RIP: The Republican Party

[kenny]

The modern GOP was born in 1964 with Barry Goldwater.
Peaked in 1980s with Regan.
Died in 2016 with Trump.

Interesting piece.

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12256510/republican-party-trump-avik-roy

 

[ksinger]

Yes, good piece. Although I have my doubts about the author's assertion that Goldwater was not particularly racist. Racism has always been hiding behind arguments for "states rights" and distrust of a strong federal government since before the founding of the country. It's why "states rights" was a dogwhistle later on when being overt in your racism became impolite at the least. Until Trump made in-yer-face racism acceptable again, and gave the white supremacists somebody to be all googly for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ

What is truly pathetic, is that the Republican so-called intellectuals' echo chamber couldn't be pierced for so long because they were too wimpy to take an unflinching look at the reality that those of us outside the fold have seen clearly for decades, that (as the article points out) their party has been wedded to whiteness since Goldwater:

"Conservative intellectuals, for the most part, are horrified by racism. When they talk about believing in individual rights and equality, they really mean it. Because the Republican Party is the vehicle through which their ideas can be implemented, they need to believe that the party isn’t racist.

So they deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

“It’s the power of wishful thinking. None of us want to accept that opposition to civil rights is the legacy that we’ve inherited,” Roy says.

He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”"


IMO, they were too busy trying to convince themselves that their group was not founded on racism, because the reality is pretty painful. The only thing that has been able to finally pierce that iron denial is the shock and horror of the glaringly obvious racism-fueled Frankenstein monster that lack of introspection has created. And for the rank and file who cut their teeth on the racism that the leaders have denied denied denied, and thus allowed to grow, it's too late. The soul-searching mentioned in the article that leads to uncomfortable realizations - "This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.", - is not something most people do willingly. White people of a certain age are still not doing it, they're actually killing themselves instead.

 

[Madam Bijoux]

Too bad the GOP didn't die with Goldwater.
"In your heart you know he's right.
In your guts you know he's nuts."

America would have progressed and evolved so much more without Tricky Dick and the Shrub family.

 

[AGBF]

I cannot see the original piece. It is blocked by my computer (obviously by the anti-viral or anti-malware programs on my computer). On the way back from my daughter's hospital a reliable Sirius radio station reported that there is discussion of the Republican leadership having "an intervention" with Donald Trump" within 24 hours. It has, one of the program's hosts said, been discussed with Paul Manafort. Allegedly the Party wants him to toe the line or be cut loose. Supposedly what made Reince Priebold make the decision was Trump's failure to endorse Paul Ryan. Reince Priebold could live with him calling Mexicans rapists, slandering the mothers of fallen soldiers, and condoning the sexual harassment of women. He could not, however, accept a slight on his buddy, Paul Ryan.

AGBF

 

[AGBF]

More thoughts about why we suddenly need an intervention. From "The Washington Post":

"Republicans nominate dangerously insane person to lead America, then panic when he proves he’s dangerously insane".

Link...https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/08/03/republicans-nominate-dangerously-insane-person-to-lead-america-then-panic-when-he-proves-hes-dangerously-insane/?tid=pm_opinions_pop_b

 

[kenny]

Here's the text of the original article.

A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die
Updated by Zack Beauchamp on July 25, 2016, 8:50 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp [email protected]

TWEET SHARE (137K) +

(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
CLEVELAND — Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.

His history of conservatism was a Greek tragedy. It begins with a fatal error in 1964, survived on the willful self-delusion of people like Roy himself, and ended with Donald Trump.

“I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken,” Roy tells me. “Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act.”

The conservative movement’s founding error: Barry Goldwater


(William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Barry Goldwater.
The conservative movement has something of a founding myth — Roy calls it an “origin story.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckley’s ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Normally, Goldwater’s defeat is spun as a story of triumph: how the conservative movement eventually righted the ship of an unprincipled GOP. But according to Roy, it’s the first act of a tragedy.

