The wages of white panic are democracy’s death

Sometime during the last twenty years, Republicans began to get a sinking feeling there would soon come a time they could not win a presidential election fair and square. They decided, consciously or unconsciously, to secure victory by any means, whether they admitted it to themselves or not. This was a momentous decision.

The Big Lie, the January 6 insurrection, the GOP’s massive delusional denial of Biden’s electoral victory, laws passed in multiple states to selectively suppress the vote and to replace nonpartisan control with partisan control of the mechanics of elections, the white panic that goes under replacement theory, the fuss over critical race theory and the 1619 project, are all expressions of a desperate effort to resist becoming irrelevant, a permanent minority party like the Liberals in the United Kingdom or a permanent minority race like the whites of South Africa.

It happened in a second on the scale of historical time. Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories in the 1980s suggested the future belonged to the Republicans. But clouds soon began to appear on the horizon. The complexion of the electorate was changing, mainly because of two factors: the mass enfranchisement of Black voters for the first time in American history, and the abolition of racist quotas that previously prevented brown and black people from immigrating into the United States.

The results of the voting rights law and immigration reform, both of which happened in 1965—not coincidentally during the height of the civil rights movement—took decades to be felt politically and the consequences have not yet played out in full. There is a lag between demographic change and political change.

In the years between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, the GOP had debated how to deal with the new reality. Should it make the tent bigger and attract at least a decent proportion of minority voters? That was the preference of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. It was a largely successful strategy for a Texan, but the GOP did not adopt it for the long haul. The alternative was exclusion and disenfranchisement. If you can’t beat them, don’t let them come here, and if they are here already, don’t let them play the game. This is where we are here and now.

The heartland of the Republican party is the Deep South, the former Confederacy, plus several overwhelmingly white mountain states, like Wyoming and Montana, and a few upper midwestern states, also white and conservative, like Idaho and the Dakotas. The denizens of the Republican heartland were not inclined to play nice with the new voters because, beyond the balance of political power, they want to keep the racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious character of the nation “as it has always been.”

The Republicans can cheat, steal, and lie to win some presidential elections—they are now laying the groundwork for doing that. But only for a while, probably a short one. Demography and ideological evolution are more robust than demagoguery, wishful thinking and vacuous mirages.

The downward slope of Republican presidential aspirations is clear. Between 1954 and 1984, the Republicans had three presidents elected fairly for two terms each, and who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Since then, Republicans have had a one-term president, George H.W. Bush; one president, George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote on his first try but was elected by the combined grace of the Supreme Court and the undemocratic Electoral College; and a one-term president,  Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote but won via the Electoral College and with the help of Russian intelligence, then lost reelection big in the popular vote and narrowly in the Electoral College.

Reagan was the last popular Republican president. Since then, Republicans have been forced to rely on undemocratic institutions like the Electoral College and the Supreme Court to make it into the White House. Republicans have lost the popular vote to an African American twice and a woman once, an ominous reality for a basically white antifeminist party.

Republicans can be counted from now on to use increasingly rough tactics to hold on to power, but not because of power for its own sake. The Republican party is made up of an elite that has way too much money, but never enough, and a mass that doesn’t have much except grievances. The core fight is between those who want a country that maintains the hyper-capitalist status quo in which maximum profits and minimal taxes count more than anything else, and those who want a nation for its people, a nation in which families can count on support for children (income support, day care, paid leave), which makes all kinds of sense in a country with a dwindling population; a guarantee of the minimal level of free education needed in a technological economy (free community college); and decent investment to keep the planet from alternatively burning and drowning.

People worry about what will happen if the Republicans vanish; we need two parties and all that. I don’t worry. The Republicans can count on the “enduring South” for a long time but that is not why I don’t worry. Rather, I wish the GOP would be ground to dust, then scattered to the four winds. There is no necessity for a party built around selfishness and economic and racial privilege.

Not that I advocate for a one-party state. I have seen that movie. But we could have the New Democrats, the Old Democrats, and ye Old Reactionaries. That, at least, would be more honest.