". . . I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Matthew 19:23-24
Since the death of Abraham Lincoln, the history of the GOP, and, indeed, of America, has been inextricably tied to the rise of Corporatism. In recent years, however, the GOP has begun to stray from its Corporate moorings. If this thesis is true -- that the GOP is "straying" from its "Corporate moorings" -- what does this portend for the future of the GOP?
First, remember: It is always dangerous to underestimate the opposing political party. Because when you do, the opposition oftentimes rises up to smack down the arrogant. As Samuel Clemens famously said upon hearing reports that he had died while traveling abroad: "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." So must we hesitate when we receive reports of the crippling, and, occasionally, of the impending death, of the Republican Party.
But the questions remain: Has the GOP strayed too far from its Corporate moorings? If so, is the GOP crippled? And, more importantly, is the GOP crippled to the point where the injury is fatal? Is the GOP dying, in the relatively near future, as a political party?
What this diary purports to do is trace the political and economic evolution of the modern Republican Party in an attempt to deduce the vitality of the Grand Old Party. And so, as a Sunday afternoon exercise, I thought I'd throw several thoughts together concerning the fate of the GOP, and see what others with interest may think.
Before venturing into predictions of the future, it generally instructive to examine the past. If this analysis of the GOP's past is reasonable, then let's try to read the tea leaves concerning the GOP's future over the next 12 years or so, and see what we can see.
FOUNDATIONS: Every schoolchild knows that Abraham Lincoln is the first Republican President. Yet, for purposes of this analyis, I challenge that assumption in terms of economic ideology. Yes, Lincoln was the first Republican President, but I think it can be reasonably asserted that the economic ideology of the GOP did not develop until after Lincoln's death. Before Lincoln, the GOP was mainly a party opposed to black slavery -- not a party meant to further the interests of the wealthy class.
The first "Corporate" Republican President (thus the first "modern" Republican President) was Ulysses S. Grant. It is not surprising that the "Corporatist Republican Party" was born in the North, or that Corporatists would seize control of the then-based northern Republican Party. Before Lincoln, the Democratic Party had become, predominately, a southern regional party, protective of the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and it had been crushed, along with the Confederacy, in the Civil War. Furthermore, the huge industrial and financial centers were located in the north. The captains of industry -- Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan -- all were Northerners. The wealthy elites were also re-forming themselves into corporations, as industrialization exploded; hence the name, "Corporatists."
The Corporatist seizure of the Republican Party was swift. In fact, in 1876, the developing Corporatist Republican Party was able to steal an election away from Samuel Tilden, thus paving the way for an easy continuity of the Corporatists, and their laissez-faire economic ideology, into the future. The significance of the 1876 election wasn't so much about economic policy: Tilden was just another "Bourbon Democrat," happy to go along with the Corporatist agenda. In those days, Democrats cared mainly about racial segregation, economics being a clear secondary concern.
No, the significance of the 1876 election was, first, in consolidating Corporatist power in the Republican Party; and, second, in avoiding the effects of black emancipation. The unholy bargain struck with Democrats that placed the Republican Benjamin Harrison in the White House in that winter of 1877 mandated removal of Federal troops in the South -- troops that had been guarding nascent black civil liberties taking root in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Accordingly, southern black Americans were consigned to the law of Jim Crow and segregation for decades -- the effects of which have only now, with the election of Barack Obama, become successfully ameliorated. The unholy bargain of 1876 will play a key role in the development of the Corporatist "three-legged stool," as argued below.
So successful were the Corporatists in maintaining political power, they influenced the Democratic Party for the next 75 years. Only one Democrat was elected between James Buchanan in 1856 and Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and that was Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was just another "Bourbon Democrat" (known today as "Republican-Lite"), passing laws dictated by the Corporatists. With Cleveland, it can be accurately said that his two split terms can be summed up as, "Move along, there's nothing to see here."
