What Happened to Responsible Conservatives

Once upon a time conservatives and Republicans put country first and were advocates for science, knowledge and education.   They even believed in the social safety net.  Those days are gone and today's hideous version of the Republican Party and the foul occupant of the White House now seem hell bent to turn America into something resembling a banana republic from the 1950's.  One cannot help but wonder what the hell happened.  In my view, two things: (i) the Christofascist take over of the GOP base, and (ii) the GOP's embrace of white supremacy.  To the Christofascists, science, knowledge and good education are a threat since they run the risk of enlightening would be adherence to a toxic dogma that the entire Christofascist worldview is based on fantasy.  As for the embrace of racism, the party is now obsessed with an us versus them mindset where "winning" requires that others lose, both in terms of civil rights and whose is viewed as a"real American."  As a column in the Washington Post reminds us, things were not always like this:

The past several days underscore why not only political progressives but genuine moderates are at their wit’s end with the Republican Party and what passes for contemporary American conservatism.

If conservatism in the United States has claimed to stand for anything, it is the idea that government authority should be limited. Conservatives regularly argue (especially when Democrats are in the White House) that the executive’s clout should be checked and that legitimate law enforcement authorities deserve our respect, particularly when they are investigating abuses of power.

The behavior of House Republicans in demanding former FBI director James B. Comey’s memos about his conversations with President Trump, which were subsequently leaked to the media, shows a GOP that has abandoned all principle. It is willing to do whatever it takes to protect a president who has no regard for the truth, the law or established norms.

Any doubts that Republicanism and conservatism have given themselves over to one man, his whims and his survival were dispelled by the GOP’s use of the congressional oversight process to undermine a legitimate probe into a hostile power’s interference in our elections.

As it happens, the actual memos are embarrassing to Trump and support Comey’s veracity. And if the Republicans’ obstructionist triumvirate of Reps. Devin Nunes of California, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had hoped to prove that Comey leaked classified information, the memos reveal exactly the opposite.

It should be stunning that the chairs of the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees are more interested in doing Trump’s bidding than in figuring out how Vladimir Putin may have helped to elect our current president. It’s possible to imagine that, somewhere, Ronald Reagan is weeping.

The ongoing frustration of many of us who really did respect conservatism once upon a time is not just about the movement’s capitulation to Trump. It is also triggered by the supposedly substantive side of the news: The only thing Republicans in Congress know how to do now that their corporate tax cut has proved to be unpopular is — to propose more tax cuts. There is an emptiness where problem-solving conservatism used to be.

In the period when democracy planted deep roots in Western Europe and was thriving in the United States, conservative parties were led by figures such as Dwight Eisenhower in the United States, Harold Macmillan in Britain, Konrad Adenauerin West Germany and Charles de Gaulle in France.

Applying the insights of this more responsible version of conservatism to our time would lead us to seek the best approaches to the very discontents that helped put Trump in the White House in the first place — for example, growing inequality. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found that income inequality has been increasing since 1970. And between 2000 and 2015, incomes actually went down for the bottom 60 percent of earners. There are many causes of division and resentment in our country, and this is surely one of them.

We need a politics where the democratic left and right compete over who can most effectively and efficiently excise this social cancer from our body politic. Such a debate could be both instructive and productive.

Alas, except for a small, honorable cadre of writers and think-tankers, the American right has taken itself out of the game. Our politics will remain broken as long as conservatism confines its energies to cutting taxes and defending a reckless president at all costs.

Be Afraid: Extremists Are Taking Control of the GOP

While in many ways the Republican Party has become and extremist sectarian party, things may be about to get much worse with the coming departure of feckless John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Now, swamp fever addled "movement conservatives" - read Christofascist religious fanatic extremists - backed members of the House are likely to push for even more extreme batshitery, including shutting down the government and force a debt default.  A piece in Salon looks at the frightening turn of events that may be in the near future if these lunatics get their way.  Here are excerpts:

Movement Conservatives just claimed the head of House Speaker John Boehner. His political death was the price of preventing a catastrophic government shutdown after Movement Conservatives in Congress tied the very survival of the United States government to their determination to defund Planned Parenthood. Movement Conservatives are gunning for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell next. We should be very afraid. Boehner and McConnell are not wild-eyed lefties. They are on the very far right of the American political spectrum: fervently pro-business, antiabortion, opposed to social welfare legislation. But they are old-school politicians who still have faith in the idea of American democracy.

Movement Conservatives do not. They want to blow up the government and remake America according to their own radical ideology.

