Standing Athwart History Yelling Stop

In November of last year a new biography of George H.W. Bush, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, was published. It’s an interesting time to read a biography of Bush-41 given the current state of turmoil in the GOP and Bush’s status as one of the last living links to the more cohesive Republican politics of the past. Towards the end of the book, the author, Jon Meacham, laments the “reflexively polarized” nature of American politics in the first decades of the twenty-first century — how each party consolidates around their extremes, compromise has been made impossible, and the social fabric seems to decay a little more every election cycle — but offers George H.W. Bush as an example of the better politics and politicians of the past.

According to Meacham, Bush’s philosophy and the politics he practiced were based on compromise with political foes, respect for the opposition, used only as a means to serve others, and would be completely out of place in the present day. Essentially Bush is presented as a politician of a bygone, more civil, era. This positive image of Bush as bipartisan and smoother around his edges than his party as a whole can be supported — Bush, while a Republican congressman, had a relationship of mutual respect with President Lyndon B. Johnson, as a congressman he fought for equal housing legislation, he effectively worked with a democratic majority congress during his presidency to pass landmark legislation like The Americans With Disabilities and Clean Air Acts, and his foreign policy achievements are admired from both sides of the aisle. But to say that Bush has not helped shape the current combative state of politics is a lie. Today, while the GOP self-immolates in a blaze fueled by demagoguery, racism and xenophobia, there is a trend of old-guard Republicans jumping ship and painting Trump and the current direction of the Republican Party as way out of their mainstream. I believe this sort of inner-party sniping is mainly about preserving legacies, and Meacham engages in the same behavior on Bush’s behalf in this biography. However, the especially ugly politics we see today are not an aberration from the norm, but the logical product of the evolution of Republican Politics since the early sixties, and this is an evolution in which George H.W. Bush played an important role.

George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Massachusetts in 1924, the product of a marriage between the already prominent Bush and Walker clans. He attended the Phillips Academy and Yale just as his father did, and would eventually get himself elected as Republican congressman for the 7th District of Texas. Bush was a Republican more in the mold of Dwight D. Eisenhower and his father, Prescott Bush, not Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, (though he would support both during his political career) and he struggled at times to mold his personal ideology to fit into a Republican party rapidly moving to the right. For all of his concessions to party orthodoxy and political expediency, such as his opposition to the civil rights act in 1964 and race baiting campaign ads in 1988, he still had a progressive side that often made him a black sheep within his party. Bush was at various points in his political career shunned for his family’s involvement with Planned Parenthood, torn apart by his constituents for supporting the 1968 Fair Housing Act, mocked for his blue blooded Eastern Establishment upbringing and ultimately had the coffin sealed on his political career when he raised taxes in an effort to correct the severe federal budget deficit created during the Reagan Presidency.

Meacham’s book never misses a chance to bring up the fact that Bush was a black sheep in his party, and it begs the question of why? One gets the impression that the author is doing his best to distance Bush’s political legacy from Reagan’s, Goldwater’s, and other movement conservatives’, but much more importantly from the Republican party of Bush’s successors. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Whip in the early-1990’s and later Speaker of The House, is portrayed by Bush’s accounts as irrationally partisan, and both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush-43's Vice President and Secretary of Defense respectively, Bush-41 refers to as “iron-ass”, and are blamed in part for the catastrophic presidency of his son. The result of this sniping at other Republican elites is a book that at times reads as a kind of veiled apology from a Republican “elder statesman” for his part in the institution that would go on to be represented by the Neocon Right-Wing hawks in Dick Cheney’s mold, Tea Partiers like Michelle Bachmann, and the Presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump. However, the apology is also firm in its insistence that, while the right-wing nuts and the Trump phenomena are a shame, they are not a reflection of George H. W. Bush or the GOP he knew.

The effort by GOP elites in general to disassociate with the Republican Party’s current face has become especially ubiquitous in the news the past few months. A few weeks ago Mitt Romney, using whatever stature he may have left as the last politician his party consolidated around, urged fellow republicans to try to stop Donald Trump from securing the GOP’s nomination. Paul Ryan, current Republican Speaker of the House, recently delivered a speech to congressional interns dubbed a “veiled apology for Trump” by National Review. The same Right-Wing magazine has made its own anti-trump stance clear, lamenting the “racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign.” Even Fox News has jumped in and out of the fray, recently excoriating Trump for his misogynistic behavior. In all of these cases, Trump is presented as a sick aberration from Republican Party values, with roots outside of the conservative movement, not the logical next step in the evolution of the party.

