The Republicans from Lincoln to Trump
What is happening with the Republican Party? After almost four years of slavish support for whatever lunacy Donald Trump was pushing, lately cracks have developed in the GOP monolith. Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and foreign presidents including his Russian buddy Vladimir Putin, are contradicting the president’s alternative reality that he won the presidential election.
In Trump’s version he won in a landslide; according to everyone else outside the shrinking asylum ward inhabited by Trump’s and whack jobs like his press secretary and the pseudo media, the propagandists at FOX, Newsmax, and OAN, he lost by more than seven million votes. Even Trump’s toady Attorney General Bill Barr stated there is no evidence of electoral fraud.
For a lot of Republicans, even in this Alice in Wonderland administration, Trump’s election delusion was too loony. Some high-profile GOP members have resigned from the party over the issue. And the erosion in blind faith in Trump has taken place on other issues too. Another Trump lemming, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, contradicted the president by saying Russia (and not China as the president has argued) was behind the recent cyberattack on the United States. The president seemed to strike back against everyone in one stroke by asking for changes to a bipartisan bill for COVID financial relief laboriously agreed to by congressional leaders and administration officials after months of negotiations.
This limited and belated Republican independence from the Leader seems to be a sign that Republicans have recognized that Trump is already under the bus, they can’t be blamed for it because it was Biden who put him there, and it’s the one place where they don’t want to join Trump.
All this temporary turbulence—typical of this administration but more intense than ever at the funeral—should not distract attention from the deeper troubles of the Republican Party. For a generation, the Republican’s secret sauce for success has been based on a pact with the nation’s ugliest devil: white supremacy.
When FDR’s 1930s program for economic justice (the New Deal) transmuted into LBJ’s 1960s program for economic, social, and racial justice (the Great Society), whites, not only in the South but especially there, demurred. They began to migrate from the party of FDR, who won election four times, to the Republican Party of Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Donald Trump.
The Southern Strategy worked for a long time, but this election was a sign that its expiration date may have arrived. The Republican approach to winning presidential elections resembles the tactics deployed by Republican leaders in Congress to block even popular legislature, the majority of the majority rule. The Republican Speakers of the House in the Obama years would not allow legislation to even be considered unless a majority of the Republicans favored it, so that a winning coalition of Democrats and Republican mavericks could not get legislation through the House. McConnell has followed the same principle in the Senate.
With most of the white vote secure for the Republicans during the post-civil rights movement era, this majority of the majority approach was often a winning strategy in presidential elections. A confluence of forces made this a losing approach in 2020. With each year that passes, what was once an overwhelming white majority gets smaller. Additionally, Trump’s racist rhetoric and actions helped mobilize black voters who voted at higher rates than in most previous elections. Trump’s xenophobia activated voters who had not been in the country when the Southern Strategy was crafted. These are the naturalized immigrants and their U.S.-born children who began coming to the United States after the racist immigration law that had been in place for more than forty years was abolished in 1965. Finally, young voters and the well-educated did not embrace the Republican candidate for president as strongly of other white voters.
Biden’s previously unthinkable win in Georgia shows most clearly how these forces combined to overcome the Southern strategy. This time, the majority of the majority was not enough for the Republicans even in Georgia. The election of 2020 may be looked back as that through which a new America, yearning to be born, finally arrived.
Births can be painful and traumatic and joyful at the same time. Those who were previously in the driver’s seat will not be relegated to the back of the bus but for many of them just being another passenger like everybody else will feel that way. As the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire taught, when the oppressor is finally forced to give up being the oppressor and the oppressed becomes his equal, the former oppressor feels oppressed.
The coming weeks are likely to be contentious and even perilous. Encouraged by the lout-in-chief who refuses to concede his defeat, his most recalcitrant followers will mount a version of resistance which will be more violent and boorish than the anti-Trump resistance after 2016. The loud tantrums and the micro-rebellions, not any less dangerous for not being massive, have started already and won’t fade away quickly. Even if these are only death spasms, they will be upsetting and likely scary.
Unlike many people, I am hardly inclined to embrace the “we.” They made our lives miserable for four years and now want to seize another four years come hell or high water to bury us. Many people have been literally hurt, even killed. The 330,000 victims of COVID and the ones coming behind them. The children separated from parents, the immigrants terrified by ICE raids, the assembly line federal executions being carried out at the 11th hour to satisfy the bloodlust of Maga-maniacs. For me, the injury has been mostly moral. The shame of living in a nation that carries out such atrocities and the alienation of being a citizen in a country in which almost half of the citizens support the leader who carries them out.
Never again the Republicans. Certainly not this incarnation of a party that once was Lincoln’s and is now Trump’s.
This is a period for vigilance, for courage and for determination, not for reconciliation. There is no reconciliation possible with those who have wronged you and fight tooth-and-nail to be in the position to continue to do it. Reconciliation requires repentance; the GOP is unrepentant.