Eisenhower worried deeply about the rise of authoritarian governments. He worried about fascism, communism and religious extremism overseas, but he was also deeply concerned at the rise of Movement Conservatism in America.

Mass movements ultimately need a disaffected population, Hoffer said, people who are either economically or culturally dispossessed. Those isolated individuals need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They need to believe they can regain their previous relevance. Properly primed, such followers will throw themselves behind a leader who promises to return them to power.

The easiest way to unify followers was with hate. Leaders of such a movement identified a villain. These villains were usually the weakest members of society, making them easy to attack. And each attack on these new “enemies” fed contempt for them. Followers of a movement made more and more outrageous claims about those they demonized. Eventually those villains became so dehumanized that movement members would kill them, believing such atrocities were vital to reclaiming a glorious future for their nation. At this stage, followers were immune to facts or logic. Indeed, arguing with them only entrenched them in their beliefs, because the sign of a true believer’s faith was that it stood firm in the face of overwhelming opposition.

In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower’s use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans. Black people threatened America by forcing the government to redistribute wealth, thus inserting communism into the very fabric of the country. In 1968, Nixon made this Movement Conservative argument part of the established Republican Party when he resorted to the Southern Strategy. 

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives controlled the Republican Party, and they abandoned reality in favor of their simple story line. A member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind that “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” this senior adviser to the president told Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”

That is exactly what today’s Movement Conservatives are doing. After the last Republican debate, astonished observers noted that many of the candidates’ assertions were flat-out lies.

They tell followers that America has fallen apart because enemies— minorities, women and liberals– have poisoned the government. Only a Movement Conservative leader can purge the nation of that poison and return America to its former greatness. Donald Trump, who currently commands a significant lead, is the salesman who puts it most clearly. . . . He tells them a story in which Christianity is under siege, President Obama is a foreigner, and that immigrants—who actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans– are criminals.

But Trump is not an outlier. Jeb! says that black people vote for Democrats to get “free stuff.” Mike Huckabee insists that the United States is criminalizing Christianity. Bobby Jindal promises to “fire” Congress. Ted Cruz hints that President Obama is a Muslim and warns that no Muslim should be president. All of the candidates demonize undocumented immigrants.

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism. Last week, 43 percent of Republicans polled said they could imagine a scenario in which they would back a military coup. This week, Movement Conservatives in Congress knocked off a conservative speaker because he refused to sacrifice the American government to their demands.

We should be very frightened indeed. If we are not careful, John Boehner’s will not be the only head on the block.

People need to wake up to the stark danger these fanatics pose.  For too long they have used racism, false patriotism, and hate to dupe people into supporting their toxic agenda.  They need to be unmasked and defeated.

Republicans Have Been Treasonous Before

The infamous letter signed by 47 Senate Republicans is but one of the many ways in which the increasingly insane and dangerous GOP base seeks to destroy American democracy and replace it with a mix of theocracy and oligarchy and a never ending war regime.  One needs to look beyond the recent letter to see that it is only part of a trend to undermine the civil laws and grant special rights to religious extremists and vulture capitalists.  A piece in Salon looks at the worrisome trend and what it could portend.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican senators who warned Iranian officials that any agreement they made with President Obama would not outlive the present administration appear to have been blindsided by the backlash against their letter. . . . .  Sen. John McCain downplayed the extraordinary letter as business as usual: “I sign lots of letters,” he told Politico.

But the firestorm continues to rage. Newspaper editorials slam the senators who signed the bill; more than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition calling for the senators to be tried for treason; #47Traitors has been trending on Twitter.  Why has this letter garnered such a visceral reaction when attacks on the president and his policies are the everyday currency of the modern Republican Party?

It has created a backlash because it shows, with crystal clarity, that the ideology of Movement Conservatives is not simply partisanship. It is an attack on American democracy itself.

Whenever adherents of an ideological faction recognize that they do not have the popular support to control the president, they try to game the system. This happens on a grand scale, as when Southern whites so hated the outcome of the 1860 election that made Abraham Lincoln president, they picked up guns to get their way. It happens on smaller scales, as when Republicans in Congress today threaten to shut down the government to make President Obama do what they want.

[W]hen a faction tries to gain the upper hand at home by interfering with our international relations, Americans are able to see their attack on our fundamental system for what it is.

The precedent established by the Logan Act held firm from 1799 until the 1950s, when members of a radical faction within the Republican Party tried to take control of foreign policy away from their own president in order to impose their ideology on the country. Movement Conservatives within the Republican Party were horrified by President Eisenhower’s domestic initiatives. These men hated the New Deal consensus, believing that regulation of business, protection of labor, and establishment of a social safety net had imported communism into America.

