An Dutch essay from February 2020, explaining what has been wrong with the Republican party.
(translated via Google Translate, coming out very well, doesn't it?)
By Maarten van Rossem (77), Dutch historian. Van Rossem specializes in the history and politics of the United States.
When one party goes crazy. / Maarten van Rossem February 2020
The Radicalization of the Republicans
The Republican Party has turned into an extremist group in recent decades. The Republicans believe that everything is justified to destroy their Democratic competitors and to reverse social achievements.
In my early days, the United States was the most admired nation in the world. England was admired too, but the US shone with modern prosperity, and you couldn't say that about England. The two Anglo-Saxon democracies were also fundamentally different from the continental European nations, according to the experts, because of their pragmatic and wholly unideological approach to politics. The experimental character of Roosevelt's New Deal was usually given as an example. An additional recommendation for American democracy was the strong imaginative presidential election.
It was not until the 1960s that it became clear that this rosy image was not good. Poverty was found to be widespread in the US and black populations were systematically and violently oppressed in the southern states. The US was a democracy only to a very limited extent. That is still the case, but now for completely different reasons than in the 1950s. However, it will become clear in this essay that the current problems are ultimately rooted in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Own truth
Since the 1990s, the American political system has become increasingly dysfunctional. Political decision-making in important files is slow or has been at a standstill for years. Whether it is health care, immigration, totally neglected infrastructure or combating the effects of the credit crisis, the two sides cannot agree.
It is obvious to assume that the strong polarization will be the fault of both parties. However, that is not the case at all. The dysfunctionality is asymmetrical and above all the result of the changes that have taken place in the Republican Party over the past four decades. It has moved sharply to the right and turned into an extremist and outspoken ideological company. The Republicans no longer want compromise and pragmatic cooperation. They now regard the Democrats, who have not fundamentally changed, as traitors who aim to destroy the traditionally white and Christian nation. Trump felt that his opponent should be imprisoned during the 2016 presidential election (
"Lock her up!"). In fact, Obama was not even an American at all, because he would not have been born in the US (
birtherism). In short: the total delegitimation of the opponent.
The Republicans want to "liberate" the US from much of the welfare state and regulatory agencies established by the Democrats after 1933, but especially after 1960, with significant Republican cooperation, incidentally. To this end, the federal government must in any case be considerably smaller, and that can only be achieved by very drastic cuts in the federal budget. Experts believe that this is an unrealistic intention. The welfare state, however poorly equipped in the US, will remain, if only because the vast majority of voters want it. Social Security, a combination of AOW (for non Dutch readers, that is:
Algemene Ouderdomswet, a Dutch pension act) and health insurance, is very popular. That doesn't bother the Republicans, experts are the left and the left is always wrong. The Republicans have their own truth, the much-discussed "alternative facts."
To get their way, Republicans are relentlessly exploiting the unique opportunities that the American political system offers to obstruct and sabotage the opposing party. In fact, it is designed to allow any minority to persistently frustrate the majority. In addition, the US Constitution provides for two bodies, both of which can claim to be the legitimate voice of the people, namely the President and Congress. After all, both have been chosen independently of each other. They therefore do not have to be from the same party and often are not. Research has shown that presidential systems inevitably get stuck in a crippling row between president and parliament. This can only be avoided if the political parties are permanently prepared for productive cooperation and compromise. That was the case in the US, but the change of the Republican Party has ended that, slowly shattering the whole complex structure of give-and-take and mutual tolerance since the 1990s.
The party interest always comes before the national interest
Merciless nihilism
Although the behavior of the Republicans cannot be justified, it can be explained. They know that in the foreseeable future, their white core electorate will be a minority of the population. The various colored minority groups together will then be in the majority and certainly not vote for the Republicans. The Republicans are already a de facto minority. In the last seven presidential elections they have lost the popular vote six times. However, they are fortunate that American political institutions greatly favor the conservative, white rural population. Many white Americans, nevertheless, already feel they are in the minority; 57 percent even feel discriminated against. Many Republicans say with the Brexit voters:
"We want our country back!" Or:
"We lost the great country that we loved." That is also the core of Trump's message:
Make America Great Again. The intention is a return to the supposed Golden Fifties.
