Obituary: The Republican Party, March 20, 1854 -- February 13, 2021

 

While I prefer to devote this blog to LGBTQ+ issues, sometimes a moment in American civic life occurs that needs to be acknowledge. Today, a political party died; it is survived by its long-time rival, the Democratic Party, which is older and which has undergone many of its own changes and troubled history. Nonetheless, it still lives, even as its "big tent" appeal signals its continued evolution, possibly into multiple parties. Let us hope they will be able to survive as valuable contributors to our national life. Meanwhile, a body politic is dead, but long live our body politic.

The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854 in a little schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. It inaugurated its existence as a birth brought on by a sense that the factionalism most dominant in American life had lost its way and no longer represented the promise embedded in the United States Constitution, ratified in 1787 and enacted in 1789. A fundamental tenant of the party was individualism and the relation of the individual to liberty. Namely, inaugural members of the party understood that the original sin of slavery undermined the foundational premise of "America" first because it allowed the inheritance of property and accumulated wealth that create an unequal playing field for franchised Americans and second because slavery created a system wherein one could not, by default, use the work of their own hands to advance in an (idealized) meritocracy. The party was abolitionist at its inception.

 Its first president would ascend to office in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was, at least in his presidential campaign, relatively conservative, promising to maintain "union" at a time of increasing factionalism that hinted towards secession. He did not like slavery but he did not advocate for its immediate abolition as part of his political agenda until late 1862. He did not get elected by a majority--his election was due to a fatal split in the opposition party, the more established "Democratic" party. His second electoral win was also without a majority of "American" voters due to many states in the union being at war at the time. He is often cited as our greatest president, and he famously spoke of "a new birth of freedom" and the goal of having a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in perpetuity, even as he spoke these words on a field of battle being consecrated as a graveyard for soldiers who died in the Civil War.

 His assassination led to a Democrat taking office, his Vice President. Andrew Johnson would resist policies to help freed slaves in the South and was impeached for it, the first president to be impeached in our nation's history. After Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency as a Republican, the party of Lincoln.

 Grant's tenure in office was marked by historic levels of corruption, and few historians praise Grant as a great president, though he did make significant strides towards "Reconstruction" in the South that did aid freed blacks--at least relative to the violence and political opposition trying to re-institute a race-based class system.

 The end of Grant's second term marked the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of "Reconciliation," a period of "forgive and forget" that led to what most historians claim is our current situation, wherein the South lost the war but won the peace. The next 50 years of American life has been called "the nadir of the African American experience" as a result of the horrors implemented as federal policy to disenfranchise and re-dehumanize black life. Notably, other "Republicans" from the party of Lincoln fought native people into submission in the West; few presidents from this era from either party are laudable and none are terribly well-known with one Republican exception.

 Teddy Roosevelt won the presidency as a Republican at the turn of the century. He also led US expansion in our first significant attempt to be an imperial power like the nation-states in Europe. He is often credited with having a singular vision that did, once again "relatively," suggest a better promise for America. He certainly embodied a particular American ethos that focused on land management. He did a great deal to establish public lands (previously native lands), which put him at odds with the great robber barons of the time.

 The next 20 years, as racial horror expanded to a national phenomena in race riots across the country, segregation as a federal policy upheld by the Supreme Court, and women agitated for universal suffrage, the most significant Republican president oversaw the calamity of the Great Depression, only to lose his re-election campaign to another Roosevelt, Franklin D., who, notably, affiliated with the Democratic party and implemented the "big government" program called the "New Deal."

 Republicans in particular hated this policy as antithetical not so much to the individual, but to the interests of large corporations and private industry, increasingly the constituency of the party. However, as Roosevelt's policies began to benefit black Americans, a paradigm shift unfolded in American life.

 Over the years after Roosevelt's death, advocacy for civil rights swelled into a national movement. Roosevelt's big tent ideas for the Democratic party made it the more welcome party for black voters, thus disaffecting many white voters who harbored old, deeply embedded racist beliefs.

 In the Republican party, another general ascended to the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, who mostly ascribed to Republican ideas of smaller government and local control until two key moments forced him to embrace a federal policy for better American life. First, after Brown v. Board of Education, a governor in Arkansas challenged federal supremacy on matters of constitutional law. Ike responded by deploying US army troops to escort 9 black high schoolers to school in one of the more significant post-Civil War actions of federal law. Whatever his personal opinions, Ike used his authority in the executive branch to implement a ruling from the judicial branch.

 In his own party, he also faced a formidable foe from the birthplace of Republicanism, Wisconsin. Ike's original ambivalence towards Joseph McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts finally, at long last, turned to a rejection of McCarthy's extremism when McCarthy began to hunt for witches in the US army.

 In both matters, Ike embodied basic principles of US polity and character. If we assume no president from any party is above some level of corruption and political casuistry, at least sometimes, despite their human failings, they nonetheless get it right.

 The next Republican leader, Barry Goldwater, picked up McCarthy's mantle--though his attempt to win the presidency with that mantle in 1964 led to one of the greatest electoral routs in US History. A southerner, LBJ, won in a true landslide.

