The GOP’s Political Excavations
Will Rogers once advised: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” This piece of homespun wisdom seems to have eluded the Republican Party which for the last forty years has been figuratively digging itself into a hole. It has done this first by greatly expanding the disparity of wealth between America’s business owners and those who work for them. More recently, it has compounded its problems by maximizing the gerrymandering of Congressional districts and thereby turning them into havens for radical politicians. The results have been a shrinking and disaffected popular base and a radicalized Congressional caucus. This is not only bad news for the GOP, but also for our entire nation, placing its democratic system of government in jeopardy.
As far back as I can remember, the GOP has been the party of self-starters and rugged individualists. In a nation on its way to becoming an industrial powerhouse, the GOP understandably became champions of business owners and opponents of public welfare programs. Its philosophy of unbridled capitalism seemingly worked well until it culminated in the Great Depression. The Depression greatly undermined the public’s confidence in the GOP; it also prompted the Democratic Party to add to the GOP’s humiliation by adopting its theme song: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” In a very real sense the GOP’s embrace of unbridled capitalism was its First Great Political Excavation.”
The nation was led out of the Depression by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal which strengthened the role of the federal government in running the nation’s economy and in providing for working class Americans through a plethora of social welfare programs. World War II also helped to make our nation a more egalitarian society by solidifying the notion that a nation does best when its citizens work together and try to help each other. These developments were amplified by Lyndon Johnson’s “Fair Deal” and led to the trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater’s resounding defeat also caused a small group of Republican political strategists (sometimes referred to as “Movement Conservatives”) to devise a new strategy for rebuilding the GOP.
John Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election had revealed the power of television in shaping the outcome of political elections. It had also underscored the importance of financial resources in harnessing public media. These lessons would be factored into the GOP’s new strategy. It would create a symbiotic relationship with the business community in which Republican politicians would seek to channel the nation’s wealth into the hands of business owners by reducing their taxes and freeing them from business regulations that reduced their profits. In return, business owners would provide financial support for the election of Republican politicians.
To keep the nation’s finances in balance Republican politicians would seek to roll back social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare which had been adopted during the preceding Democratic administrations. The GOP’s new strategy also called for embracing southern whites who were disaffected by the Johnson administration’s passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Another facet of the GOP’s strategy was to take control of the nation’s judiciary so as to eliminate, or at least minimize, those laws and regulations that limited political campaign contributions and required election law changes to be pre-approved by the Department of Justice.
Fully implementing this new strategy would take almost 50 years, but after 20 years it was already starting to work reasonably well. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts and repealed numerous federal regulatory schemes. In addition by the conclusion Bush’s presidency, the GOP had managed to take control of the U.S. Supreme Court and it was poised to play its critical role in disposing of the laws and regulations blocking the full implementation of their strategic plan.
At the same time, however, the strategy began to unravel. Although it had enabled the GOP to become flush with cash, it had also given birth to the seeds of its own destruction in that it had left American wage-earners increasingly dissatisfied. Yes, the U.S. economy had grown from $3.2 trillion to $48.5 trillion in the nearly three decades since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, but the wealth of all but 20% of American families had grown only marginally. This reality was made even more apparent in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 when banks and major businesses were bailed out by the federal government while working class Americans were largely left to fend for themselves.
The GOP leadership was stunned in 2008 by the election of Barack Obama, a one-term black senator, over John McCain, a white senior senator and war hero. It responded to this defeat in by adopting its “red state” strategy which recognized that the GOP had become a minority party and that it could best preserve its political power by seizing control of state governments. It thus directed its considerable fund-raising prowess to electing GOP candidates to state legislative and executive offices. It would then seek to solidify those gains by gerrymandering election districts, a plan made easier when the U.S. Supreme Court’s newly acquired conservative majority began its attacks (more fully described below) on the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed during the Johnson administration.
Even though the Obama administration tried to rebuild the U.S. economy, its efforts were undermined by staunch opposition from Congressional Republicans. Their political strategy not only consisted of vilifying Democratic leaders, but also doing everything in their power to prevent the Obama administration from actually improving the lives of those Americans who had not benefited from Republican economic policies. In this way they could claim that the Democrats bore at least equal responsibility for plight of the working class. Faced with the likelihood of continuing Democratic rule presided over by Hillary Clinton, Republicans leaders in 2016 reluctantly accepted their primary voters’ choice of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee.
While Republican politicians did so thinking that Trump, a businessman with no political experience, could be counted on to do their bidding, this turned out to be a major miscalculation. Rather than simply follow the strategy that had worked for their party over the preceding three and a half decades, Trump chose to focus his campaign on the fact that the federal government had not been working for the benefit of most Americans. He called it “the American Carnage” and vowed to “Make America Great Again.” He did not, however, point out his party’s dirty little secret; namely, that its policies had been the primary cause of the unhappiness of working class Americans.
