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August 10 - August 18, 2020
Today more than forty-four million Americans were born in another country, the highest percentage since 1910.
The largest group is Mexicans, and the second largest is from India. Non-Mexican South Americans are the third-largest group.
Donald Trump—and that means the Republican Party—has attacked Mexicans as “rapists,” and he rants every few weeks about an invasion from South America, as if the Chilean military had just landed in San Diego and were broadcasting live from SeaWorld.
In the spring of 2016 when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, I approached a number of individuals encouraging them to run as a “favorite son” candidate in their home states. The idea was simple: if a third-party candidate with an appeal to the center right ran and took votes from Trump, it would block his path to victory. I spoke to each person under strict confidentiality and so will not reveal names or states, but they were high-profile conservatives who believed that Trump was a disaster for the party and it would be better to lose one election
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But Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns.
If I could make every Republican elected official read one book, it would be the memoirs of Papen, the aristocratic chancellor of Germany who dissolved the German parliament and enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power. 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.
Sounds like Traudl Junge in “Hitler’s Last Secretary” and her incomprehension about Hitler’s actions even though she was his personal secretary.
Legitimizing hate is like a war: it is easier to begin than to stop.
Those who refuse to specifically support various acts of outrage by Trump more often than not simply shrug and pretend not to be aware. When Trump has left, it is safe to say the ranks of the “Good Republicans” who maintain they really didn’t know the extent of what Trump did will make Washington feel a lot like 1946 Berlin.
For me, much of this is personal. I helped elect so many who now support Donald Trump, and I know, because I know these men and women well, that they find Trump repulsive and a degradation of their life’s work and espoused values. And yet they support him, knowing on some level that it is damaging to every civic value they have previously held. There is a mutually self-reinforcing abandonment of any sense of higher duty than serving the political moment.
American history has never seen a party so unified in perpetuating a massive fraud. This isn’t the action of a rogue president like Watergate but a deliberate, calculated decision for a major governing party of the most powerful nation in the history of the world to join hands and deny what they know is true: that Donald Trump is a threat to the country.
The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is a vastly wealthy, powerful force. Though there is no mention of parties in the Constitution, these conglomerates have come to be the most powerful forces in our democracy. Each party is a multibillion-dollar industry that, like any powerful business, will respond when threatened.
Interesting. Ironic that these parties are monopolies, something that is supposedly illegal in business but not in politics.
Though no one inside the Republican Party likes to admit it, a deep fear lurks in the heart of the party: a fear of the future. The Trump obsession with immigrants from Mexico and Central America is motivated by his own racism, but it also reflects the knowledge that every new nonwhite voter in America is a threat to the existence of the Republican Party.
Taken together, this strong growth among minority populations means that a third of eligible voters will be nonwhite in 2020, up from about a quarter in 2000.
One-in-ten eligible voters in the 2020 election will have been born outside the U.S., the highest share since at least 1970.1
this will mean that the white vote has declined from 77 percent in 2004 to 68 percent in 2020.
when coupled with the drop in Hispanic support for Bush of just over 40 percent in 2004 to Trump’s likely target of between 25 percent and 30 percent in 2020, it’s, well, problematic
Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.
the Republican Party faced an existential choice. Was it possible to change such that it could attract more nonwhite voters, or would it go down the road of using every means possible to fight the demographic trend of declining white voters by making it more difficult for nonwhite voters, particularly black voters, to participate in the election? This was a fundamental battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
Before Donald Trump, I and many of my Republican consulting colleagues would have thought that any embrace of racism would alienate moderate Republicans. But those of us who made that assumption seem to have been wrong. The ability to rationalize the overt bigotry of “good people on both sides” has proven shockingly common among Republicans, who still support Donald Trump at more than 90 percent.
what many Republican politicians actually do believe is that they represent the “real” America, and they are somewhere from uncomfortable to frightened by America’s changing landscape.
Illegal voting has long been a felony, and the idea that of all the felonies possible to commit, someone would risk the consequences of a felony conviction to vote is one of the more almost-charming absurdities imaginable. Our problem in America is getting people to vote, not stopping illegals.
Labeling any media you don’t like as “fake news” is an all-encompassing conspiracy theory that makes truth an enemy. Same goes with denouncing anyone in government who might stand in the way of an authoritarian president as a member of the shadowy “Deep State.” The Trump/right-wing conspiracies have a common thread of labeling truth a conspiracy.
The Republican Party will signal that it is a healthy, growing political party when it embraces efforts to make it easier to register and vote for all segments of the electorate, not just Republicans and likely Republicans.
The country has a crisis of voter participation: half of the eligible voters do not register, and of those who do, only half actually vote.
Nonvoters were disproportionately poorer, nonwhite, and younger, all groups that, if they had voted, favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by wide margins.
Only once since 1988 have Republicans won the popular vote in a presidential race.
But if Trump wins or loses, it is a fantasy to think that the impact of a nation’s major center-right party embracing a racist unprepared to be president with Trump’s deep psychological problems will not be lasting. Perhaps what passes for the establishment in the Republican Party will be able to conjure a cover story to explain why they embraced a man who mocked the disabled, attacked a former POW hero, paid off a porn star from the Oval Office, defended Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, bragged about assaulting women, and implored foreign governments to investigate his political
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Can anyone honestly define what the Republican Party stands for beyond “owning the libs”?
They had a sworn oath to defend the country and chose to defend Donald Trump, the most anti-American president in the country’s history.
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.
This generation went out and fought and bled for…Donald Trump. Each bent the knee and kissed the ring, and though like the courtiers of old among themselves they tried to convince each other they had maintained dignity and joked about the foibles of their king, they know in their hearts they have proven to be small men and women unworthy of the greatness of the country they were elected to defend.
This was my tribe. I did not think them perfect; no man may be a hero to his valet or political consultant. I never pretended to see even glimmers of greatness in most of them, but I did hold out for an assumption of decency. They have proven me wrong, and the sadness I feel is difficult to express.
They will call me hypocritical for happily taking the rewards of the tribe—money, access to power, something that hints at influence—then choosing to betray my fellow members. For this charge I have no answer. They are right. I did.
I left that hard work to others and spent my non-campaign time roaming the globe chasing snow, in pursuit of athletic challenges with no meaning. They would argue they did the hard work and I was over-rewarded for playing a bit part in our political drama.
There will be a role for a white party for a long time in America, but it will soon not be a party that can win national elections, and perhaps that will force the party to adapt.
No one asks what is the greater good OPEC is trying to achieve. Its purpose is to sell oil at the highest prices possible. So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.
Donald Trump has served a useful purpose by exposing the deep flaws of a major American political party.