They launched a public brawl with Eisenhower, arguing that his support for the United Nations opened the way for communism to conquer America. It was only a question of time until the UN dictated all U.S. laws (it would start, they warned white Southerners, by ending racial segregation). 

Eisenhower was shocked that his opponents were willing to weaken the nation internationally to score domestic points. He pointed out that Americans had let Congress control foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, and the resulting disaster had inspired the authors of the Constitution to centralize international negotiations in the president. But Movement Conservatives ignored the historical record and continued to whip up opposition to Eisenhower’s foreign policy in order to weaken his support and kill his domestic Middle Way.

Their efforts backfired. Determined to prevent the passage of the measure, Eisenhower had to build a coalition with Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson. . . . . and for the rest of his presidency Eisenhower would work with Democrats, rather than Movement Conservatives, to make policy.

Sixty years after the Bricker Amendment failed, 47 senators have tried, once again, to undercut a president they abhor by attacking his foreign policy. The letter was addressed to Iranian officials, but it was aimed at strengthening Movement Conservatives at home.

The letter put into stark relief that Movement Conservatives value their ideology more than the nation’s founding principles. If members of a faction can override the president so long as they are willing to sacrifice the country to their cause, elections don’t matter. Only ideology and commitment do.

In 1799 and 1954, this was not what most Americans understood to be American democracy. In 2015, while sending a letter to the leaders of Iran was probably not illegal, Americans across the political spectrum are echoing their predecessors when they condemn the senators who signed it as #47Traitors.

Republicans Have Nothing to Offer the Middle Class

The main response of the Republican Party to Barack Obama's proposals laid out in last night's State of the Union address can be summed up in basically one word: "No!"   While giving lip service to aiding the middle class, the GOP is fine and dandy with the growing wealth disparity in America and the New Gilded Age goals of those like the Koch brothers.  Here in Virginia, the Virginia Republicans just killed a very modest increase in the state's minimum wage.  Talking about helping the middle class and doing something are two very different things for Republicans.  A piece in Salon looks at the reality that the GOP has nothing to offer the middle class.  Here are excerpts:

Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney are zeroing in on inequality as America’s fundamental economic problem.

Bush’s new Political Action Committee, called “The Right to Rise,” declares “the income gap is real” but that “only conservative principles can solve it.”

Mitt Romney likewise promised last week that if he runs for president he’ll change the strategy that led to his 2012 loss to President Obama (remember the “makers” versus the “takers?”) and focus instead on income inequality, poverty, and “opportunity for all people.”

But they’ve got a whopping credibility problem, starting with trickle-down economics.  Since Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, Republican policies have widened inequality.

Neither party deserves a medal for reversing the trend, but evidence shows that middle-class and poor Americans have faired better under Democratic presidents.  Personal disposable income has grown nearly 6 times more with Democrats in the White House than Republicans.

[M]ore jobs have been created under Democratic presidents as well.  These broad-based job and wage gains haven’t hampered economic growth. To the contrary, they’ve fueled it by putting more money into the pockets of people who spend it — thereby boosting business profits and hiring.

Since Reagan, Republican policies have nudged it toward big gains at the top and stagnation for everyone else.  The last Republican president to deliver broad-based prosperity was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the 1950s.  Then, the gains from growth were so widely shared that the incomes of the poorest fifth actually grew faster than the incomes of the top fifth. As a result, America became more equal than ever before or since.

Under Reagan, Republican policy lurched in the opposite direction: Lower taxes on top incomes and big wealth, less public investment, and efforts to destroy labor unions.  Not surprisingly, that’s when America took its big U-turn toward inequality.  These Reaganomic principles are by now so deeply embedded in the modern Republican Party they’ve come to define it.

When Jeb Bush admits that the income gap is real but that “only conservative principles can solve it,” one has to wonder what principles he’s talking about if not these.

And when Mitt Romney promises to run a different campaign than he did in 2012 and focus on “opportunity for all people,” the real question is whether he’ll run on different economic principles.

That the leading Republican hopefuls recognize the economy has to work for everyone and not just a few is progress.

But unless they disavow the legacy of Ronald Reagan and adopt the legacy of Dwight Eisenhower, their words are nothing more than soothing rhetoric — akin to George W. Bush’s meaningless “compassionate conservatism.”