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

“THE GRAVITATIONAL CENTER OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS WHITE NATIONALISM”
Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He himself was not especially racist — he believed it was wrong, on free market grounds, for the federal government to force private businesses to desegregate. But this “principled” stance identified the GOP with the pro-segregation camp in everyone’s eyes, while the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson became the champions of anti-racism.

This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites.

“The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,” Roy says. “Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.”

Conservative intellectuals were blind to the truth about the GOP — hence Trump


(William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC News/Getty Images)
Avik Roy (L) discusses Obamacare on television.
The available evidence compiled by historians and political scientists suggests that 1964 really was a pivotal political moment, in exactly the way Roy describes.

Yet Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was “popular but indefensible.”

This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

Conservative intellectuals, for the most part, are horrified by racism. When they talk about believing in individual rights and equality, they really mean it. Because the Republican Party is the vehicle through which their ideas can be implemented, they need to believe that the party isn’t racist.

So they deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

“It’s the power of wishful thinking. None of us want to accept that opposition to civil rights is the legacy that we’ve inherited,” Roy says.

He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

This, Roy believes, is where the conservative intellectual class went astray. By refusing to admit the truth about their own party, they were powerless to stop the forces that led to Donald Trump’s rise. They told themselves, over and over again, that Goldwater’s victory was a triumph.

But in reality, it created the conditions under which Trump could thrive. Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism — labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists — succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights.

“[Trump] tapped into something that was latent in the Republican Party and conservative movement — but a lot of people in the conservative movement didn’t notice,” Roy concludes, glumly.

For conservatism to live, the conservative movement has to die


(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Cal)
A sign with one of the RNC’s most popular slogans.
Over beers, I ask Roy how he feels about all of this personally. His answer is very sad.

“When Marco [Rubio] lost, I went through the five stages of grief. It was tough. I had to spend some time thinking about what to do for the next several years of my life,” he says.

“I left a comforting and rewarding career as a biotech investor to do this kind of work. I did it because I felt it was important, and I care about the country. Maybe it’s cheesy to say that, but I really sincerely do,” he continues. “So then, okay, what do I do? Do I do the same things I’ve been doing for the last four years? To me, just to do that to collect a paycheck didn’t make a lot of sense.”

This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.

Both are too wedded to the politics of white nationalism to change how they act, but that just isn’t a winning formula in a nation that’s increasingly black and brown. Either the Republican Party will eat itself or a new party will rise and overtake its voting share.

“Either the disruption will come from the Republican Party representing cranky old white people and a new right-of-center party emerging in its place, or a third party will emerge, à la the Republicans emerging from the Whigs in the [1850s],” Roy says.

The work of conservative intellectuals today, he argues, is to devise a new conservatism — a political vision that adheres to limited government principles but genuinely appeals to a more diverse America.

“I think it’s incredibly important to take stock,” he says, “and build a new conservative movement that is genuinely about individual liberty.”

I don’t know how this would work. I don’t think Roy knows either.

For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism. That’s Roy’s own diagnosis, and I think it’s correct. As a result, we have literally no experience in America of a politically viable conservative movement unmoored from white supremacy.

I’ve read dozens of conservative intellectuals writing compellingly about non-racist conservative ideals. Writers like Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and too many others to count have put forward visions of a conservative party quite different from the one we have.

But not one of these writers, smart as they are, has been able to explain what actual political constituency could bring about this pure conservatism in practice. The fact is that limited government conservatism is not especially appealing to nonwhite Americans, whereas liberalism and social democracy are. The only ones for whom conservatism is a natural fit are Roy’s “cranky old white people” — and they’re dying off.

Maybe Roy and company will be able to solve this problem. I hope they do. America needs a viable, intellectually serious right-of-center party.

Because we now know what the alternative looks like. It’s Donald Trump.

 

[ksinger]

And this should dovetail nicely with the previous article.