Trump, of course, was not wrong when he argued that a malaise had taken over the country, leaving average Americans at a distinct economic disadvantage. In doing so, he pointed his finger at Washington politicians who were more focused on advancing their own interests over those of the people they were chosen to represent. After seeing their livelihoods deteriorate for over three decades, working class Americans were ready to take a gamble on electing a boisterous and crude Washington outsider who promised to champion their interests. This was an opportunity too good for Trump to resist. Even if he lost the election, the recognition that he would achieve as a presidential nominee would supercharge his various struggling promotional activities like Trump University, Trump Golf Resorts, Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks. To the surprise of the Republican politicians who had nominated him, Trump won the 2016 election and used the presidency to further promote his image as the champion of Americans who were being betrayed by their government.
Unfortunately, much of what Trump did during his presidency was detrimental as he made an absolute mess of combatting the Covid pandemic and presiding over the nation’s economy and foreign policy. He even did grievous damage to the rule of law (something many of the people who worked around him are now admitting). Most importantly, he undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of the press and the very government over which he had presided. Still, he somehow succeeded in becoming a cult leader, capturing the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Republican voters. Perhaps it was because they simply wanted to believe in Trump, viewing him as the only person who could restore the nation they had learned to love. It may also have been because Trump had been aided by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets who found it in their own economic interests to cater to those who were clinging to Trump as their savior.
Republican politicians are now faced with the uncomfortable reality that its inmates are in charge of their asylum. Rather than the party’s leaders setting the agenda for governing the nation, the members of their voting base, whom they had short-changed for the previous 40 years, are now dictating policy through their messiah, the Oracle of Mar-a-Lago. The problem is that neither Republican voters, nor Donald J. Trump, have any idea how to govern the nation. Even more troubling, Trump doesn’t even care whether the nation (like his misbegotten casino empire) thrives or collapses as long as he can find a way to make it benefit him. As a result, “the Party of Ideas” has now become “the Party of Chaos.”
The GOP’s leaders (a term which only loosely applies) must now figure out how they can proceed relying on a disenchanted voting base that now represents a minority of the nation’s registered voters. In 2013, after seeing his party lose the popular vote in five of the six previous presidential elections, Reince Priebus, then the Chair of the Republican National Committee, addressed this issue in a study which he entitled “Growth and Opportunity Project”(sometimes referred to as “The Autopsy”). In that publication he asserted that his party needed to broaden its political base which he suggested could be achieved by moving away from its concentration on maintaining control of “red states” and reaching out to minority communities and supporting immigration reform. Priebus’ proposal, however, never got very far.
Republican legislators from “red states,” most of whom owed their political success to gerrymandered election districts, were reluctant to put their seats in jeopardy by adopting a pro-immigration agenda. Such a move would surely upset their carefully-chosen constituents. This position was made clear in 2014 when Congressional Republicans killed immigration reform legislation. Then, in 2016, the notion of expanding the GOP’s voting base was finally laid to rest with Trump’s election and his quest to put a halt to immigrants entering our country via its border with Mexico. Thus, if Republicans were going to resurrect their party by expanding their appeal to immigrant voters, they would have to scale a mountain of opposition within their own party.
Trump had his own solution to his party’s diminishing voter appeal. He would openly reach out to disaffected whites (whom Hillary Clinton had undiplomatically referred to as “a Basket of Deplorables”) and repeatedly encourage them to use violence to preserve their dominance in U.S. politics. He was an avid admirer of foreign dictators and a vociferous supporter of gun rights. This led him to preach a gospel that our nation’s government had been taken over by elites who looked down upon working class whites. Thus, it was no accident that white supremacists regularly showed up at his rallies. Nor was the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol a spontaneous uprising; it was the culmination of a four-year campaign to convince disgruntled whites that violence was the only way that they were going to save their country from the liberal elites who championed the cause of black and brown-skinned people.
Trump did a masterful job at energizing Republican-leaning white voters in the 2020 elections, garnering more votes than any prior presidential candidate. At the same time, however, he had an even greater effect in motivating Democratic leaning voters, losing to Joe Biden by more than seven million votes. The GOP had another chance to reform itself when the House Democrats voted to impeach Trump for his role in instigating the January 6th insurrection. That opportunity, however, was squandered when only seven Senate Republicans voted to convict Trump, leaving him even more firmly in control of (what had become) HIS party and determined to vindicate his claim that Biden’s victory was achieved by fraud.
Almost immediately after it had become apparent that Trump had lost the 2020 election, the GOP doubled-down on some of its previous strategies. First, it picked up on Trump’s contention that the 2020 election had been stolen and used that assertion to justify a number of its tried-and-true voter-suppression techniques. It made voting by mail more difficult by limiting the number of ballot drop-boxes. For example, the largest county in Texas (Harris County encompassing Houston) with over 2.5 million registered voters was limited to a single mail ballot drop box. In New Hampshire, mail ballots were totally eliminated. Republican controlled states also began to limit voters who could even request mail ballots and required that such requests had to be renewed during each election cycle (every two years).