 However, when LBJ declined to run again in 1968, at a critical cultural moment in US life after the more visible advances of the Civil Rights movement (and the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.) and in the pitch of the Vietnam War, Ike's vice president won the election, placing another Republican in office, Richard Nixon, the first of two Republican presidents from California.

 Famously, Nixon employed his "Southern Strategy" to win disaffected whites to the Republican party. He was, himself, barely below the level of surface racism, and his strategy had the effect of creating a party teeming with the rancor of white supremacy regardless of whatever else it stood for, good or bad.

 When Nixon broke the law to win re-election, he was caught. At first, he used his executive powers to fire and otherwise sabotage the processes of accountability given to our government as part of its self-regulatory checks and balances. However, when irrefutable evidence emerged of his guilt, members of his own party met with him and told him to resign--thus saving him from impeachment. His vice president-turned-president pardoned him, thus saving him from prison. Nothing has saved Nixon from infamy. As time as progressed, the damage he did to his party has become more apparent.

 The next Republican president spent outrageously on national defense while cutting all the domestic programs he could--he also raised taxes, though that part of his legacy is often overlooked. Reagan embraced "trickle-down economics" (a study published this year, just last month, once again debunked this economic policy as just more casuistry encouraged by the wealthy fueling political corruption). Reagan was a Republican in the mold of Goldwater; and while he was immensely popular among white voters, his domestic policies were deeply damaging to the middle class generally and black Americans specifically. He also got caught illegally funding a foreign war and only by the prevalence of his party in Congress did he escape serious consequences. His successor, riding Reagan's popularity, won a term in office. When he promised "no new taxes," he set himself up for failure. After George H. W. Bush raised taxes, his only strategy to win back angry Republicans was to embrace a virulent strain of the Southern Strategy masterminded by notorious racist Lee Atwater, who might well have invented the concept of the racist dog-whistle in American political life (he was recorded admitting as much). H. W. Bush still lost.

 The Republican party during the Clinton years became increasingly marked by a single-minded determination to destroy government. Led by Newt Gingrich, it embraced an absolute rejection of taxation as well as fomented more racist tropes to paint "government programs" as code for "helping blacks." For the first time in US history, a major political party used the basic budget process in Congress to shut down the government. Republicans also impeached President Clinton for lying under oath when, while being asked about the fake Whitewater scandal in deposition, Republican lawyers asked him about his sexual relationship with a white house intern.

 Clinton's vice president won the popular vote in 2000, but due to a Supreme Court decision to discount votes in select counties in Florida, George W. Bush was declared the winner. He also won in 2004. Under this Bush, America began two wars, the second despite condemnation by the United Nations and based on bluntly false evidence of non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. As I write this, 20 years later, the United States is still formally engaged in both wars. Economic disparity rose to alarming levels. Anti-LGBTQ animus was used to pull voters to Republicanism in one key-swing state, Ohio, thus handing Bush his second term. At the end of that term, he oversaw the 2008 financial collapse.

 When a black Democrat won the presidency in 2008, the final death knell of the increasingly anti-American opposition party began to sound. That president, Barack Obama, made the fatal flaw of believing bipartisanship was the answer. He did not understand that the opposition party to which he was extending a hand was at this point hopelessly crippled by its own self-interests, racism, and disdain for basic tenants of American life being extended to anyone not white, rich, heterosexual, and male (and only to women who knew their place in that miasma).

 On multiple occasions during Obama's two terms, Republicans threatened to or outright did shut down the US government. They adopted a practice of absolute rejection and exploded senate procedures by using the filibuster to weaponize their minority status. They finally broke all convention and tradition by refusing to even have a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee in an act of such bad faith that future historians will likely place it as the irreversible moment of the party's demise.

 After Obama's second term, Republicans elected a fascist strongman with no experience or qualifications. He won the presidency due to a fluke in our antiquated electoral college system even as he lost the popular vote. He openly courted foreign assistance for his election. He embraced blatant corruption so extreme it seemed unbelievable in its day-to-day repetition and regularity. His own campaign chairs were found guilty of numerous federal crimes. He was impeached twice and acquitted twice by members of his own party who put their loyalty to him, a single man who pulled himself up by inheriting millions and repeatedly breaking the law, rather than to their party, much less their country.

 They also overlooked his increasingly violent embrace of white supremacy--his making dog-whistle racism the violent scream of his party, in direct contrast to the birth of his party in Ripon in 1854.

 Just after 4 pm, on Saturday, February 13, 2021, the highest-ranking elected official from this party said he had voted to acquit Trump because he didn't think he had jurisdiction. He then said Trump was at fault. It was a moment similar to the fall Julia Kristeva defines as the abject, and only relevant to the world of the cadaver, in this case of a body politic that one cannot look at nor touch without facing the abyss. The death was the party to which that elected official had previously claimed to belong, though whatever he thought that party was, it is no longer a core belief nor even vague political leaning. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Ike, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and the minority leader who wanted it both ways is dead. There can be no revival except to conjure it as a ghost. 

 And so died the long-standing Republican Party, second of the two major parties in American civic life. It was 166.