Dismantle the GOP
It was past time before a mob stormed the Capitol.
At the end of a shocking and shockingly predictable week, let’s start with Mad Libs. The following paragraph is from an interview in The Atlantic (redactions mine):
“The conservative party was doing well electorally. In [YEAR], they had a big electoral loss. There was a grassroots rebellion of the far-right who thought that the party leadership had been making too many concessions to the democratic order, and the party was taken over by this right-wing media mogul, [NAME], who pushed the party far to the right and began to open the door to the much further right, and sought out alliances with [NAME] and the rising [MOVEMENT] party.”
Is this a paragraph about recent American history? You likely surmised it isn’t. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that this quote describes the rise of the Tea Party and its aftermath, and that the four blank slots in the preceding paragraph could be:
- 2008
- Donald Trump
- Pick a name
- White Nationalist
The person who provided the above quote to The Atlantic is political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, and his original, unredacted words are: 1928, Alfred Hugenberg, Hitler, Nazi.
Ziblatt argues that stable, advanced democracies share in common a strong center-right party. At moments when the center-right establishment is tested, as Ziblatt goes on to say of 1928 Germany:
“The question becomes: Do these parties on the right ally with the very far right that are explicitly trying to overthrow the democratic system, or do they distance themselves? In this case, they clearly made the wrong choice.”
And so they have again.
I cited this interview in a recent story about how the United States is ripe for major upheaval in its political party configuration. Now that Mark Zuckerberg is, presumably, studying a high schooler’s notes on the Sherman Antitrust Act, a generation that has known nothing but Too Big To Fail might register a small crack in the TBTF foundation.
In one critical fashion, however, major political parties are (theoretically) different from any other trust that might need busting: The mob bosses are the police.
Institutional failure
In a parliamentary system, employed in countries like Japan, Germany, Canada, and many more, the head of government is elevated to that position by the legislature. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is head of government because he is a member of the legislature (Parliament), and the legislature chose him to lead. This means that Johnson has a governing majority behind him — his coalition is unambiguously in charge.
This is similar to the way in which Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House, but it is entirely different from the way the United States elevates a head of government (POTUS), who is chosen by the people. This existential distinction, along with our bicameral legislative body, means that the presidency is often controlled by a party that does not have complete control of the legislature.
Why is this relevant to this week’s events?
In theory, representatives seeking reelection come before the voters and have to run on their records. Fascism might not be an inspiring campaign vision, but splitting power between Democrats and Republicans muddies the waters of accountability. Policy failures are more difficult for the electorate to pin on the donkey (or the elephant) than they would be in a system where it’s obvious who is in charge.
That means one party can, over time, radicalize without suffering proportional political consequences. If the Republican Senate doesn’t seek to provide more financial relief to citizens during, say, a pandemic, its leaders can always mask that position by pointing at the Democratic House and accusing its leaders of being the ones playing politics. In Boris Johnson’s government, his coalition’s actions (and inactions) cannot be so easily masked.
Ambiguity is oxygen to anti-democratic forces.
We can also blame hyperpolarization, and hyperpolarization is certainly a cultural problem, yet it only becomes an institutional problem when one side of the divide opts for implosion over collaboration. Without meaningful political consequences — again, it’s hard to prove to the public who’s to blame for legislative inaction or malpractice — the only disincentives to choosing implosion are personal integrity and an earnest commitment to serving constituents’ best interests.
(Insert comment on political courage.)
It’s not about 2016
Go back in time — more than a week, two months, four years, or even a decade. Trickle-down economics, cemented into GOP doctrine under the Reagan administration, has proceeded to demonstrate zero evidence of bringing prosperity to groups other than the wealthy. Without proof, it is nothing more than a belief system, one that glorifies tax cuts and provides a front for a more sweeping belief in self-reliance, i.e. gutting the social safety net without regard for facts. Attacks on the nation’s social safety net, which is relatively modest compared to those in other advanced democracies, are sold as prudent and function as pain.
This vision of governance limits social mobility, reflects and reinforces a scarcity mindset, and requires boogeymen to explain why an ideology that favors tax cuts, deregulation, and union-busting doesn’t turn into middle-class security.
I wonder if things get worse from here.
