Party is a logical extension of Ronald Reagan's values, but they represent Reagan on steroids.  Their members in Congress, led by people like Ted Cruz, would bring government to a standstill rather than compromise on any issue.  They would decimate dozens of programs, like Planned Parenthood, that help millions of people.  They would marry government with Christian evangelical beliefs.  They are as much, and perhaps even more, against establishment Republicans as against Democrats.

Of course, the Republican party has brought this on itself.  In the hopes of forever courting more votes, the party has steadily migrated further and further to the right.  Moderate Republicans running for office have been eliminated through a process called "primarying," where they are outspent and defeated by the super-PAC's and lobbies, such as the NRA, which back the more radical candidates.  When is the last time you heard a Republican politician speak out against the power of the NRA lobby?

What I've noticed over the last several years is that the Republican party is increasingly run by fear.  Both parties are run by big money, but the Republicans are much more fearful than Democrats.  They fear the threat of terrorists, immigrants, Latinos, Black Lives Matter, gays and any social program that would help minorities.  The Democrats are fearful of injustice and inequality and wrong turns in the economy.  In a Pew Research poll in 2014, Republicans were much more likely to have a gun in their home than Democrats (49% to 22%).  Think of that: half of the Republican households in this country have guns!

What the Tea Party did provide was a gradual avalanche of reasons why moderate Republicans began to consider becoming Independents or (gasp!) Democrats.  The Republican leadership in Congress did not stand up for moderate (traditional) Republican values, like civil rights and separation of church and state, but went along with the Tea Partyers.  This lack of leadership and conviction has driven the party toward the Tea Party wing, which is one thing that has caused the schism in the party.  John McCain was much more moderate before he received the nomination and was dragged to the far right by Sarah Palin and her friends in 2008.  Mitt Romney, for goodness sake, had implemented Romney Care in Massachusetts, which is strikingly similar to Obamacare, and yet Romney beat a swift retreat to the far right to join his partner on the ticket, Paul Ryan, in 2012.  Neither McCain nor Romney would have dreamed of campaigning for the rights of gays or the ban of assault weapons or the continued separation of church and state.

At some point, a moderate Republican has to say, "Which is more important--voting my party or voting my values?"  Ten years ago I actually considered asking a Republican friend if he would vote for Adolf Hitler if his party nominated that person for the presidency, but I refrained from asking the question, because I thought it would be taken as too much of an insult.  Now the Republican party is on the verge of nominating a man who sounds an awfully lot like Hitler, the author of Mein Kampf, which expressed views of a leader who was all-powerful and infallible--sort of a "Make Germany Great Again" treatise.  That political philosophy was based on the fundamental belief that whites are the superior race, and all other minorities are to be driven away, held down or exterminated.  In a country like ours, which is increasingly more diverse, that position has not served the far-right Republicans well, and now the party finds that its top two candidates--Donald Trump and Ted Cruz--are heavily biased against immigrants and Muslims.  None of the seventeen Republican candidates campaigned loudly for a "path to citizenship" for immigrants, although that would have been the wise, inclusive thing to do.  (A couple of the candidates, like Marco Rubio, mentioned a path to citizenship and were quickly quieted by the others.)

The splintering of the Republican party has thus accelerated in the last year, and I suppose we can all hearken back to Abraham Lincoln, who said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."  Look at the millions of people who are supporting Trump.  They are generally disenfranchised people (to use an appropriate term from columnist David Brooks), who are white, less than college-educated and just scraping to get along, and they believe they've been fooled long enough.  They overwhelmingly feel that the Republican Congress has deserted them, and they do not trust the Republican establishment and elite.  They are not especially religious, although some of them are evangelicals.  They believe in individual rights, but not if those individuals happen to be gay or black or Latino or Muslim.  They are conflicted Libertarians.  They believe in the right to carry guns and in an aggressive, overpowering, conquering military, even though that would ensure large deficits in the federal budget--something Libertarians are against.

However, Trump's millions (and I mean people, not dollars) are probably the most honest, sincere people in the entire party.  They don't speak from the head, but from the heart.  Their leader perfectly represents what they believe in, and they don't hold back their enthusiasm or their biases.  They embody the real splintering of the Republican party.  They have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to the recession and other countries, and they're tired of it.  Their senators and representatives generally support foreign trade deals and are against spending money on domestic job bills.  Republican Congresspeople do not see the gaping chasm between those two policies, while their constituents have meanwhile fallen into it.

Losing jobs to overseas workers was not a problem for the United States when my father was a Republican.  There was no disconnect between the party's elite and white blue-collar workers back then.  The policies of the party were consistent with the realistic dreams of families like mine.  That is no longer the case.