Is The Republican Party Really Committing Suicide?

Calhounism & the Republican Party

The GOP is barely a national party any longer anyway and would be better described as a creepy and reactionary revanchist movement in the former slave-holding states with support in backward, socially-primitive Mormon parts of the country. Friday Jamelle Bouie posted about the revival of Calhounism as a hallmark of the modern Republican Party. South Carolina right-winger, John C. Calhoun, an anti-American slave fanatic, helped ignite the Civil War with his attempts to insist that states could nullify any federal laws they didn't agree with. His doctrine is still popular with right-wing extremists in the GOP. And, of course, it's South Carolina once again in the forefront of the movement, this time over healthcare (for the descendants of their former slaves). Bouie doesn't see this leading to anyone firing on federal troops this time.

The most likely outcomes involve a lawsuit against the state of South Carolina-- filed by businesses, like hospitals and health insurers, who want implementation-- or nothing, as the state moves forward and its citizens are kept from access to decent, affordable health insurance. Congrats, South Carolina Republicans! You’ve scored an ideological win at the cost of immiseration of your fellow residents. [White Republican elites in the Old Confederacy do not consider African-Americans their "fellow residents." Why do you think they revived the Republican Party down there?]

This push to essentially nullify the Affordable Care Act within the state’s borders is another indication of how far the modern Republican Party has fallen from the ideas that animated its creation. The GOP of Abraham Lincoln wasn’t just an anti-slavery party-- or at least, one opposed to the expansion of slavery-- it was a unionist party, one dedicated to the idea that there was a single United States, whose government could not be shattered by individual states.

This idea is in wide currency now, but it wasn’t in the middle of the 19th century. Then, an influential wing of Southern conservatives-- led by the fiery John C. Calhoun of South Carolina-- pushed the view that the federal government was subordinate to the states, who could nullify the Union at any time. This was an ideology borne of history—the exact nature of the constitutional pact signed in 1783 was unclear-- and of economics. Calhoun and his allies, intellectual and political, were overwhelmingly slave owners, deeply invested in the system of bondage and white supremacy that supported their society.

Calhoun died in 1850--10 years before Lincoln won the presidency and sparked a rebellion among Southern states-- but his ideas motivated and inspired the secessionists.

Of course, the Civil War settled the broad question of national authority. But Calhoun’s core idea-- that political minorities owed no allegiance to the decisions of majorities-- lived on. It found refugee in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party-- through segregationists who opposed every effort to pass civil rights laws and end state-sponsored violence against African-Americans-- and eventually fused with conservative ideology in the 1960s and ’70s as the center of gravity in the GOP moved from the West to the South.

In the last four years, Calhounism-- the tyranny of the minority-- has moved to the forefront of conservative ideology. You can see it in the parade of Republicans’ bills (37, at last count) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as if it were forced on the country and not passed by majorities in the House and Senate. You can see it in the moves-- some aborted, some not-- to rig presidential elections by changing the distribution of electoral votes to favor land and rural areas over cities and people. And you can see it in the Mitch McConnell–led effort to block implementation of duly elected laws through obstruction of Senate business. Republicans have blocked nominations to vacant judgeships and federal agencies for no other reason than opposition to the president’s agenda-- in the case of his judicial nominees-- or opposition to the law, in the case of Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

These moves, as many observers have noted over the last four years, are unprecedented. The Senate was never meant to be a super-majoritarian institution, and lawmakers have never been able to block implementation of laws because they disagree with the contents. But in the Calhoun-infused GOP, this is the new normal.

If there’s anything positive you can say about the Republican Party’s Calhounism, it’s that they haven’t embraced the full spectrum of Calhoun’s ideas on race. In a speech on the Senate floor in 1837, Calhoun defended slavery as a “positive good” and not a “necessary evil.” It was, he argued, a universal truth that “there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.”

With that said, it’s not as if the Republican Party has shied away from using ugly racial rhetoric for political advantage. Mitt Romney’s Ohio campaign was centered on the (false) claim that President Obama had ended the work requirement in welfare, and was simply sending checks to recipients. Given the established rhetorical association between “welfare” and African-Americans, the dog whistle wasn’t hard to hear. More recently, a Tea Party activist in Texas told a crowd of Republicans that “the Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9 to 1 for Democrats.” And on top of this, Phyllis Schlafly-- a luminary of conservative activism-- argued that the GOP should abandon immigration reform and further commit itself to being the party of white people. Losing 82 percent of nonwhites, it seems, just isn’t enough.

None of this is to say that the GOP can’t change direction and move away from the legacy of John C. Calhoun. For now at least, it’s barreling ahead to the past, eager to avoid any change.

