The shattering: The GOP in Florida and the nation
The Republican party is imploding. That is not exactly news. Every other pundit and many Republican politicians and party faithful have been proclaiming it or maneuvering to prevent it by torpedoing the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. The curious thing, which has gotten much less attention in the national media, is that the very same thing is happening simultaneously right here in our own state of Florida.
More about the situation in Florida in a minute. At the level of the national party, however, the question is why is the reason that, as former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said on network television on Super Tuesday, we are watching “the shattering of a great national party before our very eyes.”
The simple answer is Donald Trump. The reason is that Trump ripped off the mask the Republicans have been hiding behind for decades. Trump understood that at the very core of the Republican party, among the hard-liners who make up a significant proportion of the voters who decide primaries, there beats a xenophobic, indeed racist, heart.
Since 1968, and Nixon’s implementation of the Southern Strategy—the successful effort to turn the region’s partisan loyalties on their head as punishment for Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Congress’s support for civil rights–the GOP has been signaling its sympathy for the backlash against civil rights. They did it in myriad ways, through judicial appointments and symbolic gestures, with a nod and a wink, but almost always maintaining plausible deniability against the charge of racism.
But the anger in certain sectors of the Republican electorate was not satisfied by this somewhat subtle approach. Analysts often identify immigration as the thunderbolt that ignited the new fire. Certainly, the war against “illegal immigrants” became a major rallying point.
But the source of the angst among conservative whites is broader. The crux of it specifically is the Latinization of the United States. More generally, the increasing diversity of the U.S. population that immigration from Asia, the Middle East and Africa has wrought scares and angers them.
Barack Obama in the White House came to crystalize the sum of all fears and prejudices for this group, the ultimate object of hatred, a black and a foreigner in the White House. “Take our country back, they cried!” in response. But no one was giving voice to their rage in quite the visceral way they desired. Then along came Donald Trump.
Ironically, the Republicans have been significantly responsible for a strong undercurrent helping drive the Trump express that threatens to wreck the party: the flat or declining living standards of the white working and middle class. The GOP social policy since Reagan has amounted to a top down class war that has produced the highest inequality since the age of the robber barons. It’s a perfect scenario for the kind of pseudo-populist demagoguery that Trump has mastered.
Trump began the race with a classic move: scapegoating immigrants. Many people mistakenly blame immigrants for stagnant or declining wages and the scarcity of decent jobs with benefits and security notwithstanding low overall unemployment. Then Trump spread the blame around attacking politicians for not doing anything about it. Trouble is Republicans control two thirds of government—both Houses of government and the Supreme Court before the death of Scalia. Trump’s fire was directed not just at Obama but at fellow Republicans who had thought themselves as the second, more radical wave of the “conservative revolution.”
Looking at the history of the conservative revolution recalls the gyrations of the French revolution. As the revolution became ever more radical, yesterday’s radicals were guillotined by new, fiercer radicals. Finally came a strong man on horseback promising to make France great.
Trump too is promising to make America great again and vowing that our enemies will no longer mess with us. Napoleon made France great–for a while. But there was also Waterloo and disaster in Russia. At least Napoleon knew that to submit big countries you had to make war on them and win. Trump thinks people like the leaders of Russia and China will roll over when he threatens them. Good luck.
The growing disarray in the state Republican party has been extensively chronicled in the Miami Herald. “Relations between Scott, Fla. Legislature hit a new low point” reads the lead story in this Sunday’s Miami Herald. Scott “is perilously close to becoming a lame duck with nearly three years left in his term.” GOP legislators are playing real hard ball with the Republican governor: “With cool efficiency Republicans have bludgeoned Scott’s agenda,” according to the Herald.
In significant ways, the warfare among Republicans in Florida has connections and parallels with the national brawl. As governor of Florida Jeb Bush was at the forefront of the conservative revolution as top down class war. But when he ran for President he was overwhelmed by Trump’s rhetorical radicalism. As governor, Rick Scott’s top-down class war too has made Bush’s former rule seem almost moderate. And both Trump and Scott originate outside the political class, swashbuckling robber baron billionaires operating on or over the edge of the law and exuding contempt for the political process and for politicians.
But revolutions self-destruct when the point of maximum radicalism is exceeded. Both Trump and Scott have repeatedly crossed that line and the result has been civil war in the Republican party at the state and national levels.
This disarray spells disastrously dysfunctional government for Florida for the next three years and defeat for the GOP nationally in the 2016 presidential election. Republicans sense this and are anguished. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks.
