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Donald
Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image. Under his
mismanagement and ineptitude, the GOP has become the party of
corruption and plunder, kakistocracy, and white nationalism. Trump is
dismantling the government and his party with it. Certainly, if he
has ruined the GOP brand, he could not have done it alone, as this
process was decades in the making.
The party of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass - founded in opposition to slavery, with 2,000
black elected officials
during Reconstruction
- emerged as the party of intolerance and exclusion in the 21st
century. Although many in the Republican Party rejected and resisted
the Trump candidacy, the GOP nonetheless coalesced around him. How
did this happen?
It all started in the 1960s with the Southern
Strategy,
a process of race baiting to woo conservative white voters who
resented African-Americans, integration, and the gains people of
color made in the civil rights movement. Seizing on the themes of
black people as criminals and bogeymen on the one hand, and
undeserving beneficiaries of government welfare and social programs
on the other, the GOP channeled white racism toward people of color
into hatred of government - all for political gain. In 1981, the late
GOP strategist
Lee
Atwater
elaborated on the
strategy:
“You
start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N--r, n--r, n--r.’ By 1968
you can’t say ‘n--r’ - that hurts you, backfires.
So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and
all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re
talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re
talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is,
blacks get hurt worse than whites. … ‘We want to cut
this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh,
and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N--r, n--r.’”
For years, the Southern Strategy was an effective tool for Republican electoral victory Richard
Nixon’s law-and-order campaign
targeted the black
community for punitive measures and a war on drugs. Ronald Reagan
announced his presidential run near Philadelphia, Mississippi - where
three
civil rights workers
had been murdered by
the Klan in 1964 - giving a speech celebrating states’ rights.
He also invoked the racially stereotyped image of the
“welfare
queen”
to bolster support for
social spending cuts.
George H.W. Bush won over Michael Dukakis in 1988 in part because of a campaign ad featuring Willie
Horton,
a black murderer who committed rape while released from prison on a
weekend furlough program. In his race against black candidate Harvey
Gantt,
Jesse
Helms
used the “Hands”
ad, in which white hands are shown ripping up a job rejection letter
because the applicant lost the job to a racial minority as part of a
hiring quota.
With
the advent of Barack Obama, Republicans found a new bogeyman, a symbol
of power and a living embodiment of their war against government and
multiculturalism. Birtherism,
of which Trump was a founder and cheerleader, was based on the
premise that Obama was the “other” - a Muslim, born in
Kenya, not a U.S. citizen, and therefore an illegitimate president.
The tea
party
vilified the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare,
as an object of racial resentment.
Years
of race-baiting, of alignment with white fundamentalist Christianity,
homophobia, and an anti-abortion stance finally caught up with a
Republican Party that was chasing a dwindling demographic of angry
conservative whites in an increasingly diverse and inclusive nation.
Following the Republican loss in the 2012 presidential election, the RNC issued an autopsy
report
calling for a more
inclusive party as a means of salvaging its long-term viability. The
report urged the GOP to shift its views on LGBTQ rights and
immigration, listen to young people, women, people of color, and
those who may not agree with the party. Republicans failed to heed
the warning, and the result was an erratic, authoritarian narcissist
named President Trump. The dog whistle of the Southern Strategy
morphed into a loud “alt-right” bullhorn of extremism,
and the GOP “big tent” coalition became a white sheet
providing cover for Charlottesville neo-Nazis.
George Will who left the Republican Party, said
grotesque
has become the GOP norm.
“Trump’s energy, unleavened by intellect and untethered
to principle, serves only his sovereign instinct to pander to those
who adore him as much as he does,”
Will
said.
“With Trump turning and turning in a widening gyre, his crusade
to make America great again is increasingly dominated by people who
explicitly repudiate America’s premises. The faux nationalists
of the ‘alt-right’ and their fellow travelers like
Stephen Bannon, although fixated on protecting America from imported
goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains
the continental European right.”
“The
capacity of Republicans to rationalize their support appears to be
bottomless,” said conservative talk show host Charlie
Sykes
of Trump. Sykes noted
the
“alternative
reality bubble”
he and other
conservatives helped create, and the values conservatives have
rejected in favor of “media clowns,” “crackpots and
bigots.”
“I
am less horrified by Trump himself than by what he has done to the
rationalizers and enablers,” he said. “Why are you people
defending this, why don’t you see what he’s doing to your
own cause?”
Although
Trump’s GOP won in 2016, it was a Pyrrhic victory, and one which cannot
be sustained, given the Russia investigation, Democrats’ momentum, and
a browning America, and movements like #MeToo and #NeverAgain
transforming the political landscape.
This commentary was originally published by WHYY.org
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