Donald Trump Gave Republicans the Choice of Racism or Defeat. They Chose Racism.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/the-gop-has-made-its-peace-with-trumps-racism.html?wpsrc=nymag

excerpt:

"The Republican Party fashions itself as the party of Lincoln, and when its national leaders have used race as a wedge, they have buried it beneath the language of race neutrality. The official party history holds that Barry Goldwater’s rejection of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was merely an overzealous interpretation of constitutional principle, and the mass influx of white Southerners that followed an unrelated coincidence. Those who don’t closely follow conservative rhetoric may not appreciate how deeply the right has invested itself in these fantasies of racial innocence.

And so, even though Trump has sprung naturally from the conservative fertile soil of racism, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism, his nomination is truly a sea change. No successful candidate before him has identified himself so tightly with white-identity politics. His place at the top of the ticket, and potentially as head of state, has presented fellow Republicans with an agonizing dilemma. To be sure, their choice is not comfortable. Those Republicans who have distanced themselves from the nominee, even in carefully measured increments, have endured fierce blowback from their own voters and even donors. (Eliana Johnson reports for National Review that Ted Cruz and his inner circle have been shocked at the hostility his carefully neutral, vote-your-conscience speech in regard to the man who accused his father of potentially murdering President Kennedy has provoked among his supporters.) In a party rife with racism, anti-racism is hardly considered an acceptable basis for partisan disloyalty.

What most Republican elites have always wanted is to lead a party that appeals to a majority of the country on the basis of abstract small-government, patriotic themes. Trump has revealed that this is a hopeless fantasy, and what they can lead instead is a party of racists. And they have decided, nearly every one of them, that they will take it."

 

[AGBF]

Yes, good piece. Although I have my doubts about the author's assertion that Goldwater was not particularly racist. Racism has always been hiding behind arguments for "states rights" and distrust of a strong federal government since before the founding of the country. It's why "states rights" was a dogwhistle later on when being overt in your racism became impolite at the least. Until Trump made in-yer-face racism acceptable again, and gave the white supremacists somebody to be all googly for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ

What is truly pathetic, is that the Republican so-called intellectuals' echo chamber couldn't be pierced for so long because they were too wimpy to take an unflinching look at the reality that those of us outside the fold have seen clearly for decades, that (as the article points out) their party has been wedded to whiteness since Goldwater:

"Conservative intellectuals, for the most part, are horrified by racism. When they talk about believing in individual rights and equality, they really mean it. Because the Republican Party is the vehicle through which their ideas can be implemented, they need to believe that the party isn’t racist.

So they deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

“It’s the power of wishful thinking. None of us want to accept that opposition to civil rights is the legacy that we’ve inherited,” Roy says.

He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”"


IMO, they were too busy trying to convince themselves that their group was not founded on racism, because the reality is pretty painful. The only thing that has been able to finally pierce that iron denial is the shock and horror of the glaringly obvious racism-fueled Frankenstein monster that lack of introspection has created. And for the rank and file who cut their teeth on the racism that the leaders have denied denied denied, and thus allowed to grow, it's too late. The soul-searching mentioned in the article that leads to uncomfortable realizations - "This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.", - is not something most people do willingly. White people of a certain age are still not doing it, they're actually killing themselves instead.

I finally read the article. Thank you for posting it in its entirety, kenny. I think it was very worthwhile.

First, ksinger commented that she was unsure Barry Goldwater was not a racist. That he opposed integration certainly puts him in the camp of acting like a racist, whether his motivation was supposedly because he didn't want to upset the free market or because he didn't want the races to mix. So I have to agree with that.

Second, I am a bit doubtful that conservative intellectuals could really have been completely blind to the fact that The Republican Party had suddenly picked up all the southern whites who once were Democrats back before the Democrats backed integration. I do believe that there are some conservatives who are true to their principles, but it is hard not to notice why one's party keeps winning certain elections. And certain states in elections. I do not seriously believe that conservative intellectuals thought that the red states fell to the Republicans because the people in Texas had an abiding love for individual freedom totally divorced from white skin privilege.