To be fair, between 1868 and 1932, there was some push-back against the Corporatist Republicans, but it was merely cursory. Let's see: There was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (passed under a Republican, no less), some ruffling of the Corporatist's feathers by Teddy Roosevelt back in the day, and Woodrow Wilson's Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. But there were also folks out there like Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs, Robert La Follette Sr., and others, pointing out endemic Corporatist abuses that never really began to be effectively addressed until the days of FDR, and later.
To be blunt, until 1932, when FDR was elected, the Corporatists, and the GOP, ruled supreme. Unrestricted laissez-faire cowboy economics was the economic "Law of the Land," those pesky anti-trust acts notwithstanding. More importantly, however, the Corporatist Republican Party needed no other coalition to win elections -- money alone was sufficient to keep Corporatist Presidents in the White House decade after decade, and it didn't much matter if the President was Republican or Democrat.
THE DAYS OF FDR: Then came the fruits of corporate greed, the Great Depression, and FDR. To temper the Great Depression (caused by that very same corporate greed, at the expense of working Americans), FDR did, in fact, impose a "great leveling" of the Corporatist elite through taxation of the uber-wealthy. As demonstrated by Paul Krugman in his The Conscience of a Liberal, income class stratification tremendously narrowed as FDR's policies reversed the flow of money.
Before the days of FDR, money flowed from working people into the coffers of the Corporatist Republicans. For example, for many years it was cheaper to leave faulty train couplings on railroad cars, even though those faulty couplings crippled and killed railroad workingmen, because changing to safer couplings would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while replacing a dead worker with a live worker was free. John Maynard Keynes described the Corporatist agenda as follows:
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
After FDR, and the institution of Keynesianism, the money flow reversed -- it flowed from the Corporatists to working Americans, which, combined with the removal of barriers to unionization, created the "modern middle class," of which we claim to be a part of today (and which again is shrinking under the Corporatist "trickle-down" economics put back in place, beginning with Ronald Reagan).
After the election of FDR, the GOP seethed with hatred. The Corporatist class was whittled down to a few remaining ideologues, as the policies of John Maynard Keynes were ascendent. In the early 1950s, The Corporatists turned to Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics to carry the torch of laissez-faire, neoliberal, globalized economics. And carry the torch Milton Friedman did. Slowly at first, until Friedman's great insight into the timing for the implementation of "old school trickle down economics" coalesced in his mind. But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
FDR's economic policies pertaining to government planning and regulation of the marketplace were so successful in World War II that those policies supplanted laissez-faire once and for all -- or so it was thought, erroneously, at the time. As Cleveland was a "Bourbon Democrat", so Eisenhower and Nixon continued Keynesian "New Deal" economics through their Republican Administrations. Corporate income tax rates remained at 90% in the days of Ike. When Nixon imposed his "wage and price freeze" in response to the economic havoc wrought by the First Oil Crisis, Milton Friedman called Richard Nixon, with only some hyperbole, "the most liberal of the Presidents of the 20th Century." So it was that "New Deal Keynesian" economics prevailed in America between 1932 and 1980.
As is well-known, the great "turning" for the Corporatists occurred in the election of 1980. With the election of Ronald Reagan, who was widely reported to carry a copy of Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom on the campaign trail, the return of the Corporatists to unrestrained power was completed.
How did the Corporatists achieve their glorious return to unchallenged power, and what does that portend for the Republican Party today? To consider answers to these questions, we must go back and examine the election of 1948.
THE GREAT SCHISM: In 1948, the Democratic Party was ambitious and decided to attempt to fulfill the final goal of government engineering that was left undone by FDR: The Democrats sought to establish a universal (read: national) health care system. Southern Democrats, maddened by the prospect of sharing hospitals with black people, rebelled over national health care and its implications for race relations. In fact, Southern Democrats were so upset with the possible mixing of the races viz-a-viz health care, they ran Strom Thurmond (still a Democrat in those days) on the third party Dixiecrat ticket in 1948.
