Will Politics of 1860 Inform the GOP 2016 Nomination Contest?

With the Republican Party increasingly pushing a voter disenfranchisement agenda reminiscent of the bad old days of Jim Crow, it is perhaps not a stretch to argue that an 1860's mentality has overtaken the GOP, except that now the prevalent mindset in the party is more akin to that of the Southern secessionists.  Just as the break away Baptists who became the Southern Baptist Convention used the Bible to justify slavery, the Christofascist GOP base likewise uses the Bible to justify hate and discrimination against a wide array of people.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch ponders what this toxicity will mean for the GOP 2016 presidential nomination process.  Here are some column highlights:

Will the Republicans nominate Chris Christie for president in 2016? Not if my reading of historical forces is correct. Christie’s landslide re-election victory in New Jersey should tell Republicans that they have a better chance of winning power with candidates who can reach out beyond the Republican base than with those whose extremism alienates Independents and Democrats.

But Christie has run afoul of the base’s adamant insistence on “purity” in adhering to the party line.

How will the base now weigh electability against purity?  The presidential politics of 1860 provide an answer, my premise being that the spirit that drives the Republican Party in our times is a re-emergence of the spirit that drove the South in the years leading up to the Civil War.

The re-emergence of those old patterns consists not just of calls for nullification and even secession but also deep attitudes, including antagonism toward compromise and intolerance of deviation from party orthodoxy.

The South’s treatment of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois in 1860 gives a preview of how the GOP base is likely to treat Christie in the competition for the 2016 GOP nomination.

Douglas had been a consistent ally of the South and its slaveholding ruling class. He had no objections to slavery. He was as racist as any American of that time.  . . . . But toward the end of the decade, two major overreaches by the South hurt Douglas. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision imperiled Douglas’ political survival in Illinois — in ways that Abraham Lincoln exploited in their famous debates.  And then the Buchanan administration’s embrace of the fraudulent constitution put forward by the pro-slavery faction in Kansas made a mockery of Douglas’s idea of popular sovereignty.

In dealing with these two challenges, Douglas departed from the complete loyalty the Southern Democratic leaders required.  When the Democratic Party nominated Douglas for president in 1860, Southerners bolted the convention and nominated a candidate of their own. 

This split in the Democratic Party created the opportunity for Abraham Lincoln to be elected president of the United States . . . 

How important was purity to the Southerners of that time?  Consider this: Southerners thought the election of Abraham Lincoln so terrible that they responded to it by breaking up the Union. But those same Southerners were not willing — in order to prevent Lincoln’s election — to join forces behind the candidacy of an insufficiently pure Douglas.

If I’m right that this same spirit now dominates the Republican primary electorate, Chris Christie will be rejected just as Stephen Douglas was.  Obedience to the party line, and damn the consequences.

Frankly, the sooner the GOP self-destructs (or, more unlikely, wakes up and throws the Christofascists/Tea Party out of the party), the better off the country will be.  The big question is that of how much damage will be done to America in the interim while the equivalent of rabid dogs control the GOP base.