The Devolution of the Republican Party (Or How Trickle-Down, Pro-Corporate Politics Weakened America): Part II
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It is easy to forget just how extraordinary the Biden-Trump 2024 rematch is. This election cycle is probably going to be the most memorable one we will ever see. The first rematch of two Presidents since 1892. The first rematch any two party nominees since 1956. Two men in their late 70s and early 80s are facing off against each other. The Republican nominee has 91 indictments. The Democratic President has overcome history on so many ends — including the better-than-expected 2022 midterms. And the RNC is dealing with massive layoffs, and is likely going to be stuck paying for Trump’s many (“bigly”) legal bills. That alone could have a big impact down ballot for the Republican Party.
Although Trump makes it to be the world is on fire because of Biden, here is a little Reality Check between the records, just so everyone knows for this cycle. Trump’s 2nd term vision of retribution is the centerpiece of what we will now cover here.
The Republican Party has now fully devolved from reality. It went from promoting a conservative agenda to pushing Trump’s personal vendettas. Again, what happened? All this brings us to Part 2 of our series: how the Republican Party learned to stop worrying about governing and came to love pure obstructionism and gridlock.
In the last post (Part I), we talked about the Republican Party’s conservative vision, which was largely a bust for the American people. The neoconservative consensus and status quo it built in DC paved the way for right-wing populism and isolationism in the form of Donald Trump. And it makes sense.
Whether it was No Child Left Behind, or Social Security privatization efforts, postal reform, the refusal to expand Medicaid with the Affordable Care Act, or Paul Ryan’s ironically-named “A Path to Prosperity,” the American people have suffered greatly under this conservative vision. Trump did speak to some of this discontent — and yet (like the true con he is) — he at the same time continued the status quo by repealing Dodd-Frank, and sabotaging the workings of government agencies like OWCP and OSHA. Trump’s model is the reason conservatives are hard at work trying to undermine institutions like the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Still, like I have said in my last post, many in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) — particularly Bill & Hillary Clinton and their proteges like Gina Raimondo — gave significant wiggle room for Republicans to enact their conservative/neocon agenda, to the chagrin of the Democratic base. Luckily, it seems that hopefully Democratic leadership will not be making the same mistake twice.
There is also a rise of anti-governing attitudes overall in the Republican Party. Say what you want about Reagan; he cut government, but he did govern. He did know what the workings of government were. He did know his purpose for being the President was to at least try to represent the entire country. He knew he had to balance working alongside Democrats and getting things done with conservative wins that would rally the Republican base. And beyond instances like the time when he said that “trees pollute the air,” he was generally level-headed.
His successor, George H.W. Bush, was a moderate Republican president who earned the dislike of Gingrich hardliners. In fact, in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries, Bush once rightly called Reagan’s economic vision “voodoo economics.”
I sometimes wish Democrats took some branding notes from Republicans. But anyways, George H. W. Bush was a much more sensible hand in governing than even Reagan. And even George W. Bush tried to govern with a universal emphasis on “compassionate conservatism” that included everyone.
That vision was, unfortunately, dead in a matter of years. Conservative governance did evolve — into right-wing theatrics and party obstructionism for electoral ends. It started in the House of Representatives under Newt Gingrich. He rose to power by calling the other side mortal enemies aiding and abetting America’s adversaries like the Soviet Union. Rising up in the ranks, he became the House GOP leadership, and brought into power allies made in his image during the 1994 Republican Revolution. The new Gingrich Republicans were more partisan, more adversarial, more combative, and less interested in governance.
Beyond the actual agenda items, the gridlock never seen before resulted in one of the longest government shutdowns in recent memory, and culminated in what was largely a bogus impeachment quest. But the lessons were moot. The quest for power was justified in 1994, and the Gingrich Way was to be the new climate of the House of Representatives.
For members who jumped up to the Senate, they brought that combat to the chamber as well. It was even more blunt in the Obama presidency. Against the wishes of Democratic leaders, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the late Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, President Barack Obama wanted to work in a bipartisan fashion with Republicans. He could have rolled over Republicans with the majorities he had — and he probably wishes he had done so, as the others recommended. But he wanted to extend an olive branch to the GOP, a sentiment that Bobby Jindal seemed to clumsily express in his 2009 SOTU response. Yet Republicans had a different plan in mind.