And so, in 1948, primarily over the issue of universal health care, the coming "great schism" of the Democratic Party was foreshadowed: Racist Southern Democrats realized there was no long-term home for them in the Democratic Party. The divorce between Southern Democrats and the Democratic Party became final in 1963 when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act into law, effectively undoing the unholy bargain of 1877. Famously, LBJ said at the time, "We have lost the South for a generation." In retrospect, LBJ was wrong: The Democratic Party lost the South for two generations; it being Barack Obama to become the first northern Democratic candidate to carry states from the Confederate south since JFK in 1960 (even then, JFK had a southerner with him on the ticket).
THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY: Thus was the stage set for Ronald Reagan to give his famous "A Time for Choosing" race-baiting speech at the 1964 Republican Convention, railing out over the "war on poverty." Later, in 1976, Reagan would crystallize his thoughts on the "war on poverty" into his infamous -- and nonexistent -- "welfare queen".
Inspired by Reagan's threatrics, the Corporatists realized a path to re-emergence: Bring in the racist southern whites into the Republican Party, in order to carry the erstwhile Democratic voting South, and return to Republican (and Corporatist) victory. Goldwater's success in the South in 1964 was not lost on Nixon strategist, Kevin Phillips, who, in 1968, fleshed out what is now known as "The Southern Strategy". The Southern Strategy was simple, but amazingly effective: Throw out a few thinly veiled references to race -- "government handouts," "law and order," "welfare queens," and such -- and Southern Bubbas will vote red no matter where their economic self-interest lay!
Unable to return to the White House in 1968 with only a corporate agenda, as they had been able to do prior to 1932, the Corporatists discovered a strong second leg to advance their agenda -- easily race-baited southern voters. And in 1968, the Corporatists elected Richard Nixon over a Democratic Party deeply divided over Vietnam. While, ironically, Richard Nixon himself was never a strong corporatist, at least not in terms of economic policy, Nixon's election did, nevertheless, wed the Corporatists to Southern Racists, creating a different, but still Corporatist, Republican Party: One part old-fashioned "trickle down" Corporatism, one part southern racism.
To do battle with the Democratic Party's intellectual economic giant, John Maynard Keynes, the Corporatists (Koch, Mellon, others) began to fund the formation of pseudo-intellectual "think tanks," to spew forth old-fashioned "trickle down" economic drivel, under the guise of "new ideas" (as well as to create a financial home to reward Republican Party politicians who preached the Corporatist ideology, but who just happened to lose an election). "Think tank" pseudo-intellectualism became very important to Corporatists after the election of Ronald Reagan when "news" morphed into "entertainment news," requiring "balance" between ideas, no matter how well-established one idea may be or how silly the "balanced" idea may be. Corporate financed pseudo-intellectualism continues to drive the rigid laissez-faire ideology of the Republican Party today.
At any rate, in the elections of 1968 and 1972, the GOP demonstrated that its two legs of corporatism and racism could win, and then hold, the White House. Unfortunately for Republicans, just as Corporatism is based upon the ideology of greed, which inevitably leads to corruption, so did Richard Nixon become corrupt, albeit criminally corrupt. The two-legged reconstituted Republican Party might never have evolved beyond Richard Nixon, because of the Watergate scandal, but for the emergence of a galvanizing new social upheaval: Abortion.
THE THREE LEGGED STOOL: The 1973 US Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade (and its freedom of choice for women to abort unwanted babies) was cataclysmic for Christian Evangelicals. It immediately spurred the Evangelicals into opposing abortion by any and all means, including political activism, sometimes violent. Driven blindly by opposition to abortion, another entire segment of the electorate ignored, and continues to ignore to this very day, voting in their economic self-interest. The Evangelicals determine their voting entirely according to the litmus test of abortion. Thus, what some call "Christofascists" burst onto the American political scene.
