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August 10 - August 18, 2020
I have this crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility.
There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.
The reason African Americans overwhelmingly reject Republicans isn’t based on word choices or phrasing. It’s based on policy. It isn’t how Republicans are talking to black voters that results in 90 percent or more of those voters refusing to vote for Republicans. It’s what the Republicans are doing, once elected. The fact that the Republican establishment is so invested in the myth that their problems are a matter of language is revealing and self-damning. 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
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The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” he declared. Goldwater then spelled it out, saying that school integration was “the responsibility of the states. I would not like to see my party assume it is the role of the federal government to enforce integration in the schools.”
So what’s the difference between Clinton’s making a racial appeal in 1992 and Bush’s doing the same in 1988 with the Willie Horton attack? The answer is simple and one African American voters seem to understand with great clarity:
The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.
The rejection of Wallace was as much a statement for the Democratic Party as the acceptance by Trump of the Republican Party.
The Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 was in many ways running against the Bill Clinton campaign of 1992. He campaigned on the death penalty and pushed federal funding to help pay for 100,000 more cops, largely in urban areas, with the result that the incarceration rate of African Americans increased dramatically. Hillary Clinton made “mass incarceration” an issue, and the mothers of slain black youths spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
People have to understand that although the civil rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools….[T]he civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.14
One of the common traits of the Republican Party, which the media seems to often accept and imitate, is the discussion of “the working class” as if it were the white working class. It reduces African Americans and other nonwhites to invisible and nonexistent and is a perfect example of the casual racism of so much of conservative politics.
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.
the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter,
And fittingly, absent serious change, race will define the demise of the Republican Party to a regional, Sunbelt-based party.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.
nowhere in the autopsy was there an acknowledgment or even consideration that the reason Republicans were failing with nonwhite voters was policy based, not just a question of demonstrating sincerity or failure to engage minorities. Nor is there any indication of the moral imperative of a political party that aspires to lead a country to be more inclusive and better reflect the country it seeks to represent.
But I think it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose.
This no doubt explains in part the alacrity with which the party abandoned every principle laid out in the autopsy once Donald Trump emerged as a dominant figure in the primary.
How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans “rapists” and called for...
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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. Like not being white is “other.” Like not being Christian is “other.” Like not being heterosexual is “other.”
The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” an...
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whenever I hear the loonies on the right asserting that God wanted Trump to win, I always wonder why it didn’t occur to them that if God really was involved, he probably could have won the popular vote for Trump. And done it without the Russians’ helping.
Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party. All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he leads.
It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language. Whatever Trump’s policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise. Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of
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So what happened when the Republican Party, in a shocking upset, won control of all three chambers of government for the first time since 2007? The federal debt skyrocketed. In less than two and a half years, the debt increased at record levels, from $20 trillion to $22 trillion.
Instead of decreasing national debt the $2 trillion a year promised, he increased it $2 trillion in a little over two years.
The history of the national debt is like all history: it varies greatly by authorship.
in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats.
What is most remarkable—and telling—about the Clinton success on the deficit is the furious degree that he was opposed by Republicans. Not one Republican voted for his 1993 budget package that combined tax increases and spending cuts.
the most conservative states in the country are far and away the most dependent on federal aid.
For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington. Who pays for that? Those evil states like California and New York, where the good citizens pay a dollar in taxes and get less back from the government.
Does anybody really think the elected officials from those states are going to get serious about cutting the federal budget?
Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants.
For what unites conspiracists is not ideological attachment to conservative causes or to the Republican Party but something deeper: disdain for political opposition, regulated party rivalry, and the democratic norm of “agreeing to disagree.”
Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.
He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. —Ayn Rand1
The playing ground between “mainstream” media and the conservative alternatives is forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record. The result is a disproportionally long catalog of errors in the press with standards because, more often than not, there is little if any pressure within conservative journalism to admit errors, much less correct them.
Congressman Justin Amash, the first and, as of this writing, the lone Republican congressman to call for Trump’s impeachment, describes: My colleagues tell me all the time—in fact, you wouldn’t believe how many phone conversations I’ve had, or conversations in person with colleagues….A lot of them think I’m right about the Mueller Report. And they just won’t say it. A lot of Republicans. What they’ll say to me is, Justin, you know, going out publicly with that, you know the Democrats will never support you. You know that they’re hypocrites on this stuff. And I say, you know, some of them are
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All through 2016, I had conversations with what passed for leadership in the Republican Party on the need to stand up to Trump. Most of their responses went like this: “Trump is a disaster and a disgrace. But we have to let him lose on his own. If we, the establishment, put our thumbs on the scale, when he loses it will be our fault and not the fault of his racism, the alt-right, and those idiots at Breitbart. We will have elected Hillary Clinton. We have to let him lose and rebuild.”
The simple reality is that the Republican Party was in business with Russian intelligence efforts, what used to be known as the KGB, and precious few leading the Republican Party seem to give a damn. I’ve spent decades waking up every morning eager to fight Democrats, trying to gain every bit of advantage for every battle. God knows we made mistakes and played too often on the dark side. But I never woke up knowing that somewhere out there a Russian agent was waking up with the same job I had.
my question to all those Republicans who are more worried about defending Donald Trump than defending America: Is this why you went into politics? Is this why you put up with all the bullshit and stupidity that is integral to our political system, so you can be on the same side as the Russians? You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it.
Courage is not standing up to a ludicrous man-child like Donald Trump. Courage is getting out of the boat when the soldier in front of you was just killed.
If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we’d all still be celebrating the queen’s birthday.
Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump’s lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the judiciary. At first glance it seems stunning to witness a party that once defined itself as a “law-and-order party” take the same position as every drug dealer, child pornographer, Mafia don, and human trafficker who claims innocence and attacks government officials for unfair tactics.
Competition fuels party conflict by raising the political stakes of every policy dispute. When control of national institutions hangs in the balance, no party wants to grant political legitimacy to its opposition by voting for the measures it champions.
The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems. Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern.10
Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. 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.11
Looking back, I often think I represented the worst of the American political system, just focused on winning without regard for the consequences.