Political polarization in itself does not always have to be harmful. Polarization can also provide clarity, so that voters actually have a choice of clear policy alternatives. However, the polarization pursued by the Republicans is of a merciless nihilism that regularly damages the national interest. With the Republicans, the party interest always comes before the national interest. When Obama took office, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, stated that his party now had only one goal, which is to make Obama a one-term president. Cooperation was out of the question, the Democratic president would not be granted anything. If Obama was for something, the Republicans were against it - even when it came to issues they had originally been for.
Take the health insurance legislation that Obama was striving for, the so-called Obamacare. That was a compromise modeled on the health-care legislation that Mitt Romney had enacted as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. That's what the Republicans were for, until Obama was there too. From that moment on they were against. They then did everything imaginable to make Obamacare impossible and were willing to rob 23 million people of their health insurance without any alternative available. Existing legislation resulting from the credit crisis was also systematically opposed.
Hated Obama
The all-time low of Republican misconduct was the protracted political crisis over the necessary increase in the federal government's credit ceiling in 2011. In itself that is a wonderful and completely unnecessary relic of the past. Hence, this necessary increase has taken place dozens of times over the past decades without any problems. When the 2010 midterm elections sent a large number of ultra-conservative Tea Party supporters to the House of Representatives, the gullible increase in the credit ceiling was suddenly used to force Obama to make the massive cuts the Republicans saw necessary.
The Tea Party Movement was created in February 2009 as a protest against the massive government spending on the credit crunch. No doubt it was also a
backlash against the election of the first black president. The movement came from the bottom up,
from the grassroots as it is called in the US, but was generously funded by the Koch brothers, reactionary billionaires.
Without enormous cutbacks, therefore, there would be no increase in the credit ceiling, and without that increase the government would soon be unable to meet its financial obligations. That would lead to a downgrading of the US government's creditworthiness, a serious matter in the international financial world. After all, months of fighting resulted in limited budget cuts. Still, the US creditworthiness was rightly downgraded. After all, it had turned out that the unreasonable demands of a few dozen provincial politicians could seriously damage the national interest of the US. After Republicans conquered the Senate majority in 2014, Mitch McConell, already mentioned, has done everything he can to thwart the president and undermine his position. Sometimes the filibuster weapon was used twice a week.
Many were ultimately disappointed in Obama's presidency. That is not correct. He was prolific in his first two years as president, when he held majorities in the Senate and House. After the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans' ruthless opposition made constructive policies all but impossible. The actions of the Republicans damaged the entire political system. But they didn't care, as long as they could score points against the hated Obama.
Civil rights act
The question is, how could the Republican Party be so radicalized over the years? That process began in the early 1960s. In the 1950s, both American political parties were messy coalitions that worked well together without difficulty. President Eisenhower got on well with the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and the Democrats got on well with Eisenhower, who left intact the achievements of the New Deal. There were actually four parties in the 1950s. The Democrats had a progressive wing and an arch-conservative, racist wing, made up of the so-called Dixiecrats. The Dixiecrats monopolized power in the southern states, where they maintained a segregated society in part through racist law and, if necessary, by force, where black Americans had no rights to vote. The Republicans had a conservative and a surprisingly progressive wing. One of those four parts of the system could always work together with one of the other three parts.
That is, until the issue of black civil rights was raised step by step in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1964, with broad Republican support, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which in the following years would lead to the end of the racist regime of the Dixiecrats, a repressive and undemocratic growth that was too long tolerated in American democracy.
How this issue would develop was revealed in the 1964 election. Incumbent President Lyndon Johnson crushed his opponent Barry Goldwater, whose nomination was the result of a conservative rebellion in the Republican Party. Goldwater thought that the various states of the Union were allowed to decide for themselves how they wanted to organize their political business (the so-called
states rights). That was a coded message to the conservative Dixiecrats that they were welcome in a Republican Party opposed to a meddlesome and all-powerful federal government. Lyndon Johnson had already said in passing the Civil Rights Act, against which Goldwater had voted,
"We delivered the South to the Republicans for a long time." As it turned out, Goldwater won not only its own state but also five states in the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. That was the beginning of a long process that turned the entire South over to the Republicans over two decades.