After Roe v. Wade, the Corporatist GOP accepted a third leg into its base, again reconstituting itself, this time into the Republican Party we know today -- a tripartite party composed of (1) The old-fashioned corporate uber-wealthy elite (who consider themselves to be "first among equals" in the Republican hydra), (2) Southern whites receptive to race-baiting, and (3) The Evangelical anti-abortionists. Thus was born the Republican Party's so-called "three-legged stool."
The new three-part Republican coalition debuted in 1976, in fits and starts, with Ronald Reagan not quite being able to wrest the nomination from a sitting, if politically wounded, Vice-President Gerald Ford. While the Republicans lost the 1976 election, the closeness of the 1976 Presidential election was quite startling to many Democratic observers at the time, given that it was the first election post-Watergate, featuring as the Corporatist nominee, Gerald Ford, the man who had pardoned Richard Nixon. While the down ticket races were solidly Democratic in 1976, Jimmy Carter's Presidential victory was much more tense than expected.
And then, in 1980, the "three-legged stool" was victorious under the banner of Ronald Reagan. Since 1980, laissez-faire economic policies returned, slowly at first, then more and more, inexorably, even under the Democratic Administration of Bill Clinton. From and after 1960, the only way the Democratic Party could even compete with the Republican Party in Presidential elections was by running a Southerner at the head of the ticket. Only a Democratic Southerner could win Southern states, and without carrying Southern states, the Democratic Party could not win the White House. Thus was the incredibly intimidating strength of the Republican Party's "three-legged stool."
From 1980 until 2008, the Corporatists rammed through their greed-based, upward trickling, Friedmanite economic policy without interruption -- not even the "Bourbon Democrat" Bill Clinton stood in their way, enacting, as he did, laws like NAFTA (which gutted American manufacturing workingmen), and repealing FDR laws like Glass-Steagall (mother of the 2008 economic crisis). In 1983, in a moment of insight, as described in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, Milton Friedman realized how to ram into reality his laissez-faire economic policies:
"[O]nly a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
Give the Corporatists 28 years of less and less regulation, more and more tax cuts, incentives to plunder other countries during every political or economic shock, and I'll show you a world wherein working men and women are abused, unions are smashed, education becomes politicized, the environment polluted, dialogue turns vicious; in short, the America of 2009.
THE BROKEN STOOL: Then, in 2008, a funny thing happened. The South "grew up." Literally the older generation died away, and new crops of southern children grew up realizing that, "hey, this black kid that plays beside me on my high school football team is really a pretty cool guy -- I like him." And vice-versa. Multiplied by millions of kids across the South, cultured by (still free) primary and secondary schools, racism naturally abates. Oh sure, you'll still hear a white non-racist person speak inappropriately from time-to-time here in the South, but the racism is now transitioning from true racism into a self-conscious "joke racism," and, later, in the future, into little or no racism.
I mean, many Southern whites, like myself, are only one generation removed from true racism -- most of us are still far from perfect, as black folks well-know. Look, I still vividly remember being in third grade, coming home from school after the assassination of JFK, and asking my father -- a man I love and respect (god rest his soul) -- if he had heard that the President had been shot. Dad said, "Yea, but did they kill that nigger-lovin' John Connally too?" That kind of racism is swiftly (and literally) dying in the Old South.
Consider the election of 2008. Here's a black Democrat, Barack Obama, actually winning three Confederate states, plus a long-red Indiana that once proudly elected an "out-of-the-closet" Ku Klux Klansman to be its Governor. Is Indiana going Obama an aberration? I don't see how. Maybe it would be an aberration if a white Democratic candidate had carried Indiana, but a black candidate? With all the racism that a black Presidential candidate has to overcome?
No, what we just witnessed less than 4 months ago is the fruits of our public integrated school systems all across the land. Can anyone really make a coherent argument that anti-black racism has not abated since 1980?