Noam Scheiber has another way of looking at the way the Republicans have taken hold of Obamacare and fashioned it into a noose around their own necks. Writing for the New Republic, he explains how Republicans have bet their future on the disaster they expect from Obamacare and how they plan to use it from now until 2016 to drum up support. It is certainly motivating the Tea Party types. But Scheiber's main point is that "the GOP’s health care preoccupation is absolutely destroying its long-term prospects."

However well the issue may work in the midterms, when an uptick in conservative turnout can flip a few dozen House seats, 2012 proved that it’s at best a wash in a presidential election, when Democrats can swamp that turnout with their demographic edge, and when the GOP’s challenge is to win moderates and independents as a result. Conservatives argue that the only reason health care didn’t work in 2012 is that Romney was a flawed messenger, given his patrimonial link to Obamacare. But with the Supreme Court largely blessing the law last June, the issue was mostly settled in the public mind, making it at best a non-factor among swing voters.

Even if implementation goes terribly, it isn’t like to rekindle widespread angst. Most people will be untouched by implementation-- even a disastrous implementation—for the simple reason that they won’t be relying on Obamacare. As Bloomberg’s Josh Barrohas explained, 78 percent of us get coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, or our employers, a figure isn’t likely to change very much, or at least very quickly. Meanwhile, my colleague Jonathan Cohn points out that life for many people who do end up on Obamacare will improve, however flawed the program is, because it translates into insurance they didn’t have before.

Having said all that, the real problem with conservatives’ Obamacare strategy isn’t that it won’t work. It’s that the Obamacare obsession is actively sabotaging the GOP. Earlier this week the Washington Post ran an article about the ongoing dysfunction among House Republicans. Easily the most telling anecdote had to do with a largely symbolic measure called the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, concocted by Majority Leader Eric Cantor to help Republicans look like they care about the problems of ordinary people. (The bill feinted at easing the lot of the uninsured.) That, apparently, is where Cantor erred. As the Post explains:

A few dozen Republicans opposed the modest Helping Sick Americans legislation because they said it came from nowhere. Instead, Cantor pulled the bill and held another vote to repeal Obamacare-- their 37th attempt to repeal part or all of the landmark health-care law-- to appease conservatives.

To put the problem in Marxian terms, Obamacare has become the opiate of the GOP. By its own admission, the party must broaden its appeal to Latinos, gays, and young voters. It needs an economic agenda that encompasses more than tax cuts for the rich and brutal spending cuts. It has to persuade voters it’s more than just a nihilistic force bent on triggering global financial apocalypse if it doesn’t get its way in Washington. And yet, when party leaders so much as broach these liabilities, conservatives revolt and the leadership caves, appeasing them with an issue whose political utility peaked two-and-a-half years ago. (Suffice it to say, after the last few years, the words “reinvigorating the Tea Party movement” won’t exactly help Cantor and Boehner sleep at night.)

If you want to appreciate how truly incorrigible conservatives are on the subject, I recommend watching them grapple with the early news about Obamacare implementation, which has suggested the program could work better than anticipated. It’s a bit like watching a speculator learn he’s bet his life savings on a failing company-- which is to say, chock full of denial and elaborate self-delusion.

For example, in late May, when the head of California’s insurance exchange announced that insurers were submitting cheaper bids than the state expected (and cheaper than many critics predicted), the conservative columnist Avik Roy tried to disprove the claims by visiting an online clearinghouse for private insurance plans. Roy solicited bids for a healthy 25-year-old male and a healthy 40-year old male, then pointed out that they came in far below what coverage would cost through the Obamacare exchange. All fine and good, except that Roy’s hypothetical bids were neither here nor there. The point of Obamacare is to provide affordable insurance to people who may be sick or older.

Alas, the fact that Roy basically affirmed the rationale for a program he set out to discredit-- healthy, affluent young people are the one group that will do worse under Obamacare; everyone else will do better; no one has ever disputed this-- didn’t stop every conservative outlet on the Internet from trumpeting his analysis. “Obamacare drives up insurance premiums by up to 146 percent in California,” screamed the Daily Caller. Even after a succession of wonks highlighted the glaring flaws, the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal leaned on Roy to declare an “ObamaCare Bait and Switch.”

The desperation here is palpable, but also understandable. If, instead of trying to fix your party’s deepest pathologies you wagered its entire future on a high-risk strategy that was starting to turn bad, you’d be a little desperate, too. Perhaps it’s a subset of Obama Derangement Syndrome that afflicts conservatives when they talk about health care-- call it Obamacare Derangement Syndrome. Maybe one day, once the dust has settled, it’ll be covered under Obamacare, too.