They also made it more difficult to register to vote and increased their efforts to purge their voter rolls. In this connection at least eight Republican controlled states dropped out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) which supported voter registration and helped member states to eliminate duplicate voter registrations. A number of red states mandated tougher voter ID requirements. Others limited the number of days and hours that the polls would be open. They also sought to restrict vote harvesting and made it easier for votes to be challenged. Another voting reform imposed criminal penalties on election officials who failed to implement the new voting restrictions. Even these anti-democratic tactics achieved little because other states (including some swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada) enacted legislation making voting easier.
Republican controlled states also doubled-down on their efforts to control the election of state and federal legislators by engaging in even more extreme gerrymandering. Adding to its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (in which it had held that changes to election laws no longer had to be pre-approved by the DOJ), the U.S. Supreme Court issued two additional rulings that eased restrictions on gerrymandering. In 2019 it decided Rucho v. Common Cause in which it held that political gerrymandering does not impinge on the Constitutional right to vote; and in 2021 it decided Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in which it held that challenges to voting laws based upon racial discrimination outlawed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act require a showing that the legislature intended to violate that statute.
Gerrymandering election districts, however, does not come without costs. Skewing election districts to enable a party to secure greater legislative representation than its share of the population would seemingly justify is highly undemocratic and tends to motivate voters who are being hurt by it to express their displeasure at the polls. Therefore, while gerrymandering may help to elect additional state legislators and the U.S. House representatives, it also tends to have an adverse effect in state-wide elections. Perhaps more importantly, it tends to radicalize the persons serving in gerrymandered election districts. This is because those individuals face no realistic threat in a general election and are forced to take more extreme positions in order to secure their party’s nomination.
The GOP’s increasing reliance on gerrymandering is also not likely to extricate itself from its long-term problems of a shrinking and out-of-control voter base. As a stop-gap measure, the GOP also stepped up its efforts to distract and energize its existing cadre of voters. To this end, it gave voice to a chorus of complaints over rising fuel, food and housing prices. It also ratcheted up its culture wars (see, “The Latest Casualties of the Culture Wars”). These measures have at best only a momentary effect, and, like Trump’s calls for political violence, may only serve to make the GOP’s strategic position worse.
In his February 2021 New York Times column David Brooks recommended that the GOP embrace democracy, patriotism, truth and intellectual honesty. These suggestions seem wholly alien to the political party Brooks had supported for the previous 30 years. That party now embraces authoritarian leaders, Trump’s Big Lie, countless conspiracy theories and the notion that working in a bipartisan manner is somehow anti-American. All of this probably explains why Brooks is a political columnist and not a politician.
Last week the GOP’s problems became both more immediate and more acute. A small group of right-wing Congressional Republicans, in an unprecedented move, ousted Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Almost immediately, the House was adjourned for a week so that Republican House members could agree on a replacement for the defrocked McCarthy. This has left the House Republican conference in total turmoil with no clear successor and no one likely to be able to quell the chaos and make the House even minimally functional. Although McCarthy was able to negotiate the suspension of the debt ceiling and the adoption of a 47-day continuing resolution to keep the federal government open through Thanksgiving, those absolutely essential actions were so unpopular within his own conference that they precipitated his ouster.
At this point, Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan have announced that they would like to become the next Speaker; and Donald Trump has given Jordan his endorsement. Neither of these individuals, however, is likely to be able return the House to a productive mode. Jordan is a Trump acolyte and will likely devote himself to carrying out Trump’s wishes which seem to be limited to stopping the DOJ from prosecuting its two criminal cases against him. Such efforts would be a total waste of time as they would surely die in the Senate. Scalise is a staunch conservative and a close colleague of McCarthy. Therefore, unless House Republicans undergo a radical transformation, his tenure as the Speaker would not likely be any more successful than McCarthy’s. All of this makes one wonder why any House Republican would even want the job. Remember, two of McCarthy’s Republican predecessors (John Boehner and Paul Ryan) voluntarily gave up the job of trying to preside over a majority conference that was being sabotaged from within by a handful of extremists elected in highly-gerrymandered election districts.
Hakeem Jefferies, the House Minority Leader, has extended an offer to those Republicans representing Congressional districts won by Biden to join House Democrats in a bipartisan coalition. While such a coalition could prove productive, it is little more than a pipe dream as any Republican House members accepting Jefferies’ offer would immediately be targeted for extinction by their own party. In effect, they would have to place their country over their political careers, a choice which few members of Congress seem willing to make.
The current chaos gripping House Republicans is only going to exacerbate the GOP’s problems of trying to fashion a long-term survival strategy. There’s an immediate need to extend funding for the federal government as well as for the U.S. to supply military aid to Ukraine and Israel. A failure to successfully address these highly-pressing issues is only going to further undermine the American public’s confidence in the GOP’s ability to govern. Accordingly, even those relatively modest legislative goals appear to be out of reach. In addition, the GOP’s current campaigns to outlaw abortions, to ban books and to attack the civil liberties of minorities are going to further reduce its appeal to an American population that has grown tired of dysfunctional government. The time for the GOP to stop digging is again overdue.