CURRENT TRENDS: So what does this mean for the GOP, circa 2009? For one thing, it means that the "three-legged stool" is broken. It's lost a leg. At least part of a leg. And an important leg. A crucial leg. The stool is wobbling. And as southern racism abates more and more as southern children reach the age of the vote, look for more southern states to vote their economic interest. The racial leg of the "three-legged stool" will whittle down even more over time. I pray I live to see the day when Mississippi and Alabama vote for a Democratic President again! And I will! But I digress . . . .
What the modern GOP is left with is with a "two-legged stool": (a) old-fashioned laissez-faire Corporatism, and (2) the Evangelical anti-abortion stepchild. Will a "two-legged stool" win national elections? I doubt it. I doubt it very seriously. While the "Southern Strategy" was successful for the GOP in national elections prior to the addition of the Evangelical anti-abortionists in 1973, there is absolutely no evidence that the Republican Party can win national elections with just the Corporatists and the anti-abortionists in the fold.
Southern racism contained an identifiable bloc of voters: The Confederate South, which did in fact vote as a bloc for many election cycles (even when it was married to the Democratic Party). But there is no "identifiable bloc" of anti-abortion voters sufficiently large to carry enough states, coupled with wealthy voters, to deliver enough states to win national elections, absent corruption from the Democratic Party. Worse yet for Republicans, Evangelical anti-abortion voters tend to populate the deep southern states, many of which are turning blue.
If this premise is accurate -- there are just not enough wealthy and anti-abortion voters to turn enough states Republican to win national elections -- then the Republican Party is doomed as a national party. It can go forth as a regional party, but not as a national party.
THE FUTURE OF THE GOP: If past is prologue, what, then, lies in store for the Republican Party? Well, first, the Democratic Party must avoid becoming endemically corrupt. Avoiding corruption is key for Democrats. Just give the people good government, and reasonable people will increasingly give Democrats their votes. Blagojevich/Buriss fiascos cannot multiply. Second, the Democratic Party must resist becoming the party of the Corporatists. Instead of throwing money at failed corporations like AIG, Citibank, and the rest, such failed corporations must be nationalized, whether in bankruptcy court or by replacing corporate officers.
It's just this simple for the Democratic Party.
The election of 2010 will be very interesting. I personally suspect that Obama's current nostrums for turning the economy will be insufficient. Obama will need more money for more work programs as recession begats depression. In other words, I am a Krugmanite. If Krugman is wrong, and the economy rebounds with the program currently in place, coupled with future legislation, then obviously Democrats are golden in 2010.
But, more interestingly, what if the economy does not rebound, or does not rebound sufficiently, by 2010? Or what if Obama has to go back to the "stimulus money well" (if there's still a money well to go back to), but Democrats still expand their constituency in Congress, due to Obama's good faith governance? In this case, it will be clear as early as 2010 that Republicans, with their current Corporatist slash anti-abortion ideology, are doomed.
Then comes the Presidential election of 2012. That election will be most interesting for the GOP. I have argued in this diary that the Corporatists have controlled the Republican Party since 1868. The Corporatists have controlled the Republican Party even after adding the other two legs to their party, the Southern Racists and the Evangelicals. What is happening right now, or what will happen very soon now, will be a fight over the soul of the Republican Party: Will it remain primarily Corporatist? Or will the more numerous Evangelicals take over the Republican Party via a sort of political "steeple-jacking"?
At the CPAC Convention in February 2009, it seems clear that Mitt Romney is the current choice of the Corporatists in 2012 (they preferred George Romney, Mitt's daddy, over Richard Nixon in 1968). Most likely, the Corporatists think they could settle for Sarah Palin if they had to, given her obvious love of all things money, or Bobby Jindal, if he were nominated. But the Corporatists don't really cotton to Palin or Jindal. The Corporatists, you see, don't particularly want their leader to be an Evangelical -- they view themselves as "too sophisticated" to be led by a Evangelical -- which both Palin and Jindal clearly are. Romney, I think, is the Corporatist's preferred candidate. The last guy the Corporatists want to see nominated is Mike Huckabee, due to his independent streak when it comes to Corporatist (read: Freidmanite) ideology. Yet Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, and must be considered to be one of the frontrunners in 2012, given his strength with Evangelical voters. The steeple-jacking of the Republican Party could become a fait accompli in 2012, especially given the phenomenon of GOP hate media shock-jocks driving the Evangelicals (and the entire GOP) to the very edges of extremist political thought.