But the next logical step in the evolution of the party is exactly what Trumpism is. Take the National Review quote about “racial and religious scapegoating so central” to the Trump campaign. Racially coded politics are nothing new to Republicans or to Democrats, but the extent to which Trump abandons the code and uses transparently racial politics to his advantage is surely different? Different to an extent, but definitely not without precedent. Consider the words of Lee Atwater, a political aide in the Reagan and Bush administrations, describing the Reagan campaign’s “Southern Strategy” used in the 1980 campaign:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n***er, n***er.” By 1968 you can’t say “n***er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. […]You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***er, n***er.”

Trump, while not going as far as to use racial epithets, has adopted something similar to the 1968 model. He takes issues that clearly represent race — such as immigration or the fall of the historically white manufacturing sector — and exploits these for political expediency in the same way that busing and states’ rights were exploited by Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the sixties and seventies, and “Law and Order” was exploited by George H. W. Bush in the late eighties and early nineties. In a sense Trump is simply building on an already large body of work done by the party. While his crass language and style may be unique from his predecessors, his message falls neatly within the established paradigm.

This brings us back to Bush. In an especially combative 1988 presidential race, his desire to win “outweighed his conscience,” in the words of Meacham, and he gave his campaign team the okay to run with a strategy that essentially hinged on white fear of black criminals. In this strategy, aides Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes sought to cast Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a weak on crime liberal who was too lenient on drug dealers and murderers and too weak to support the death penalty. In painting this picture of Dukakis, the campaign needed a face for criminality in America, and they settled on William Horton Jr, an African American man who raped and beat a woman while on a weekend prison furlough under Dukakis’ Massachusetts governorship. Horton would go on to star in an attack ad run by the National Security Political Action Committee, a group with deep ties to the Reagan White House and Bush campaign, but was also often mentioned in speeches and interviews by Ailes, Atwater, and Bush himself. Roger Ailes, while delivering a speech to Southern Republicans in Atlanta in July 1988, made one of the most infamous uses of Horton in the campaign. In the speech, Ailes uses Dukakis’ relationship with Jesse Jackson to essentially show that Dukakis is fraternizing with the enemy in the war on crime— a black man, who even worse, advocates for other black men. Ailes acts as if there is a slippery slope, that if Dukakis is friends with Jackson, what’s next, Willie Horton as Vice President?

“And guess what? Monday, I saw in the driveway of his home Jesse Jackson. So anyway, maybe he (Dukakis) will put Willie Horton on the ticket after all is said and done.”

One would assume Ailes is not completely serious, but the suggestion, however tongue in cheek, that Dukakis’ relationship with Jesse Jackson might somehow make him open to having convicted murderer Willie Horton as his running mate is clearly racist. Bush would later maintain that the use of Willie Horton’s name and image by himself and campaign officials was never racial in nature, but meant to show that Dukakis was “out of the mainstream” in regards to crime. Donald J. Trump brought a similar complaint about the interpretation of his controversial remarks that many Mexican immigrants are in fact rapists and murders. “The crime is raging and it’s violent. And if you talk about it, it’s racist,” Trump told Fox News. In both cases, the campaigns capitalized on white fears of African American and Mexican American criminals, but would vociferously deny allegations of racism.

Interestingly, even Bush campaign mastermind Lee Atwater would express his regret over the campaign’s conduct in 1988. Atwater, who had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor in 1991, gave a confessional interview to Life in which he apologized for his “naked cruelty” in the campaign in general, and the use of Horton in specific, saying “it makes me sound racist, which I am not.” Dukakis also weighed in on the Horton strategy, asking an interviewer rhetorically, “Was the use of Willie Horton racist? Of course it was.” Bush stooped to conquer in 1988, using racial issues to his advantage just as Trump is doing today.

The purpose here is not just to disparage George H.W. Bush’s character. Bush was an admirable figure in many respects, and a force of pragmatism in the Republican party. However, I believe that throughout his career he failed himself and the American people by going with the flow of his party. Bill Buckley, founder and first editor in chief of the bastion of conservative media, National Review, once said that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” Bush could have been the person in the Republican party to stand up and support Civil Rights in 1964, and he could have been the one to stand up and yell stop to the party’s increasing use of racism in campaigning. However, for whatever reason he did not yell stop, and history has delivered us the GOP of 2016, defined by its demagoguery, racism and xenophobia.