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June 2, 2021 - February 7, 2022
In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, and his black support plummeted to 7 percent. Since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republican.4
At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand. The reality is just the opposite. Since 1964, black voters have heard the Republican Party with exquisite clarity; more important, they have seen what Republicans are doing once in office.
working in Republican politics, I have heard variations on this theme countless times, referring to black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters—any nonwhite voters: they care about the same issues as white voters. This is one of those insidious half-truths that conceal a deeper, more important truth. Yes, pretty much all voters do care about jobs. But to say a white college-educated male or female cared about jobs in the same way as an African American is delusional. It was akin to saying that everyone would like not to get shot and that this truth means the same to a white suburban high
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it was based on the assumption there was little Nixon could do to attract black voters, so the focus should be on utilizing black voters’ support of Democrats to alienate white voters.
The similarities of George Wallace and Donald Trump are striking, from attacking the news media to railing against elites, all played in the key of racism. This isn’t an aberration or a sudden wrong turn by the Republican Party. The Nixon White House studied Wallace and deliberately tried to mobilize his race-based support without alienating voters who were uncomfortable with Wallace’s style.
There is nothing new about Donald Trump. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so depressing.
How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.
“Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream. It was an “otherness” tool, as in those who didn’t loudly proclaim their strict adherence to its code were “other” than normal.
When I first joined the Bush campaign, Karl Rove handed me a copy of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass by Myron Magnet. “Read it,” Karl said. “This is what the governor wants to talk about.” I’d never heard of Magnet and promptly devoured the book. It was an elegant description of a conservative alternative to deeply rooted problems of contemporary American society, from government’s role in enabling generations of welfare dependency to the success of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s approach to law enforcement that had greatly reduced crime in New York City.
In Magnet’s view, the 1960s were a time when America lost its way and became disconnected from the moorings of culture and faith that had…made America great. What I realized I was reading was an articulate, erudite evocation of the world as seen by Donald Trump.
the disparity between white and black economic realities is staggering: Black workers earn over $11,000 less annually than white workers. Twenty percent of black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty, compared with less than 9 percent for whites. The median wealth for white Americans is $171,000, compared with $17,600 for black Americans. Less than half of black households are homeowners, compared with nearly three-quarters of white households.13
What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear.
Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.
There is a direct line between the rising of the national debt and the increased influence of Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform.
The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America. As a point of reference, at some point in the future the sun will collapse as a red star and consume the earth. I’d call it a toss-up as to which of these three events is likely to happen first.
Hewitt looked on, puzzled, and asked a more specific question: “Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority?” This time, Trump responded, “I think—I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me,” which made it painfully apparent that the guy who was running for the job to hold the nuclear codes didn’t have a clue about the most fundamental basics of the deterrent strategy at the core of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
If you know a woman who is marrying a man who is over seventy and she says there are a lot of things she doesn’t like about him but she thinks he will change, what would you tell that woman? But many Republicans I know were convinced there was something mystical about Trump walking into the Oval Office that would elevate him.
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.6
Published in 1952, the Memoirs of Franz von Papen is a study in self-deception by an intelligent man who knows he made terrible mistakes with horrific consequences but is still trying to explain that his choices were the best of bad ones available. In an effort to justify abolishing the ban on Nazi storm troopers, he blamed left-wing radicals:
In How Democracies Die, the authors described a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.19 Republicans in the Donald Trump era are guilty of all four.
Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50. More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.
On a personal level, I feel a mix of sadness and disgust. Many of these men and women lied to me when I listened to them explain why they wanted to be elected, and I and others worked so hard to get them in office and keep them in power. For what? So they could disgrace themselves by breaking every principle they swore they so deeply believed in? I blame myself for believing them, for not detecting their weakness, for helping to put them in power so that they could lie not just to me and others personally but to the nation and the world.
Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.