Republicans Are Stuck with Trump
It's very funny that they dared not stop him in 2016, and now they're really stuck.
The entire Republican program since Nixon has rested on “white supremacy,” so now they’re stuck with their racist dear leader. Except that nothing about racism is funny, this situation would be risible in the extreme.
Republicans in the House of Representatives are about to have a second battle over the status of a scion from one of their leading families. They will vote, likely next Wednesday, according to leading Republican (!) Jim Jordan, to remove Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, from her position in caucus leadership in the House:
This is fantastically funny. It is a commonplace that the Party that holds the White House loses seats in Congress in midterm elections, but Republicans are busy fighting with each other as Democrats, under their popular president, keep passing laws that provide concrete benefits to the public that are not nearly as controversial as the Affordable Care Act, to point to the last time this situation, broadly, obtained.
But the really funny part is that this whole kerfuffle is only taking place because of the fealty of too many in the Party to their late, unlamented president, Donald Trump, who is as fully engaged as he gets in the debate despite having zero formal authority at the moment.
For anyone who is at all well informed about politics and law in the United States, this statement is vastly amusing in its utter incoherence. We could look at all of the bizzarely wrong statements it contains, but the larger point is that this is the current standard bearer of the Republican Party, and they have been on this course for fifty three years.
Richard Nixon and demographic changes cooperated to put the Republicans in this fix. Demographers have known since the late 1960s that racial and ethnic minorities would grow steadily as a percentage of the population until white people became the minority, which is terrifying to the “white supremacist” set. That chicken is coming home to roost. Nothing about the U.S. Constitution, as amended, in any way requires or specifies any specific racial or ethnic identity for the population of the republic, but good, racist Republicans are very busy right now making clear that they want only white people, by their definition, to run the country and they will whine loudly if anyone else gets a fair chance.
White people are closely divided between the Republican and Democratic Parties, leaving Black, Hispanic, and Other voters the power to decide the outcome. With the Republicans nominating a candidate who announced his candidacy by picking on Mexicans and Muslims, they hold little appeal to minority voters.
Richard Nixon created this dilemma when he ran for president in 1968 on behalf of the “silent majority,” or the good, bougie white people who stayed home and watched their televisions rather than protesting, whether for African American civil rights or against the Vietnam War mattered not. Then, Nixon instituted an affirmative action program in the skilled building trades, which had the political benefit, to Nixon, of splitting the New Deal electoral coalition that had dominated U.S. politics since 1932. Democrats had won seven of the nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1968.
Nixon’s ploy was effective in the near term. He won twice, and every Republican who won after him used some version of his dog whistle racism trick to win. Until Trump, who used overt racism, having zero grasp of subtlety. Lindsey Graham, now a loyal Trump toady, could see in 2016 that nominating Trump for president would be a total disaster, but few people listened then.
Graham did not state the exact point that is at issue here, not least because he would be a very poor candidate to notice it or remark on it. But the Republican Party dared not stop Trump once he had articulated his overtly racist agenda and won a loyal fan base with it because they had spent forty eight years teaching their base what we may call the Nixon Corollary, or the noxious idea that civil rights for African Americans came at the expense of white people and that the federal government, except for defense, serves only to take money from hard working white people and give it to supposedly lazy Black people.
This ploy had the enormous advantage for Republicans since Reagan of allowing them consistently to pursue policies that harmed the very white people who voted for them. Every Republican policy, such as they are, and rhetorical trick — “liberals are elitists” — for forty eight years depended on that conceptual framework. But the racial solidarity ploy always had a limited shelf life and it collapsed when Barack Obama won twice. Trump was just the last, screeching gasp of the “white supremacist” vote collapsing.
But, since Republicans have not bothered to develop a policy idea other than tax cuts as the solution to every problem, they now have not a single idea to put forward. Worse for them, they still dare not challenge Trump because he can summon the “white supremacist” masses to attack like rabid dogs anyone who attracts the ire of the dear leader. McConnell just won election again, so he doesn’t care. Mike Pence is a nullity. When Trump runs in 2024, he will choose a new vice president to run with. Of the targets in the statement above, only Liz Cheney has anything to lose. But all she has to lose is her House Republican leadership seat. Trump is always clueless and understands nothing about the politics of the House of Representatives. Cheney won the Republican primary with 74 percent of the vote and the general election with 70 percent of the vote. Anything is possible, but the odds of her losing in 2024 are exceedingly slim. Hers is a safe Republican seat and she is not likely to lose that much Party support in the next eighteen months.
With any luck, however, we will get to watch the Trump circus consistently between now and November 2022, maybe even November 2024, as Trump leads his Party to loss after loss. It should be hugely entertaining.