The current state of the Republican Party reminds me of a science fiction tale I read half a century or so ago. It involved climate change. As the Earth heated, the ice caps melted, the oceans rose, and major coastal areas were threatened. Governmental leaders worked frantically to rescue residents and, where possible, build systems of dikes – using Holland as a model.
But scientists, in their calculations, had not taken into account one hidden factor. To their surprise the waters washed over entire continents, drowning most of mankind.
Fictional scientists didn’t see that coming.
The Republican Party is in a death spiral that has been blamed on many things.
The blue wave of special elections has an obvious cause. Donald Trump has put the GOP in a vice grip that does not appeal to those outside the base.
It isn’t Trump. It all would have happened anyway. Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked for a few decades, but now comes to demand what Karma owes.
It isn’t Nixon. Republicans formed an unholy coalition composed of economic libertarians, racial conservatives, right wing religious leaders, and Satan. Satan has now grown beyond anything anyone had imagined.
It wasn’t Satan. It was those who ran into the 7-Eleven to buy Satan his cigarettes. They dutifully ran that errand each election cycle.
What has not been blamed is the hidden cause, the factor that is never included in postmortem calculations. And, like those who did not anticipate that fictional seven continent disaster of my youth, they did not see the current tsunami until it was too late. Even now they measure the speed and depth of the coming flood at only it’s lowest levels.
Republicans don’t see it coming, but it is on its way.
Lee Atwater was one of many who ran for Satan each cycle.
Lee didn’t know he was dying until he went into a seizure at a Republican breakfast in 1990. He spent the final year of his life in frantic apology for dirty tactics against past opponents. He especially wanted to apologize to Michael Dukakis for what he called “naked cruelty” while managing the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1980. He had a lot for which to apologize, and to a lot of victims. He did not have much time to do it.
He had often gone beyond dirty into filthy tricks through his political career. He helped elect politicians in South Carolina, Strom Thurmond among them, then outside the old confederate south. He became head of the National Republican Party.
Race was always an undercurrent, he advised candidates, but care had to be taken. Things were changing.
One interview was never attributed to him until after his death.
Here’s how I would approach that issue as a statistician or a political scientist. Or as a psychologist, which I’m not, is how abstract you handle the race thing.
Handling the race thing was central to his thinking.
In other words, you start out, and now y’all don’t quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’
By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r,’ that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like “forced busing, states rights” and all that stuff.
I suppose one indicator that supports him is the hesitation writers and speakers now have in using racist epithets even while quoting others, to wit: you start out in 1954 by saying ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’ By abstract, Mr. Atwater meant you communicate what you mean with less offensive euphemisms. Dog whistles. You can’t use the same words now that you could use back in 1954.
And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things. You’re talking about totally economic things, and the byproduct often is Blacks get hurt worse than Whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.
Subconsciously.
There is a bit of rationalization involved. Mr. Atwater seems to say that because you don’t actually use racist language – that you would, in fact, be offended by the vulgarity of racial epithets – racism has been taken out of the vocabulary, out of acceptable discourse, and out of the conversation. It only exists in the deeper recesses of the mind.
What I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut taxes, we want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n****r, n****r.” You know!
I’m afraid we do. Lee tells the interviewer, the history of racist language makes him, well, not exactly a pessimist. Only an opportunist.
So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
Successful politics is often built on coalitions. Atwater looked beyond coalitions of convenience to actual commonalities. Small government conservatives did not have to be racists. But racists could be enticed into small government conservatism. Racial conservatives were almost never among the religiously skeptical. The most conservative of conservative Christians were highly motivated by legal rulings that made racially segregated religious schools harder to maintain.
Race is a is a substantial part of it but I think it’s usually more than that I think it’s usually a combination of race, economics, and tax policy – where the final conclusion is reached by the more racially conservative whites that the Democratic Party is not representing their interest.
Earl Black, co-author, The Vital South
The polite term is racially conservative. Atwater’s analysis could have applied to Richard Nixon’s appeal to, well, racial conservatives.
What we need now is not just speaking out against more busing. We need action to stop it.
And Nixon was cautious about appearing too aggressive.
Above all, we need to stop it in the right way.
It is understandable that many who have studied political trends would view the current state of contemporary conservative politics as a natural result of strategic decisions. By Nixon. By Atwater. By a host of minor figures whose collective choices, like ripples, join together in history to form a tidal force.
I do not see a series of strategic decisions. I do see a phenomenon that is beyond the control of, well, anyone.
Political parties have faced disaster before.
In 1972, the Democratic Party reacted to an unwinnable war and continuing racial disparity by nominating George McGovern. A country hopeful about negotiating a peace and skeptical about civil rights offered a crushing defeat.
In 1964, the Republican party challenged a nation still in mourning, nominating a candidate much more conservative than most voters.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!
Goldwater went down, winning only a few states.
In 1928, Democrats nominated a Catholic candidate in a country still dominated by anti-Catholic prejudice. Got crushed.
The conventional wisdom of a bygone age said that election loss must be met with moderation. Move closer to the center. Sometimes the party moved back toward the center. Sometimes the center moved enough for a losing party to come back.
In the last thirty years, outside factors have swept through like passing storms, as they often do. Economic forces, scandals, a terrorist attack, the ordinary waves that have always provided an ebb and flow in politics have all obscured a more significant trend.
During the last thirty years, there have been victory waves for Republicans. But margins of victory has been generally shrinking. When the pendulum has swung back to Democrats, it has been at a generally increasing level. The change in sea level has not been by wave or storm. It has been by a steadily raising tide.
Republicans won three great presidential victories beginning in 1980. Since then, they have won three out of seven times. Only once have they won with any vote margin at all. Once since 1988, did they win even a plurality.
Beginning in the 1990s and continuing since, the Republican party has been moving further away from the center of the nation with no sign of a turnaround.
The fault has not been from any one political figure, or any series of miscalculations.
In the science fiction story from my distant youth, the forgotten factor, the fatal flaw in science logic had to do with the weight of millions of years of accumulated ice. As the ice melted at the polar caps, the land beneath rose. The rising waters were matched by a lowering of other land masses. Instead of a coastal threat, entire continents were doomed to largely vanish beneath the waves. Only mountain ranges were left.
Fictional scientists didn’t see that coming.
Here in political reality we have our own version of collapsing land masses. There is a new technology that might explain what has happened to the Republican Party over the last 30 years.
Internet and cable now provide whatever messages users want. For conservatives, that choice is an easy one. If Fox News or Drudge or those who inherited Breitbart, fail to deliver a palatable plate, conservatives can find somewhere else to get the message they want. That message is simple:
You don’t have to change. Everything about you is fine. Keep running to the right. That is where your heart leads you. That is where your home is.
That new pattern does leave questions, of course. As the Grand Old Party keeps shrinking, as it grows more extreme, at it drives out more reasoning conservatives, as it then shrinks still more, what if anything will take its place? What, if anything, will keep Democrats from following the same technologically paved path to the same oblivion?
Stay tuned.
to get episodes automatically downloaded.
A death spiral. I’ll believe it when Democrats not only come in strong in the next election, but continue to do so thereafter.
Especially given the kind of person he is, Trump’s popularity rating is disturbingly high for the leader of a party on its way out.