From: impracticalcogitator.wordpress.com/…
If you had asked any politico to describe the differences between Republicans and Democrats, say fifteen years ago, he or she would have had a reasonably easy time of it. True, the Regan years had shifted things somewhat, but there were fundamental principles to which members of each party held fast, and there were central beliefs shared by both parties, allowing occasional bi-partisan cooperation and relatively smooth governance.
Principles are often tested in times of trial, and in the last fifteen years the nation faced significant challenges, each of which tipped the parties toward particular responses, each of which pulled the parties farther apart.
Seismic shifts had already begun to shake the economic, social, and political landscape,
and, although thoughtful people had long anticipated the effect of industrialization on labor,
and although Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962,
and although Volkswagen, Toyota, and Honda had already begun to put an end to the hegemony of the Big Three Automakers,
and although the Supreme Court in 1973 had ruled that the right to privacy under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment prevented states from issuing laws that prevented a woman from seeking abortion,
and although religious revolution had already swept Iran, establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state ruled by clerics,
and although the Civil Rights Movement had brought both progress and reaction,
and although the wars against drugs had not mitigated addiction issues in the United States or put a dent in violent cartel activity in Central and South America …
the established political parties were unprepared for the shock of living in a new world.
The Republican Party was particularly vulnerable, in that pressure from the religious right pulled the party to positions that would be difficult to moderate. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians claimed more authority in the party even as social change brought increasing acceptance of what the Republicans continued to call “Lifestyle Choices”. The Bush-Cheney administration sent troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, responding to the 9/11 attacks and endorsing the neoconservative inclination toward military preeminence.
In addition, the strident certainty of Fox News and its commentators began the populist politicization of a large viewing community.
An article by Tim Dickinson in the May 25, 2011 of Rolling Stone,“How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory”, explained the connection between Ailes and the right-wing of the Republican Party.
To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. “He was the premier guy in the business,” says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. “He was our Michelangelo.”
All of which would have been challenging enough had the Tea Party Movement not taken the party (and government) hostage, bringing ordinary legislative compromise to a screeching halt.
The Tea Party emerged as President Obama began the process of pulling the nation out of the Great Recession; the catalyzing issue was Obama’s plan to extend aid to bankrupt homeowners, bringing the Taxpayers March on Washington in 2009. The Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives organized itself in opposition to every initiative brought by the Democratic Party of President Obama.
Christopher Ingram’s June 2, 2015 article in the Washington Post, “This Astonishing Chart Shows How Moderate Republicans are an Endangered Species” reported, the Republican Party’s move to the right was far more rapid and extreme than the Democratic Party’s move to the left.
As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, “Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.”
Its identity as an insurgent party with roots in populist reaction left the party open to the charge that political insiders had failed to change the shape of the world and the rush toward modernity. The assortment of Republicans vying for the Party’s nomination reflected the contending range of political philosophies (from Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio to John Kasich and Jeb Bush) and offered outsider Donald Trump the opportunity to reach millions of disaffected voters.
The primary left the party licking its wounds, puzzled by the outcome of the races and struggling to find points of connection with a candidate attracting the support of distasteful fringe groups and a candidate clearly uninterested in traditional Republican political verities.
The Republican Party assured itself of a majority in the House and Senate by highly strategic incursions into local and state elections, gaining control of the process of redistricting, drawing hallucinatory district maps so that Democratic zip codes were jammed into one or two districts while Republican voters were spread across many districts. As a result, the party was able to stonewall every Democratic initiative and bring the government to gridlock.
A Trump candidacy, however, puts that majority at risk, and, even if the nominally “Republican” candidates scrape by at the Congressional level, it is difficult to guess what the identity of that Congress might look like.
Can a moderate Republican Party reemerge should the Trump candidacy end in disaster? Can it reemerge should Trump sweep to the highest office in the land?
The United States has not developed the sorts of multi-party coalitions that often govern European nations; perhaps moderate Republicans and Democrats can find middle ground and organize themselves in a new impulse toward moderation.