BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG, LONG YEAR
On December 13, 1963, Bob Dylan offered some unscripted remarks on the occasion of receiving the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Remember that this was barely three weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone was still in a state of shock. In his impromptu speech, Dylan spoke of feeling empathy for Lee Harvey Oswald: “I got to admit that I, too - saw something of myself in him.” This did not go over well with his posh audience. Nor did something else Dylan said that evening: “There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics.”
I understand why, in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Dylan felt that politics was trivial. Nothing in our civics classes had prepared my generation for the shock of a presidential assassination (and then the assassination of the assassin, followed by an investigation that looked more like a whitewash than a search for facts). The Kennedy assassination happened outside of politics as we understood politics then, and it changed the way my generation thought about politics forever.
Well, maybe not quite forever. Fast forward to May, 2016. Having lived through more assassinations (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy) and attempted assassinations (George Wallace and Ronald Reagan), not to mention Watergate, the 9/11 terrorist attack, and two misbegotten wars (Viet Nam and Iraq), I thought I’d seen it all. Maybe we’d elect a good president in 2016 (I was a Bernie guy in the beginning, but I was willing to settle for Hillary), or maybe we’d elect a bad one (someone like Jeb Bush, with Ted Cruz as my worst case scenario). But life as we know it would go on.
American democracy was supposed to be immune to demagogues, particularly one as blatantly immoral, ignorant, and unqualified as Donald Trump. His victory in the Electoral College (albeit with a minority of the popular vote) was the electoral equivalent of a presidential assassination. Life as we knew it was gone, as irrevocably as the JFK assassination ended the post-war normalcy of the Eisenhower Fifties and gave birth to the chaotic Sixties.
Six months later, the shock has worn off, but I still feel a sense of urgency about saving as much as possible of pre-Trump civilization. That’s why, to apply Bob Dylan’s “up and down” paradigm to 2017, thinking about politics does NOT seem trivial. Responsible citizenship strikes me as the best way to “go up,” as Dylan put it. To withdraw from the political arena would be to leave vulnerable populations to the tender mercies of Donald Trump’s band of racist oligarchs.
In the next few weeks and months, we’re going to find out what kind of country we live in. I’m cautiously optimistic, but as the aforementioned Bob Dylan wrote shortly before the Kennedy assassination rocked his world, “don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.”
Today, I’m going to try to step back and take a longer view. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the Party of Lincoln morph into the Party of Trump, and lately I’ve been thinking about how that happened, and what might happen next. In journalism, that sort of essay is known as a thumb-sucker. You’ve been warned.
Conventional wisdom says that the bright line distinction between liberalism and conservatism in America can be summarized as a choice between big government vs. small government. According to this model, liberals believe that government – especially the federal government – plays an important role in solving society’s problems. Conservatives disagee. They are fond of quoting Henry David Thoreau: “That government is best which governs least.” They claim to believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and small government.
As recently as the mid-20th century, there were liberals and conservatives in both parties. The white racist South belonged to Democrats, and the Manhattan liberal elite tended to vote Republican. But in 1964, Barry Goldwater and his followers began the purge of liberals from Republican ranks. They lost the presidential election that year, and badly, but they were onto something. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan continued their work, recruiting racists in the South and Mountain West away from the Democrats. It was an effective strategy, but it came with a price. The more Republicans came to depend on Southern white voters, the more racism became an important, if usually unspoken, component of Republican philosophy.
For fifty years, Republicans used code words like “law and order” and “welfare queens” as dog whistle appeals to racist votes. But Donald Trump is incapable of even that level of subtlety, and in 2016, he and his surrogates ran an openly racist, xenophobic campaign. They gambled that they’d win more votes than they’d lose with that message. Thanks to the Electoral College, where a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times as much as a vote in California, they hit the jackpot. Now the Party of Lincoln is a place where Nazis and Klan members feel perfectly at home.
In the process, Republicans have co-opted the word conservative, so that “Republicans” and “conservatives” are now pretty much synonymous terms. I’ll use them interchangeably in this post.
It’s easy to refute the claim that Republicans prefer small government. All you have to do is look at debates about the defense budget, where they’ve always argued that more is better. And it’s not enough just to build an enormous military. No, they can’t wait to deploy those assets: a little destabilization here, a sponsored coup there, and a shooting war every once in a while just to remind the rest of the world not to piss us off.
And then they’re invariably surprised and resentful when the rest of the world doesn’t take kindly to our interference in their affairs (e.g. Iran, Chile, Vietnam, Iraq, ad nauseum). This happened so consistently that Republicans soon developed an all purpose explanation for the world’s ingratitude. The problem was always that we just weren’t tough enough. We should have killed more of them and take their oil. Then they’d have loved us.
