The process of distillation means to purify, purge, or rid a substance of impurities. In the usual sense, distilling concentrates the “essence” of the matter being vaporized. Depending on your viewpoint, the Republican “base”, those who exemplify the core values of the party is in a state of distillation, the results of which will go a long way toward determining the fate of the conservative movement in America going forward. It can be argued that Democrats, had also gone through the process in the 1960s as judicial and legislative decisions of that era drove many Dixiecrats from the party into the waiting arms of Republicans. It was a decision made with the knowledge of Democratic leaders, who understood that its “solid South” base would abandon the party and sway elections, and party loyalties for generations. The movement for Civil Rights that grew after World War II would split the Democrats, alienating the hardcore southern so-called “Dixiecrats” from what would become a renewed Democratic Party. LBJ had reportedly acknowledged the impact of party support and passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1965 in an apocryphal exchange with an aide:
“We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.”
While some dispute that Johnson actually said these words, the effect is particularly evident today. Despite the deleterious effect of Watergate on the Republican Party, the GOP dominated presidential politics in the period after the passage of the bill by winning the presidency in 5 of the next six presidential elections and 8 of the past 14. Some point to the landslide Democratic Party victory in 1964 to dispute the theory, but the assassination of JFK the year prior had as much to do with that victory as the leaden campaign run by Goldwater in ‘64. In any event, Johnson’s words need not be an accurate assessment of his thinking after the two landmark Civil Rights bills (Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965) as they are indicative of the historical events that followed. In truth, the Southern states comprise half the number of votes in the electoral college needed for victory in a presidential election. The political fallout that was the result of policy decisions asserting minority rights was easily predictable. The Civil Rights Act was passed with considerable Republican support (80% in the Senate, over 60% in the House) along with northern Democrats, however, the political die had been cast. Shrewd strategizing by Republicans tieing the Democratic administration of Johnson and his Congress to both the Viet Nam War and desegregation did change the political landscape for more than a generation.
Black voters had been in the Democratic Party fold at least since FDR’s New Deal. At no time since 1936 had a Republican presidential candidate received more than 40% of the black vote, even though throughout that period black voters were evenly split when asked to identify party affiliation. The Democratic Party base, then, included antithetical wings that “co-existed” for generations with the strong presence in the party of the racist Dixiecrats. The Nixon Southern Strategy credited with making his victory possible in 1968 was either predicated on Dixiecrat abandoning the Democratic Party after 1964 or advantaged by the southern backlash to integration which invited the switch. In either case, Republican the Republican Party was transformed as the conservatives took over forcing it further to the right and deeper into a rotting core that resulted in what we are seeing now:
The tragedy of the Democratic Party through much of its history was an unwillingness to stand strong against its Southern wing and to clearly align itself with the cause of social and economic justice. The tragedy of the Republican Party is that, when Democrats began to do the right thing, key figures in the GOP welcomed Thurmond into its fold and began to craft not just a “Southern strategy” but a politics of reaction.
--John Nichols, Moyers ON Democracy
By 1971, the transformation was nearly complete. The party had begun the process of purging itself of its “better angels:”
One of the great Republican advocates of civil rights, John Lindsay, noted when he left the GOP in 1971, “Today the Republican Party has moved so far from what I perceive as necessary policies… that I can no longer try to work within it.”
It should be further noted that the two Democratic presidencies that punctuated the Republican string cited above were won by southern governors—Carter and Clinton-- and later by the first black American president, Barack Obama. The last in that line of presidential succession was Donald Trump.
“New” Republicans
Republicans may be on the cusp of a similar shift of loyalties, as Trump loyalists threaten to split the party or even create a separate “Trump Party.” The issues driving the schism are basically about whether the base of their party should have core values that adhere to the politics of white supremacy and its resultant racism and bigotry. That distillation, if you are appalled by it as .most of us are, is a perversion in which the impurities are collected and preserved. In effect, the moderate and more conservative members who reject Trump would be “vaporized” from the party. The residue would include neo-Nazis, racists, QAnon cultists, religious zealots, and assorted crazies with anti-constitutional ravings designed to hold on to an aberrant American vision. It was a vision that frightened even the far-right presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as seen in the quote above.
It is as if the distillery created for the purification of conservatism to its essence was built by demons as a means of conserving their hegemony over a party in its death throes-- a party so past its tipping point that it had gleefully expelled its long-forgotten legacy, its own origin story. The “Grand Old Party”, has distilled its association with its founder and patron, Honest Abe, and has brewed up a bitter broth adopted and enhanced by Donald Trump whose acquaintance with Lincoln is beyond non-existent. In fact, Trump has far more in common with Lincoln’s assassin whose plot was as serpentine and outlandish as those of the QAnon contingent who invaded the Capitol last month.
The Origins of the Current Movement
Goldwater also authored words that would serve as the collection vessel and that would fuel the distilled slop of disillusioned and angry white reprobates years after his failed campaign--words that provided oxygen for their January putsch attempt, and could easily have replaced the words on their tee shirts, hats, and banners:
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
The lineage of this “new” Republicanism begins there. The John Birch Society served as the political center for the conservative movement and was the major benefactor to his campaign. Its values coincide with the goals of the conservative movement today of limited government and the preservation of wealth. The Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, was a movement meant to oppose communism and in reaction to the post-war desegregation of America. It is not hard to conceive of this movement culminating a half-century later in the storming of the Capitol:
In their heyday, far-right groups that subscribed to “Welchian” conspiracy theories propagated their views on over 500 radio broadcasts each week – with the John Birch Society alone producing a program on 100 stations – and a widely circulated newsletter.
A string of Birch bookstores doubled as local headquarters for meetings and distribution centers for fliers, films, rally tickets and bumper stickers, spread its influence. Even though Welch understood racism and bigotry would hurt his cause, the John Birch Society’s opposition to the civil rights movement attracted Americans sympathetic to racist paranoia. For example, it consistently published reports accusing civil rights leaders of communist subversion and alleging that people of color were plotting to divide the country and control the world.
In his rather slim conservative manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater admitted to the limits of his movement:
“The Conservative approach is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today. The challenge is not to find new or different truths, but to learn how to apply established truths to the problems of the contemporary world.”
― Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative
It is a movement that distrusts a future, is bereft of ideas, and remains unwilling to adapt. The slender screed ghostwritten by William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell is more relic than revelatory. Bozell’s son, Leo Brent, IV last week faced federal charges for his part in the January 6 riot at the Capitol. The movement, it would appear has come full circle.
In a world in which words matter, some matter less than others. Taken together with the archived tweets and the disconnected thoughts of the twice-impeached president, we have the draft for the new Republican bible distilled from the problematic orthodoxy of its recent past---a sort of Mein Kampf, nee Codex Gigas for Dummies.