Since the moment in 2016, whenever it was, that Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, there has been the claim circulating that he somehow changed the Party significantly. So, NPR wrote last year, “For decades, the Republican Party united strong national defense proponents and social and pro-business conservatives. But President Trump has reshaped the GOP and rejected some of its traditions.”
This is entirely too kind. The Party is hollow, which is why Trump’s obnoxious voice echoes so loudly inside it. Trump took the Party over easily, and they governed quite happily with him for two years, during which time the only substantive legislation they passed was yet another tax cut. In 2020, they famously chose not to adopt a platform at all, about the only real innovation Trump caused, and they did that in order to declare their abject fealty to whatever Trump wanted to do, whatever that was. It changed day to day.
Reporters are human and they have some deep seated impulse to be courteous to other humans, even though their enterprise is sort of inherently rude, under some accounts. Insofar as the motto, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable obtains, one will undoubtedly cause some hurt feelings.
Here, NPR takes Republicans at face value, which is polite, but not very connected to reality. They regurgitate what Republicans say about themselves, but this brief account is not an accurate account of what Republicans have been about since the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon taught Republican presidents to win using dog whistle racism. His claim to run on behalf of the “silent majority” signaled to the country that he was mostly concerned about the bougie, white, middle class people who stayed home and peaceably watched their televisions, rather than those wacky radicals in the streets protesting, whether against the Vietnam War or for African American civil rights mattered little. To Nixon, anyway.
African Americans, by dint of their skin color, have always been easy targets in the United States. Under slavery, they were presumptively slaves and had to prove they were not if they were not. After slavery, the regime of racial segregation grew up quickly, with statutes requiring separate facilities for the “races,” as if there were some valid, physiological or anatomical difference that could justify relegating African Americans to inferior facilities in all aspects of public life.
Lyndon Johnson knew he was going to lose the “white supremacist” voters by pushing to pass major legislation prohibiting racial segregation and ensuring voting rights for African Americans. They left for the Republican Party, with a nudge from Richard Nixon. Nixon thus set up the noxious dynamic according to which Republican presidential candidates, and lots of them for lower offices, could rely on a solid rump of “white supremacists” who bought the line that African American civil rights cost white people something and the corollary claim that the federal government, outside of defense, does nothing but take money from hard working white people to give it to supposedly lazy African Americans.
The white people who bought the racial solidarity ploy happily accepted Republican attacks on social programs that necessarily benefited mostly white people, but bore the stigma of being primarily the province of African Americans, and the corresponding proposal, the only idea Republicans have had since Nixon, to cut taxes, cut taxes, and cut taxes some more. This program never caught on fully, but Republicans kept pushing it anyway, with the result that they are primarily responsible for the huge budget deficits we now have.
The only way in which Trump was any different than any other Republican presidential candidate since Nixon was in being overt about his racism. He attacked Mexicans over the long running issue of undocumented immigrants, who have played a crucial role in our economy at least since World War II, and Muslims, who are a newly inviting target since his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, declared a “war on terror,” but the conceptual move is the same as it always has been. Identify a segment of the population by an irrelevant characteristic and promise to heap discrimination on them as a device for winning votes without articulating any substantive policy ideas.
In 2016, African American enthusiasm dropped off without Obama on the ticket, and the national press were fools for the idiotic, unimportant story of Republicans trashing Hillary Clinton for her email problem, such that Trump eked out just enough votes to carry the Electoral College, relic of the slave owners who wrote the Constitution, and spend four years playing president. In 2018, African Americans and others were disgusted with two years of Trump and came roaring back, giving the Democrats control of the House. That momentum carried through to 2020, when they chose Joe Biden as the nominee for the Democrats and put him in the White House, relieving the republic of the horror that was President Trump.
Now that the big discussion is continuing Republican fealty to what most people call “the big lie,” that the Democrats somehow stole the election from Trump, despite zero evidence to support the thesis, some prominent Republicans have begun to state their open dissent from the Trump principle, but it is too little, too late.
With all due respect to Governor Hogan, the Republican Party has no soul to fight over.
Hogan is not necessarily the most prominent Republican to dissent from loyalty to Trump. At the moment, the most famous dissident is Liz Cheney, Republican member of the House of Representatives and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has denounced Trump for his role in inciting the riot at the Capitol in January and voted in favor of the second impeachment of Trump. Her Republican colleagues look set fair to remove her from her leadership position in the House Republican caucus for her apostasy.
These individual blips of Republican integrity are admirable on their own terms, but they do raise the question, what exactly are they fighting for? Hogan, Cheney, and Republican House member Adam Kitzinger apparently see themselves as trying to rescue or preserve some aspect or feature of the Republican Party, but it is very difficult from outside the Party to discern exactly what that is.
The basic dynamic was set motion in 1968 by Richard Nixon and nothing important has changed since. The Republican Party is a decrepit relic that stands for nothing but garden variety racism. They claim to be “conservative,” and conservative they are in striving to retain the worst aspects of our nation’s past against African Americans themselves and the rest of the smart population that looks forward to a future without racism.
Dissenters from the Trump Principle within the Republican Party deserve tepid applause for having the courage of their convictions, but their apparent ideal of some notional Republican Party absent the Trump Principle is an absurd fantasy. They mostly deserve pity.