It’s hard to claim you’re in favor of small government when you’re constantly pushing for larger defense budgets and starting unnecessary wars, but conservatives do it anyway. The George W. Bush administration introduced a new innovation in the attempt to resolve that contradiction. They simply ignored the costs associated with the war in Iraq in his budgets. Deficit? What deficit?
Tax cuts became the Republican solution to everything. Are we in a period of peace and stability? Cut taxes. Are we at war? Cut taxes. Is the economy robust? Cut taxes. Are we in a recession? Cut taxes. You don’t have to think too much about economic policy if you’re a Republican. Just cut taxes.
If you look closely at the other alleged cornerstones of conservative philosophy, you discover that the alleged Republican enthusiasm for individual liberty and personal responsibility can’t be taken literally either. The only way to make sense of it is to understand that, for Republicans, individual liberty applies mainly to white people. For wealthy white conservatives, it means “don’t tax my income, don’t tax my inheritance, and don’t regulate my business.” For less wealthy white conservatives, it means “don’t take my guns.” For conservatives at every income level, it means, “don’t stop me from discriminating against people who are different than me.”
Conservatives only hate big government when it’s used to protect people they don’t like. They’ll happily use big government to impose their personal values on other people. “Individual freedom” means that you’re free to believe what Republicans believe and do what Republicans do.
That’s why the Republican version of individual liberty doesn’t extend to your choice of religion, where your options are limited to being Jewish or Christian. Your choice of intoxicants is limited to various forms of alcohol; everything else is forbidden. Women who want to control their own reproductive systems have the freedom to choose abstinence; other options, while not yet illegal, are frowned upon. Minorities (racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual) are free to keep a low profile and hope that straight white Christians leave them alone. For Republicans, freedom’s just another word for sit down and shut up.
But if minorities get the short end of the stick when it comes to individual liberty, Republicans make up for it by giving them an extra dose of personal responsibility. In fact, Republicans talk as if personal responsibility is something that mainly applies to minorities. Every problem that minorities have is due to a lack of personal responsibility. Poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunity? Take a look in the mirror, buddy. The buck stops there.
When Republicans talk about getting tough on crime, they’re talking about getting tough on minorities. White collar crime isn’t even on their radar screen. Ten years ago, they willingly turned a blind eye to the machinations of Enron, Worldcom, and the banks responsible for the housing bubble. But even as their negligence was wrecking the American economy, they remained vigilant against minorities who shoplifted, or who looked like they might possibly be shoplifting, or who were just hanging out in a store looking Black or Latino. Petty distinctions like that don’t matter much to Republicans. Where minorities are concerned, their philosophy is “shoot first and ask questions later.”
Republicans talk endlessly about family values, but when one of their own – Donald Trump or Bill O’Reilly, for instance – turns out to be a serial harasser, they find a way to rationalize their continued support. When heroin use was largely confined to minority communities, the conservative solution to the problem was jail time, and lots of it. Now that opioids are crippling white communities, they want a more compassionate solution. Their churches haven’t been able to put a dent in the problem, so they’re turning to – guess who? – the government for help.
If you ignore what Republicans preach and look at what they actually practice, it’s clear that their core philosophy is basically this: “People like us are good. People different from us are bad. Government exists to help people like us at the expense of everyone else.”
So what’s the future of the Republican Party? According to Rush Limbaugh (quoted in an article in the failing New York Times, link below), it’s time for the GOP to let go of conservatism, at least in its classic form. The new goal of the Republican Party is now simply to piss off liberals.
That explains everything, doesn’t it? Liberals don’t like racism? Fine, we’ll double down on racism. And science denial, and the persecution of Muslims and immigrants, and tax cuts for millionaires, and all the rest. If it makes Democrats mad, we’re for it.
Donald Trump instinctively understood what Republicans really believe, and he said out loud what millions of them were thinking. His candidacy gave the Republican Party the opportunity to jettison the veneer of civility they’d been clinging to and embraced their dark side. They won an electoral majority. And then they quickly ran into a problem.
Even before the Goldwater years, there has been a strong tinge of paranoia in the conservative movement. Their world view is based on resentment and suspicion. That may be an asset for an opposition party, but it’s a liability if you’re trying to govern a nation where amajority of voters supported your opponent. What Republicans do best is blame Democrats for everything. When you’ve demonized the other party, how do you turn around and work with them on legislation? They can’t. They’re boxed in by their rhetoric. They may be good at making liberals mad, but Republicans simply aren’t good at governing.
The good news is, the American people have noticed. Republican policies, and even some Republican politicians (including the current Republican president), are in trouble in the polls. Assuming Trump is still president in 2018, or God forbid, 2020, he’ll have been exposed as a one trick pony. He figured out how to win what turned out to be a change election, and immediately began proving that he had no idea what to do with his victory. That means the next change election will be about him.