A reshaped GOP could be very conservative, but not radical. It would believe in limited government, but a government ran by people of ethics, morals, principles, standards. Respecting data and science, and operating fairly. It would believe in actual fiscal discipline. It would believe in the integrity of our institutions and insist that those in office adhere to ethical standards. It would respect the fundamental values of decency and equal treatment. It would work to broaden its base across racial and ethnic lines, not use division and voter suppression to keep power.
What happens to democratic societies when conservative parties become radical in their defense of the status quo? Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt (co-author of How Democracies Die) argued in a 2017 book that "The importance of conservative parties in democratic systems has been largely underappreciated. Democracies tend to evolve in the direction of more equality, and how a society responds to those changes determines how healthy and stable it is over time. Since it's often the conservative parties that dictate this response, how they're organized and what they do (or don't do) is hugely consequential.
"The key thing is that conservative parties are governed by career politicians who have a stake in the continuation of the political system. That's more important than whether conservatives win elections or not. So you can imagine a situation like late 19th-century Spain or late 19th-century Germany where conservatives do really well in elections, but it's because the elections are rigged, and you have state officials tampering with the election and repressing the vote so that conservatives win."
One of the frightening parallels between the current GOP to the Weimar era is that the leading figure in the German nationalist scene in the mid-1920s (Alfred Hugenberg), who had no political career. He was a businessman. But slowly, he built up a media empire. He owned movie theaters and newspapers and even the official German wire service, which provided news to local newspapers.
As this media infrastructure was developing, he was pushing a total nationalist agenda, using nationalist themes. And he then got selected as the head of the German Conservative Party in 1928. He was uncharismatic and a failure as a politician, but he helped turn the political debate in a more nationalist direction. Any of this sound familiar?
Today, it's more complicated because the media infrastructure is so all-encompassing. I've seen people draw parallels to the end of World War I where you had a narrative emerge in Germany that said Germans were under assault by liberals and Jews and communists, that they didn't really lose the war. This myth was perpetuated after 1918, and spread throughout the political system. As people retreated more into mythology, they started to believe what today we'd call "alternative facts." Remember, "Those who do not know history...". Again, any of that sound familiar?
Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical as it goes back many decades. The party is best understood as an insurgency.
Today's Republican Party has a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change but it isn't on the Republicans' side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they've walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party overstates the risk (to the point of outright lies) so that it can pass laws to limit the ways that have a partisan impact.
Taking away democratic rights (extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; voting suppression; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters) is the Republican Party's main strategy
Republicans have chosen authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn't a coalition of interests. Its behavior is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders-Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others-were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice (you read that right, the GOP we have today is because of communist ideals), and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group.
It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the current party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at the institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their "treacherous liberalism", and building alternatives, in the form of right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this "counter-establishment" (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal's book on the subject) were ready to take power.
But conservatism remained an insurgent during the 1980s and '90s, and the more power it amassed the more it set itself against the web of established norms and loved breaking them.
The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich, with the avowed aim of overthrowing the established Republican leadership and shaping the minority party into a fighting force that could break Democratic rule by destroying the "corrupt left-wing machine." Gingrich liked to quote Mao's definition of politics (again, communist influence) as "war without blood." He made audiotapes that taught candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as "disgrace," "betray," and "traitors." When he became speaker of the House, Gingrich announced, "There will be no compromise." How could there be, when he was leading a crusade?
The third insurgency came after the election of Barack Obama. The Tea Party. Eight years later, it culminated in Trump's victory, an insurgency within the party itself-because revolutions tend to be self-devouring ("I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals," Gingrich declared in 1998 when he quit the House). In the third insurgency, the facets of the original movement surfaced again, but more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence, all to prey upon kneejerk reactions of fear and ego. Their new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from everyone, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes. Once again, Democrats failed to see it coming and couldn't grasp how it happened. Neither could some conservatives who still believed in the US.
The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era set in with breathtaking speed. It took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don't see a dilemma, they have the view of, and democratic principles are disposable, sometimes useful, and sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism.
Politicians in Washington are looking out for themselves and their donors instead of serving the people they represent. This kind of corruption has become the norm under President Donald Trump's White House and the Republican-controlled Congress. Congressional Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) (which no one wanted, but they passed anyway), which gave hundreds of billions of dollars to the lobbyists and corporations who contribute to their campaigns (read as, bribe government officials). Working Americans pay the price because all the problems they are facing-from higher drug costs to lower wages-are ignored.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