Whether it was elder statesmen, House Young Guns like Eric Cantor (who, despite cynically appeasing radical Republicans to try to become Speaker, will never become House Speaker after losing his own primary in 2014), or Paul Ryan, they all gave the same directive: oppose everything proposed by the President. It was that simple. They were told to “just say ‘no.’” Never support the President’s agenda. When Obama wanted to compromise, the House GOP was to play him like a fiddle to stall, stall, stall his agenda items. Even Obamacare.
The Senate GOP played that same game, with the goal, in Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s own words, “…to make Obama a one-term President.”
It did help their electoral prospects in 2010 and 2014. And it helped Trump too. The Tea Party ran Capitol Hill. But what did it do for everyone else?
We had more filibusters grinding up the process of governing, breaking all kinds of records (not to mention a melodramatic reading by Ted Cruz of the Seuss classic Green Eggs & Ham). We had more government shutdowns, the threat of debt default that routinely threatens our credit ratings even today, and more name-calling and personal innuendos than ever. Congressional sessions became less and less productive in the Tea Party era. Some wanted to impeach Obama throughout his whole term. The holding of Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 (then doing the opposite for Trump in 2020) raised questions about even the Court’s credibility, as it looked more and more like a nakedly partisan institution for diehard conservatives.
The Trump era has put that on steroids. The Republican Party today is nothing more than Donald Trump’s personal cult. It relies entirely on the obstructionism approaches fine-tuned by the pre-MAGA movements (they did not even have a party platform in 2020). Trump tells them what to do, and they do it. There is no better example of this than the rather generous border bill compromise, as Senator James Lankford — once called “the most conservative Senator in America” — can attest to.
Their only goal during Biden’s term is “stopping Biden’s agenda” with their full devotion and commitment, as McConnell put it so eloquently early in 2021. Again, nothing new here; Mitch just replayed the Obama presidency playbook. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy quickly followed suit, refusing to even recognize President Biden as our duly-elected President.
Is it no wonder that, in great contrast to Democrats, Republican have not gotten anything done? So little, in fact, that “moderates” like Tony Gonzales and Freedom Caucus rogues (i.e., Chip Roy) are both criticizing the “New Do-Nothing” GOP leadership in Congress.
Markwayne Mullin, meanwhile, was too busy prepping for a fistfight during a congressional hearing. What was Tommy Tuberville’s military blockade doing for you? That’s the choice on the ballot in 2024.
The GOP is a party completely separated from reality. They still deny the existence of the climate crisis. They say people should carry rocket launchers. They once said you can have “legitimate rapes.” They say the LGBTQ community is “filth,” and runs pedophile rings. They say “rake the leaves,” and the forests won’t be on fire. They say the vaccines will implant microchips in our brains. They say wokeness (and not Reagan-era cuts) has caused the decline of our nation’s education system. They even say that the 2020 and 2022 elections were stolen — even though many other Republicans not named Donald Trump won, including in the states he himself lost.
Then they deny that January 6th was an insurrection, or even a riot, plotted by Trump supporters and encouraged by a Trump watching it on TV. Yet even that is not the peak of the Pizzagaters of the world. To them, we live in a world where our government may have orchestrated 9/11. To them, we live in a world with “Jewish space lasers,” a dead (and maybe resurrected?) Hugo Chavez who swings elections to Democrats, a George Soros who funds terrorist groups like Boko Haram, a mythological New World Order, and a Taylor Swift in cahoots with the “New World Order.”
We Democrats are apparently criminal masterminds. By the way, we have not even touched on Trump’s history of insane conspiracy theories, also available on the web.
The days when respected conservative leaders led the Republican Party, from Bob Dole, to John Boehner, are gone. They have been purged out. This is today’s Republican Party. This will be the Republican Party on the ballot in 2024. A party out of touch, out of reality, and out of the mainstream of what Americans want and need.
And that is the only choice on the ballot in 2024-between this MAGA Republican Party, and the Democratic Party led by President Joe Biden.
