The Dissolution of the Republican Party, and of What Else?
Photo Credit: Mike Stone/Reuters
The Donald is blowing the GOP to pieces. In a way it’s gratifying to watch – they’ve been playing with the ugly undersides of things for generations now and are getting their comeuppance. But no matter what happens in the fall, we’re all sure to be paying for it for a long time to come. And we Democrats seem destined to have our own challenges in coming back together this season as well.
I am persuaded by people whose opinions I respect that there’s something to be wary of in this. (I’ve added some emphasis in places.)
Elizabeth Drew, in the New York Review of Books: After Tuesday: The Ugly Truth:
With the results of [last] Tuesday’s nearly dozen contests, most of them in the South, both parties are well on their way to having their candidates. But they’re a long way from having internal peace. The collapse of the Republican Party, which has been foreshadowed since last fall, if not before, is now taking place before us. The probably unstoppable candidacy of Donald Trump—who won seven states on this so-called Super Tuesday—bears witness to the broad rebellion against the Republican Party establishment. …
All sorts of maneuvering is going on to attempt to rescue the Republican Party, but its leaders face a major conundrum: how to transmogrify themselves. Can Republican members of Congress and in the upper echelons of the party hierarchy possibly understand that they are the problem, that the breakdown stems from an institutional detachment from reality—and from a failure to understand today’s Republican base? The leadership had proceeded on a number of illusions: that the base could be mollified by making unfulfillable promises—to repeal Obamacare and balance the budget—while their own emphasis was on cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations, paring entitlements, expanding trade, and helping out businesses that want cheap immigrant labor. They thought that they could toy with racism—a strategy that began with Richard Nixon—without it capturing the party.
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Our political system has only so much elasticity. Pull it too hard and it can break. The consequence of a break could be authoritarianism—the temptation toward which is in evidence now—or chaos, which would likely encourage authoritarianism. Hillary Clinton is the one major candidate taking care not to overpromise. But my guess is that way inside she knows the obvious—if she wins in November, the Republicans will seek to undermine her just as they did her two Democratic predecessors, including her husband. Our problem now is that the political parties—and their followers—seem to have forgotten that the role of politics is to resolve differences.
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It is the radicalization of the Republican party — not just in terms of ideology but also in an utter rejection of the norms and civic culture underlying our constitutional system — that has been the most significant and consequential change in American politics in recent decades. Tribal politics fueled by partisan and social media leaves us with a good vs. evil view of democracy and a visceral hatred of the opposition party.
There is another factor that is less ideological and more strategic: the phenomenon of the permanent campaign in a competitive environment. Republicans in Congress — from the day of President Obama’s inauguration in 2009 — pursued a strategy of unified opposition to every Obama policy and initiative, including those they had recently supported, such as investment in infrastructure, health care reform and climate change. They also worked with their counterparts in cable television and talk radio to demonize every victory and to delegitimize the president.
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The most promising route to a healthier democracy and less dysfunctional government almost certainly runs through the electoral process. Yet democratic accountability is not easily achieved during a period of polarized parties, divided government and hotly contested national races on an ever-diminishing competitive terrain, especially when that process is rigged to prevent decisive outcomes. The Trump disaster, especially if it leads to a Democratic sweep of the 2016 elections, may provide the basis for a major rethinking and realignment of a deeply dysfunctional Republican Party.
Then again, it may not.
Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect: Constitutional Crisis and Political Stalemate:
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The essence of the constitutional crisis is that one of our two parties, the Republicans, has stopped conceding the legitimacy of the Democrats. This has been building for decades, but it became critical under Obama.
The Republican leadership, and most of the 2016 presidential field, basically don’t concede that Obama is a legitimate President of the United States. You see this in charges of his alleged Muslim religion and foreign birth and his supposed radicalism. (Obama is basically a centrist and instinctive compromiser—well to the right on key issues of such presidents as Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even Nixon and Eisenhower.)
The Republican refusal to even consider a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court is only the latest example, and it comes on the heels of several threats to shut down the government or to refuse to roll over the national debt if Obama did not give in to Republican demands, a scorched-earth tactic that dates back to the Speakership of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
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In political science, the concept of legitimacy is essential to a functioning democracy—in two senses: Legitimacy means that the authority of the government is accepted as earned rather than being a function of brute force; and it means that one party accepts that the other is loyal. For one party to deny the legitimacy of the other has not happened since the Civil War, when Southern Democrats were literally traitors to the Union, and the South viewed Lincoln’s Republican Party as an occupying army to be resisted by every means including force and assassination.
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So we have a constitutional crisis—one party destroying the ability of the government to govern, combined with a crisis of our democracy at a time when we need government to act.
Republicans, as far-right corporate conservatives, have pursed this strategy knowingly and cynically, in the hope of weakening government and its capacity to regulate and to collect taxes. They have perfected a dog-whistle strategy in which appeals to racism are couched as a rejection of political correctness, producing support by working class voters for policies that don’t really serve their interests.
But be careful what you wish for. This vacuum of functioning democracy in the face of mass frustration was ready-made for the emergence of a demagogue. And for Republicans, the appalling thing about Donald Trump is that he is no conservative.
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