This ideological rearrangement brought about a major change in the character of the two parties and their mutual relationship. The Republican Party lost its progressive wing with the influx of conservative Southern politicians, and the Democratic Party became more
liberal with the loss of the Dixiecrats.
Reagan worked with the Democrats in a way that is now unthinkable
Obstruction
This change increasingly crystallized in the following decades. Thus, the Republican Party became primarily a party of conservative whites who looked with dismay at the massive immigration following the liberalization of immigration laws and the rapid cultural changes that began in the 1960s. From the 1978 midterm elections, this process, and the polarization that accompanied it, gained momentum. Those midterm elections were "nationalized" by a massive and costly campaign by the National Conservative Political Action Committee, part of the right-wing backlash against the ideas of the 1960s that was gaining momentum. The election of Ronald Reagan two years later was the culmination of that development. By the way, Reagan was a pragmatic politician who effortlessly worked effectively with the Democrats in a way that is now unthinkable.
As a mood destroyer, Newt Gingrich turned out to be an unparalleled success
In 1978 Newt Gingrich was elected to the United States House of Representatives, the first ever Republican representative from his Georgia district. Gingrich intended to end the Democrats' decades-long dominance in the House. To this end he pursued a double strategy. The Republicans had to bolster their political profile by no longer cooperating sluggishly with the Democrats. Hard opposition was warranted. In addition, the House's reputation needed to be so damaged that voters would decide to rob the Democrats of their majority. After a long campaign of lies and persistent obstruction, Gingrich succeeded in 1994: for the first time in 40 years, Republicans held a majority in the House. In the so-called Contract with America that the Republicans offered to voters that year, they pledged to tackle corruption in Washington and limit the size of the federal government.
This ended the Democrats' long political dominance and made polarization the normal course of events. However, the Republicans did not win all of their self-created conflicts with the Democrats. They lost a showdown with President Clinton over the budget, and Clinton's impeachment was unpopular with voters. Gingrich was already killed in 1998 as President of the House. The tone had been set, however, and Gingrich had proved an unparalleled success as a mood destroyer.
Racist nonsense
The final phase of the radicalization of the Republican Party began with the election of President Obama. Not only was Obama black, he was also the near-perfect representative of all that conservative Americans hated. He easily defeated two Republican candidates. Characteristic of this latest phase of the perverting of the Republican Party was the false rumor that Obama should not have become president at all because he was said to have been born in Kenya. His birth certificate would be a forgery. The leadership of the party deliberately allowed this racist nonsense to proliferate. The most famous propagandist of this nonsense was Donald Trump, who had shown himself completely unfit for president by his role in this shameful
birther movement.
The fact that the Republicans have succeeded in building up a rock-solid position as a minority party is a great achievement. That Republican nihilism and the systematic obstruction of the opposing party have pleased conservative voters is suggestive. The Republican Party increasingly represents a limited identity, that of a conservative, white, and partly religious America. The Democratic Party is the opposite of that, which is a broad coalition of all kinds of minority groups and of a progressive white minority, the
liberal inhabitants of the large urban agglomerations. If all Democratic voters come to the polls, Democrats can easily win, but that is by no means always the case.
The fact that the Republican Party has managed to build such a limited but ironclad identity has also been made possible by the rapid expansion of a conservative media world - of which cable channel Fox is the best-known example - that always provides white conservatives with as shrewd comfortable propaganda. We may think Trump is a pitiful banter, but whoever looks at Fox every day knows for sure that he is a stable genius. There is one last impressive American institution that, through the success of the Republican war against the system, has become a division of Republican headquarters, namely the Supreme Court. The conservative majority of the Court, considerably strengthened in recent years, has consistently served and strengthened the Republican position of power. That seems like a gain to the Republicans, but is an immense loss to the nation. There are already calls for radical reform of the Court.
The English weekly
The Economist wondered once again: what does a nation do with two parties when one of those two parties has gone mad? Many well-intentioned have come up with constructive solutions to the crisis affecting the US. However, all of these excellent solutions raises the painful question: Why would Republicans cooperate in reforms that would definitely end their current position of power?
www.nme.com