Indeed, the most interesting Republican at the 2009 CPAC Convention was not a politician at all, but a radio talking head: Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is an extremist's extremist. A true fascist. The man may have 20 million loyal radio listeners, but Barack Obama and his Administration, by painting the entire GOP as an extension of Rush Limbaugh, is attempting to isolate the entire GOP universe of voters into those 20 million listeners. Try winning a national election with a base of 20 million, but without much hope of extrapolating from there. Worse yet, Republican politicians are actually touting Rush Limbaugh as the "leader" of the Republican Party. Obama is pushing the GOP so far right the party is falling off a cliff, thus accelerating the demise of the Grand Old Party.
The outcome of the 2012 election, is, however, unlikely to be decisive as to whether the GOP dies in 2012, steeple-jacked or not. Why? I think that after Obama's dynamically cathartic speech to Congress over the budget, most Republicans are beginning to understand that absent something catastrophic, Obama is going to be formidible in 2012. The President is a truly gifted orator, honest, has a loving family, and that's a pretty good political package for success. The GOP will undoubtedly cling to their narrow laissez-faire slash anti-abortion ideology after 2012, even with a loss in 2012, chalking the loss up to having to run against "a gifted incumbent".
2016 AND BEYOND: It's the 2016 election that Republicans will soon realize that is critical. Of course, it is far too early to even begin to speculate about the parties' respective candidates for 2016. But if the Democratic Party wins the 2016 election, post-Obama, by carrying Virginia and/or other southern states, then the GOP will be forced to introspection. Today, Republicans are apparently hoping against hope that the Southern Strategy still has life left in it. Hence we see Corporatist newspaper cartoons with the dead monkey in it, and emails with watermelons growing on the lawn of the White House. On the other hand, maybe the Republican Party is honestly shell-shocked to discover that laissez-faire just doesn't work as an economic model in the real world wherein resources actually are finite, and they are continuing on with their collective heads in the political sand.
Either way, a Democratic Presidential victory in 2016 that involves carrying one or more of the former Confederate states will be the proverbial "straw that breaks the camel's back" for the GOP and the Corporatists. While the GOP might hold on as a rump party until the election of 2020, it is likely that other, more reasonable, splinter parties will emerge on the political landscape after 2016. If the Republican Party is steeple-jacked by the Evangelicals in 2012 and 2016, then the Corporatists will have to re-form in a manifestation other than as part of the Republican Party. I go on record in this diary as predicting that the Republican Party will be steeple-jacked, since I believe the Evangelicals outnumber the Corporatists, and that Evangelicals will begin to garner the Republican nomination for President beginning in 2012 and beyond.
If it is not a more "reasonable" Corporatist party that emerges from the shell of a Republican Party gone Evangelical, then it will be more a unreasonable Corporatist party that will emerge. Because the Corporatists will not go away. Wealth will always fight for its money, its privilege, and its power: A rich man may not be able to enter the kingdom of heaven, but by god a rich man can buy a kingdom on earth! If the Corporatist movement morphs into a democratically unfriendly doppelganger, will anyone really be surprised? For that matter, would it surprise anyone if the Evangelicals are below resorting to violence, self-righteous as they are?
As for the Democratic Party, we can only hope that firm, but fair, methods of handling a more conventional fascist insurrection will be well-established once the Republican Party and a new Corporatist party are forced by the events of history to evolve.
Your thoughts?