Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The GOP has no unifying philosophy other than hate, fear, and kowtowing to billionaires and their giant corporations; the people who make up its governing class are similarly fractured
US News and World Report has a story about how the fringe has become the mainstream in the Republican Party. The headline of their story says it all: "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Rises From GOP Fringe to Front."
The backstory here is fascinating and grim.
The GOP is no longer a normal political party with a single governing philosophy: instead, it's become a coalition of interest groups, each seeking its own ends.
How did we get here, and where will this crisis of political governance lead America?
It all started with the billionaires. Of course, back then they were merely worth hundreds of millions, but in today's dollars they were billionaires even in the 1950s.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote about them in a letter to his rightwing brother Edgar in 1954, the middle of his presidency.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
What Eisenhower never anticipated, however, was that 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would rule that billionaires buying off politicians was mere "free speech" rather than political corruption and bribery. Had he lived to see it happen (he died in 1969), he would have been shocked to his core.
Today those rightwing extremist billionaires have an outsized influence in the GOP. They're pouring hundreds of millions into this fall's elections, and every Republican politician must bow to them and their low-tax, no-regulation desires to gain or hold political office. Cross them and you're toast in GOP politics.
But billionaires aren't enough to make a political party and win elections so, when the GOP put itself up for sale in 1978 after Lewis Powell wrote the decision in the Bellotti Supreme Court case allowing that, the Republicans around Reagan pulled together a coalition of voters large enough to win elections. They are:
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1. Southern white racists. This was, for the GOP, low-hanging fruit. A group identified in the 1960s by the Goldwater and Nixon campaigns, Kevin Phillips told The New York Times in 1970 how it would work:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
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