Another Rant On The Radical Nature Of The Current Republican Party

Last fall, before the election, I wrote a post highlighting the coming split between true conservatives and the Republican party. That piece was largely based on an interview with Samuel Goldman, a professor of political theory at George Washington University.

Goldman is a conservative himself but believes that true conservatives no longer have a place in the Republican party. According to Goldman, “[I]t appeared not just to conservatives but to virtually everybody that a program of deregulation and free trade really did benefit almost everyone. For the last 10 or 15 years, that hasn’t seemed to have been the case. George W. Bush, as we all know, brought the country into two inconclusive and at least one unnecessary war. The economic package that was associated with conservatism stopped delivering the goods. Since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied. It took a while, as these things always do, but that dissatisfaction has found a focus in Trump.”

At the same time, the Republican party moved away from conservatism and became a radical white nationalist party. Goldman again, “The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America. If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things. That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.” On the flip side, this is the seemingly insurmountable problem that Democrats have in trying to appeal to the voters in the outer suburbs and rural areas.

In the same vein, Kate Antonova, a historian of conservatism, has a remarkable storify thread providing enormous amounts of history but ending up making the point that the Republican party under Trump is a radical, not conservative, party. She says, “Trump’s GOP has become a radical right. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s an established term w/ many examples…There’s a fundamental difference in today’s radical right, which gleefully says FU to knowledge, education, demonstrable fact. A radical right that makes up absurd ‘alt facts’ & presents them confidently, fully aware that base will believe literally anything as long as it’s associated with their ‘team’ and/or serves as a hit against the other ‘team’. Liberals & conservatives in the proper sense of those words are now both (uncomfortably) covered by the shade of the Never Trump tent. Both accept the premise of rights & representative govt. Current president, cabinet & Congress explicitly oppose the govt they run. Base voters, largely white, many evangelical, cheer undermining of democracy & boo defenses of traditional American values. They are not conservatives. They are a radical right. They were elevated to power thru hacking, bots, gerrymandering, PACs.”  She neglected to mention voter suppression in that list. And I would also disagree that the party has only become the radical right under Trump. Like Goldman, I believe that has been going on since the 1990s and the opposition to Bill Clinton at a minimum. But the main thrust of her analysis is certainly correct.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker had an insightful article explaining why the French rejected the right-wing Marine Le Pen but Americans elected Donald Trump. As Gopnik explained, the center-right in France banded together with the left in order to defeat Le Pen. In America, “They [conservative Republicans] believed that people were exaggerating Trump’s personal flaws and underestimating the power of the Party and the constitutional structures to contain and moderate him”. That turned out to be a massive miscalculation. Not one well-known member of the Republican establishment endorsed Clinton and, to this day, not one well known member of the Republican political establishment has repudiated Trump. The Bushes and the Romneys remain silent and Congressional Republicans do their best to ignore Trump while trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations at the expense of American workers and families.

Part of the problem may be that there is no such thing as a true conservative and never was. As Goldman says, “I think the great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives. There is an infrastructure of journalists, intellectuals who are vested in a conventional combination of limited government, a relatively hawkish foreign policy, and a sort of religiously inflected public morality. There are a few hundred such people, and they all know each other. But it turned out that there aren’t that many voters who actually care about these things — or at least cared about them in quite that combination.”

While Goldman may or may not be correct that there are not that many movement conservatives, the conservative philosophy he describes created the intellectual framework that allowed right wing religious and ethno nationalists and either like-minded or opportunistic oligarchs like the Kochs, Adelsons, and Mercers to take over the GOP and turn it into the radical, white, Christian, nationalist party we see today. The oligarchs and the nationalists have a symbiotic relationship where the oligarchs fund the nationalists in order to be left alone to rule over the economic sphere to their advantage while the nationalists pursue their own agenda in foreign and domestic policy as long as it does not interfere too deeply with the oligarchs’ interests. This is how we end up with no major evangelical Christian group even mounting minor objections to waging multiple wars of choice, splitting up families through mass deportations, and now a Republican plan to force millions of Americans to lose health insurance causing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly.

Neither the oligarchs or the nationalists believe in the Constitution or our democracy as it merely gets in the way of their stated goals. The oligarchs fear democracy as it is the only thing that will reduce their enormous and dominant political and economic power. The religious nationalists don’t believe in democracy and government in general because they are answering to a higher authority. And the ethno nationalists don’t believe in democracy because it gives voice to many they do not consider Americans. And for those reasons, both sets of nationalists do not believe that any opposition can be legitimate, as we saw with treatment Obama received, culminating in the refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing.

This radical party has now seized power on a wide-ranging scale, from dominating most of the state governments, to controlling Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court. As Antonova states, the party no longer accepts the premise of rights and representative government and is doing its utmost to undermine our democracy even further before 2018 in order to further consolidate their power. I’m not an historian but, to my mind, there have been few examples of parties with this kind of anti-democratic attitude who have given up this kind of power both freely and willingly. And that should concern anyone who still cares about our country and our democracy.