Republicans Are Stuck in the Past

If one looks at the current batch of would be Republican presidential candidates, much of the party base and the Republican Party's overall agenda, everything is backward facing and little focuses on the future and the changed world in which we live. The Christofascists and white supremacists want a return to the early 1950's with a Jim Crow era society when white privilege was supreme and all of society was forced to live under far right religious dictates. Blacks, other non-whites and gays knew their place and, if smart, did their best to remain invisible.  The GOP billionaire donor class wants a return to the Gilded Age with huge tax cuts, the unwinding of labor and safety regulations and a constant concentration of wealth among the few.  The rest of the GOP base, much like those in Britain who voted for Brexit want a return to the 1950's as well when America dominated the world and the non-college educated could live a somewhat prosperous life (they remain blind to the reality that is GOP policies of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and the destruction of labor unions that have undermined that once attainable lifestyle).  The result is that as we enter another presidential campaign cycle, one party only wants to go backward in time with little offered for the realities of today.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Republicans are warring over the relative virtues of three political eras. Unfortunately for those who want the party to prosper, all of them are in the past.

The weight of the old hung over the GOP last week in the booking of Donald Trump on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta and in the Trumpless presidential debate the night before.

Both events underscored that differences in the party are defined in large part by competing loyalties to three political yesterdays: First is the one associated with Trump. The second is the tea party rebellion during the Obama years. And the third — glowing in a sacred conservative stratosphere — is the tradition of Ronald Reagan.

Of course, there is some mixing and matching of the eras. Former vice president Mike Pence, the mixologist in chief, offers a lot of Reagan, a few dashes of tea party and an inevitable bow to the good things he ascribes to the “Trump-Pence” administration. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is the hardest to place, which is why she did well in last week’s debate: She had some feel of the future about her.

[T]he GOP’s wistful longing for a lost age is an ongoing and serious condition. Dispatching Trump and the era he represents is important not only to his GOP rivals but also to the country as a whole. He is a threat to the constitutional order and democracy itself. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are invaluable voices in a contest they cannot win because they are willing to say so.

But all of the former president’s rivals are struggling to dethrone him because they still have not come to terms with the other side of Trump, which was innovative. He moved past Reaganism. He co-opted the tea party, drawing its supporters in by echoing their nativism on immigration and backing tax cuts, without embracing its anti-government message in full.

Unlike most Republicans, Trump speaks the language of frustration experienced by Republicans who no longer believe the promises of global capitalism . . . . A man who had no business being president secured the GOP nomination in 2016 precisely because he understood, as his opponents didn’t, that many in the rank and file did not want to hear about cuts to Social Security or Medicare, hated NAFTA and other trade agreements, were skeptical about the Iraq War, and longed for an economy in which those who did not attend college could count on a decent living.

Trump’s “again” in his MAGA slogan thus does a lot of work. It certainly speaks to a nostalgia in his largely White constituency for old racial and cultural arrangements. Trump offers racist texts and subtexts, bows to religious traditionalism and tosses in some old-fashioned red-baiting.

But “again” also captures a craving in the battered regions of the country for the economic stability associated with the three decades after World War II. Trump has no coherent plan for restoration other than the blunderbuss of higher tariffs, but his supporters cheer him for acknowledging what they yearn for.

Trump’s Republican opponents are handcuffed not only by their reluctance to risk alienating his loyalists by taking him on but also by their ideological fealty to Reagan’s market faith and tea party thinking.

A cadre of GOP politicians (Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida among them) have begun to challenge market purity, but they are a small minority — and do not want to take Trump on.

Successful parties find a way to honor their traditions while absorbing new realities. Dwight D. Eisenhower broke the Democrats’ 20-year hold on power in 1952 by broadly accepting the reforms of the New Deal. It’s often forgotten that in 2000, George W. Bush adjusted to Clintonism, ran on “compassion” and spoke of reforming education and immigration.

In 2023, our economic challenges call for reinvention. Like it or not, “Bidenomics” accepts that it’s not the 1980s or 1990s anymore. The GOP’s policy imagination is still stuck in the era of Lee Greenwood, the venerable country singer the party reveres.

The first Republican president had a plan for this. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1862. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Republicans who understand the urgency of preventing a catastrophic Trump second term have a lot of disenthralling to do.