The Republican Party Then and Now

As noted at Politifact, a popular meme has been sweeping the Internet and social media that notes positions once supported by the Republican Party in the 1950's which are now anathema to the party faithful.  So what happened and when did the GOP change?  In my view, one of the main catalysts was the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP.  Since the Tea Party has a 85% overlap of "conservative Christians," I view the Tea Party crowd as simply disingenuously disguised Christofascists. The irony is that while these people claim to support "Christian values" they policies they have brought to the GOP are the antithesis of Christian values.  Other than trying to police other people's bedrooms to enforce their neurotic sexual mores and force public religious displays on all citizens, they have no moral agenda.   Of course, with the rise of the Christofascists, sane and decent people fled the GOP.  The combined result is today's ugly political party where greed, racism, and religious extremism are the norm. Here are highlights from Politifact that make it clear that the change in the GOP - for the worse - is real:

Liberals are getting nostalgic about the 1950s Republican agenda -- at least judging by the social media meme several readers recently sent us.

The meme, created by the group Occupy Democrats, summarized a few planks from the 1956 Republican Party platform, followed by the wistful comment, "Share if you miss the good old days!"

Here are the seven planks listed in the meme, which to today’s ear sound more like Democratic talking points:

1. Provide federal assistance to low-income communities;
2. Protect Social Security;
3. Provide asylum for refugees;
4. Extend minimum wage;
5. Improve unemployment benefit system so it covers more people;
6. Strengthen labor laws so workers can more easily join a union;
7. Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.

We wondered whether the meme accurately describes these elements of the 1956 platform, and if so, whether the 1956 document contrasts sharply with the most recent party platform in 2012. So we took a closer look.

We located a copy of the official party platform from 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was running (successfully, as it turned out) for his second term as president.  All told, the meme is generally accurate in portraying these seven elements of the 1956 platform . . .

The bottom line, then, is that on most of these issues, the GOP moved to the right between 1956 and 2012, though the degree of that shift has varied somewhat issue by issue.

We asked scholars whether the contrast between the two platforms is noteworthy, and they generally agreed that it was.

Delton noted that the Republican Party in the 1950s was divided between moderates (including Eisenhower) and conservatives. She said the moderates controlled the process of platform-writing in 1956, but they threw a few bones to conservatives in certain portions of the document. For instance, the platform said the government wouldn’t sign a treaty or enter into an international agreement in violation of individual rights -- an issue that continues to energize conservatives decades later -- and there’s a plank about a balanced budget, which was seen as a conservative position.

The seven items listed in the meme were supported by moderates, Delton said. At the time, she said, "conservatives would have focused, with horror, on the very items the meme highlights."

Eisenhower was facing a Democratic Congress in 1956 and didn’t want to try to reverse the New Deal, Anderson said. "If the point is that Eisenhower was not as extreme as Republicans today, it is accurate."

The meme says the 1956 Republican Party platform supported equal pay, the minimum wage, asylum for refugees, protections for unions and more.

That’s generally correct. . . . The claim is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.

The 1956 platform describes the GOP I grew up in and that generations of my family supported.  That party is dead and perhaps beyond saving unless and until the Christofascists are driven out and treated as the foul individuals that they are notwithstanding their feigned piety and religiosity. 

How the GOP Stopped Caring About Average Americans

A piece in the Washington Post looks at the descent of the Republican Party from a party that pushed progressive measures to one that rejects knowledge - indeed, the embrace of ignorance is now deemed a virtue - and seeks to undo so many of the policies the party once championed.  My family members were Republicans for generations largely because of the party's moderate social positions and respect for knowledge and logic.  Now, none of us are Republicans because the GOP now stands for the opposite of what it once did.  On top of that, the GOP is now the party of open racism. Here are column highlights:

In 1862 , in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Justin Smith Morrill stood in Congress to defend his party’s invention: an income tax . The government had the right to demand 99 percent of a man’s property, the Vermont representative thundered. If the nation needs it, “the property of the people . . . belongs to the government .” The Republican Congress passed the income tax — as well as a spate of other taxes — and went on to create a strong national government. By the time the war ended, the GOP had invented national banking , currency and taxation; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s 4  million slaves.

A half-century later, when corporations dominated the economy and their owners threw their weight into political contests, Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Insisting that America must return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him,” the Republican president called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes. 

In the mid-20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower recoiled from using American resources to build weapons alone, warning, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He called for government funding for schools, power plants, roads and hospitals.