Let’s quickly bridge the timeline from Reagan to Trump with a different game: Guess the year. The following is from an editorial featured in a major newspaper. Guess the year it was published:
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen [it] this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
This quote is from a Washington Post editorial by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, preeminent scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively, neither of whom is prone to overstatement. It was published in 2012.
Let’s try another one. The following is from a book. Guess the year it was published:
“The goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and — possibly — in which elections are only a formality.
“Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and suggest that they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are usually accused of being ‘shrill,’ of going over the top. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: the goals of the right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?”
Perhaps Nobel laureate Paul Krugman just hadn’t yet heard that we’re supposed to take the rhetoric seriously, not literally. These words are from his book, The Great Unraveling, published in 2003.
Mann and Ornstein would hasten to remind us that during the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich unleashed forces that “destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base… and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress.”
This smattering of contemporary perspectives brings us from Reagan to the Obama administration. The Tea Party, a phenomenon of a decade ago that ostensibly favored a dramatic reduction in the size of government, has since been replaced by MAGA, a political machine that has no specific issue with government spending and no consistent policy platform that cannot be boiled down to political expedience and cult of personality.
What the two movements do have in common is that which connects them to the last 40 years of Republican politics: scorn, specifically scorn for people who deserve it. That means scorn for people who are the wrong color, sex, gender, or religion, who live in the wrong places, who are poor for the wrong reasons, who are successful for the wrong reasons, who kneel during the national anthem, who love the wrong people, who come here seeking asylum, who fear gun violence, who want to save the planet, who vote for a Democrat — anyone whose turn it is to be blamed.
This is a recipe that invites demagoguery. Demagogues rise because they have access to institutions (e.g. media, politics, finance) and are willing to point the finger and exploit policy failures (especially those for which they are responsible) by any mechanism that furthers their ambitions.
By the time Donald Trump came to political prominence, a GOP that once championed conservative principles to solve our country’s problems had been whittled down to a few binary issues that are — in proportion to all the possibilities of what government can do — niche: no abortion, no gun restrictions, no inconvenient science, yes Christian fundamentalism, yes power, no others having power.
Like other demagogues of world history, Trump entered politics as a mere fungus, growing from an already rotting body politic.
The Republican Party is not Too Big To Fail
For those who did the math, Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol was virtually inevitable. I am as grateful as I am stupefied that the destruction was not more violent.
Take 40 years of expanding the wealth gap and fighting demographic change, add an incomprehensible number of guns, toxic masculinity, and leadership by agitation, and seal it in an information echo chamber that preys on emotional investment until it reaches its boiling point.
The Republican Party has agreed to too many deals with the devil. It has looked the other way when hate was on the ballot, and it has embraced anti-democratic forces as its most fervent base.
That is why, somewhere in America, I hope, a robust plan for launching a major political party is underway. Building a home for the center-right was vital to our democracy before Wednesday — the coup dry run only gave us a preview of what doing nothing looks like.
A new party is a tabula rasa. Its center-right members won’t have to swear fealty to trickle-down economics or the Republican platform. They won’t have to speak the language of rich tycoons and Christian fundamentalism. They won’t have to praise Reagan or Trump just to get through a primary, and they will never have to work with, acknowledge, or be accountable to the MAGA constituency. Instead, they can promote 21st-century conservative values, like supporting LGBTQ rights, building a robust health care marketplace, investing in green infrastructure and jobs, passing responsible gun control measures, reducing wasteful government spending, and advocating for state and local leadership.
This center-right party and the Democrats will share a lot of governing priorities. Without a parliamentary system, they can still freeze the GOP out of relevance until the party more or less dies. By then, we must hope, we will have reestablished norms around what will and will not be tolerated in American democracy.
A version of the Republican Party will stand after the Trump presidency. Whether it exiles the far-right across the Rubicon or responsible conservatives flee the Grand Old Party, America’s center-right will need the support of the center-left and progressives if we are to banish evil to the fringe.
For a last dose of perspective, let’s close where we began. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Ten years before that, in 1923, he led a failed coup against the Weimar Republic.
The Republican Party is not Too Big To Fail. If it can’t extract itself from its Faustian bargain with fascism, then the rest of us must ensure that it fails spectacularly.
