When The Powerful Align With The Mad
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Politics

When The Powerful Align With The Mad

The descent of the Republican Party into madness and chaos

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When The Powerful Align With The Mad
Kendall Hoopes

There is something wrong with the Republican Party. Any glance at the headlines, any sound bite by the pundits, any feeling in the air reveals that there is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party. Whether it’s the resignations of top party officials, the chaos from the White House, the screeching from Fox News, or the paranoid conspiracies from the base, the GOP is beset by difficulties and the American public is paying the price.

The short answer to what’s wrong with the GOP is that the party has found itself trapped in a coalition with white supremacists, wannabe authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, corporate power brokers, and the other unsightly dredges of American politics, and that this gang of the deranged and the damned is tearing the party apart in their quest for power. The more difficult question is why.

In order to understand the “why,” it’s necessary to go back in time and have a little history lesson about the Republican Party. From 1860 to 1929 the Republican Party was the dominant party in the country and held a firm grip on government. However, after the crash of 1929 and the ensuing great depression the GOP was cast into pariah status and was left to wander the political wilderness for the next 20 years as Democrats dominated national political life.

In response to this exile, two distinct factions emerged; we’ll call them the moderates and the hardliners. The moderates thought the way back to power was to soften their previous positions and embrace the prevailing mood of the country; the hardliners took the opposite view seeing their exile as punishment for being insufficiently ideologically pure.

Initially, the moderates carried the day and returned the GOP to national prominence, but the hardliners never gave up on their crusade and they saw the developing cold war as their path to power. Using fears of Soviet Communism, the hardliners unleashed the Red Scare upon the country and catapulted themselves into power using grassroots organizations like the John Birch Society and official government bodies like the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The effort ultimately reached its height and latter excess under Senator Joseph McCarthy. The red scare ultimately failed to keep the hardliners in power as it was a victim of its own success, but many of its foot soldiers would remember the lessons from it. In his iconic play “The Crucible,” playwright Arthur Miller provided a strong allegory for American politics during the McCarthy era.

As Tony Kushner recently commented in a documentary on Miller, this play revealed what can happen when the powerful align themselves with the mad.

The hardliners would attempt twice more to take power back; first under Barry Goldwater and his “extremism in the name of liberty” and then under Richard Nixon and his silent majority and dog whistling. Both were eventually brought down; the first by his love for nuclear weapons and the second by Watergate. But both added a crucial piece of the formula for a hardliner victory, namely the pivot to the Western states and the infamous Southern strategy.

It was finally with Ronald Reagan in 1980 that the hardliners clinched victory and it is with him that the problems of the current Republican Party start. As for how he did this, it all falls to who he invited into the party. Reagan led the pivot away from the older Republican base of east coast industrialists and professionals toward three new groups; first were the farmers and ranchers of the west who wanted less government interference in land use, second was the evangelical movement who came to the party in opposition to abortion and feared a diminished Christian dominance at the hands of godless liberals, and third were southern whites who broke with the Democratic Party over civil rights.

If there was any hesitation at the inclusion of these new groups by the party old guard they were quickly quashed by the electoral juggernaut the Reagan unleashed and the gifts of tax cuts, deregulation, and defense contracts which sent profits into the stratosphere.

The final element of the decline of the Republican Party came in 1996 in the form of a cable channel called Fox News. Fox was something unique in the annals of American television in that it had an explicitly conservative viewpoint and pushed it with particular vigor under the leadership of former GOP operative Roger Ailes.

The channel quickly made itself indispensable to the party and was welcomed with open arms to educate and motivate the party faithful. This was the critical error that has led the party to its current calamity. Once the Republicans in power started telling lies to the public, Fox started creating an alternate reality that upheld those lies even once they were exposed.

All this took on a new dimension in 2008 when Barack Obama became the president and the housing market tanked the economy. Indignant that they let a black man come so far and perhaps fearing that another economic crisis would send them back into the wilderness, Republicans declared open war on Obama and opened the Pandora’s Box of their movement.

As soon as Republicans took control of Congress they announced in no uncertain terms that they would not work with this president and would see him out after one term when pressed for why they claimed to be acting on the wishes of the people and their base. When no mass movement was forthcoming, they simply created one by funding secret think tanks and policy centers to create a vocal, but ideologically murky movement called the “Tea Party.”

Another movement, spearheaded by our current president of all people, started a fake controversy that Obama was secretly born in Kenya and was a Muslim. These and various other movements and issues marked the Obama years nurtured by Fox news and encouraged by Republican leaders, but the danger was hiding just beneath the surface, visible to anyone smart enough to know what to look for.

Throughout this period the number of hate groups in the US made a sharp increase, the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories on the right became increasingly prevalent, and intra-party warfare became much more marked on the right as groups like the Freedom Caucus bedeviled party leaders.

It was in the 2016 presidential election that this storm that had been brewing for the better part of 30 years came to a head. When Donald Trump descended the golden escalator like some hateful parody of Jesus and called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals” he drew these currents of hatred, paranoia, and fantasy to him like a lightning rod. Party leaders were helpless but to watch as he steamrolled over their anointed nominees, defeating Rubio, Cruz, and Bush to easily win the nomination.

However, they rationalized that it was their movement and that they were still in control. Those illusions persisted all the way until he fired James Comey and triggered the largest presidential investigation since that of President Bill Clinton, sustained on the promise of conservative justices, repeal of Obamacare, and a tax cut.

They’ve got two of those promises along with the most incompetent presidential administration ever, an escalating series of domestic and foreign political crises, a nonstop parade of scandals, a neo-fascist movement, an enraged public, and a newly galvanized opposition party. In short, they have 99 problems and they are responsible for all of them.

So what happens from here? In the short term, things look rough for the GOP; the party leaders are abandoning ship as fast as they can, they are looking to lose both the House and Senate in the midterm elections, and a possible impeachment of the president looks more probable by the headline. In the long term its difficult to say.

Certainly, Republicans have done great damage to American democracy by diluting the value of truth, sowing paranoia and fear amongst a large chunk of American society, inviting authoritarians and fascists into the political mainstream, and awakening the white supremacy monster again. Will this cause the breakup of the Republican Party or even the collapse of American democracy? Who knows?

Although I would regard any would be prophet of doom with a bit of suspicion as it is not all hopeless at the moment, just bleak. Perhaps what the GOP needs is some time out in the political wilderness to find itself again and decide what kind party it wants to be and finally separate the powerful from the mad for good.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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