Like Lincoln and Roosevelt before him, Eisenhower adhered to the classic Republican view of government and set out to use it to guarantee economic opportunity in the postwar world. He cut regulations and price controls for certain businesses, but vetoed laws he thought unfairly favored businessmen and endorsed an upper income-tax bracket of 91 percent. Under his direction, Congress invested in education and infrastructure: The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act remains one of the largest public-works programs in history. He defended the right to economic opportunity for every hard-working American, putting government muscle behind desegregation. During Eisenhower’s administration, the middle class expanded, and the country thrived. 

But business leaders who hated government regulation insisted that Eisenhower’s policies were tantamount to communism.  They pointed to desegregation as proof that the government was redistributing tax dollars to undeserving minorities, and their mingling of racism and communist fears won votes. By the 1970s, in an uncanny echo of the 1890s and the 1920s, Republican economists had embraced the old idea that only deregulation and unfettered capitalism would create wealth, which would then trickle down to everyone.

After 1980, the government slashed taxes and social welfare spending, even as it boosted defense spending, and once again, wealth stratified. Between 1979 and 2008, the after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans grew 275 percent. By 2007, the top fifth of American earners made more than the other four-fifths combined. 

Perhaps with the influx of young people, immigrants and minorities into the voting population, the cycle can finally be broken. These voters are too young to remember the Cold War and are more comfortable across ethnic lines, making it harder to rally them with the specters of socialism or racial conflict. Forced to adapt to a changing nation, in this century, perhaps, the Republican Party will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders.

Bring Back the Party of Lincoln

If one knows the full history of the Republican Party it quickly becomes apparent that today's GOP is an ugly aberration away from what the party once stood for.  Fueling the GOP's decline into something ugly, as I have argued before, have been the Christofascists, many of whom are the modern day descendants of racist Southern whites and white supremacists who are terrified at what they perceive to be the loss of white privilege.  The GOP has transformed from a party of fiscally conservative, socially moderate country club Republicans to a party of religious extremists, robber barons and what my New Orleans belle grandmother would have deemed poor white trash.   A piece in the New York Times seeks to remind us of what the GOP once was and argues that the party needs to return to its roots.  Here are excerpts:

FOR all the differences between establishment Republicans and Tea Party insurgents, their various efforts to rebrand the Grand Old Party tend to start from a common premise: the belief that Ronald Reagan was the quintessential Republican, and that his principle of defending wealth and the wealthy should remain the party’s guiding vision.

In doing so, they misunderstand the party’s longer history. They would do better to look to earlier presidents, and model their new brand on the eras when the Republican Party opposed the control of government by an elite in favor of broader economic opportunity.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution’s protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working class.

Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble Westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860.

Even as the Civil War raged, Republicans made good on their promise: They gave farmers their own land, created public colleges, funded a transcontinental railroad, took control of the national currency away from rich bankers, and ended slavery. To pay for their initiatives, they invented national taxes, including the income tax. The middle class grew, and the North and West, regions covered by the new programs, boomed.

But as soon as the war ended, wealthy Americans joined with those who hated African-Americans and immigrants to insist that slaveholders had been right: Permitting poor men to have a say in government had produced policies that redistributed wealth. Only a few years after building a federal system that cleared the way for equal opportunity, Republicans faced a racist and xenophobic backlash against an active government — and they folded. 

In 1893, the economy crashed, and too few Americans had enough purchasing power to revive it. Lincoln had been right: Government that served the wealthy would ruin the country.

The party responded, and a new Republican Party emerged from the Panic of 1893, rededicated to Lincoln’s vision. Led by Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive Republicans recognized that government had to address the systemic inequalities of industrialization or no man could rise.

They cleaned up the cities, promoted public education, protected workers and regulated business. Their policies fed a strong and growing middle class; their vision resurrected the Republican Party.

It took a new leader who would embrace Lincoln’s principles to return the party to health. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s experiences in World War II convinced him that the only way to prevent the rise of dictators was to promote economic equality around the world. He used the government to desegregate American schools, promote higher education and start the largest public works program in American history, the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act.

The consequences were predictable: After Reagan’s 1980 election, economic stability turned into the Great Divergence, in which wealth moved steadily upward. In 2008, the economy crashed.

Twice in its history, the Republican Party regained its direction and popularity after similar disasters by returning to its original defense of widespread individual economic success. The same rebranding is possible today, if Republicans demote Reagan from hero to history and rally to a leader like Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower — someone who believes that the government should promote economic opportunity rather than protect the rich.

Yes, re-branding is possible, but I do not see how sane, decent people can easily re-brand a party whose base is controlled mostly by extremists and those most motivated by their hatred of others.  I don't see anyone among today's GOP leaders up to the challenge.