The Self-Destruction Of The Republican Party, Puts The Democrats At A Crossroad

The least racist person anywhere by Nancy Ohanian

Last May Trump performed at one of his hate rallies in one of the most vile neo-fascist areas of America, the Florida Panhandle (AKA, "Little Alabama"). He was stoking hatred and bigotry is a place he had no need to be. Panama City Beach is east of Panama City-- in Bay County-- drawing residents from Florida's first and second congressional districts. Trump beat Hillary in Bay County 71.2% to 24.9%. Trump beat her in the first district 67.5% to 28.2% and bear her in the second district 66.2% to 30.6%. They were his top two performing districts in Florida, not just Republican, thorough fascist. Matt Gaetz represents FL-01. At his hate rally he excited the audience with a question and answer: "How do you stop these people? You can’t." He was referring to immigrants. One of his adoring fans screamed, "Shoot them." Trump smiled benignly as thousands of repulsive fascist supporters cheered wildly.

And then, Saturday, we had El Paso. Remember RedHat = HatRed. Yesterday Yasmeen Abutaleb, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote about what's inside the Trump-inspired manifesto posted by the Trumpist mass murdrerer. "It railed against a 'Hispanic invasion' and laid out a plan to divide the United States into territories based on race... It begins by praising the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year. That document cited a white supremacist theory known as 'The Great Replacement,' which postulates that a secret group of elites is working to destroy the white race by replacing them with immigrants and refugees. 'This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,' the manifesto says." Trumpism were sprinkled throughout the 2,300 word manifesto, which she notes is "a jumble of positions and ideologies."

Under “political reasons,” the manifesto lambastes both Democrats and Republicans, suggesting the United States will soon become a one-party state run by Democrats because of the growing Hispanic population, the death of the baby-boom generation and the “anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right.” The author postulates that the growing Hispanic population in Texas will soon make it a solidly Democratic state, which he argues would all but assure repeated Democratic presidential victories.

“The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate,” the manifesto says.

The document repeatedly rails against corporations, which the author says have taken over the government. The author criticizes Republicans for favoring corporations, but argues that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

The author also expresses fear over the impact automation will have on job opportunities and argues that immigrants should not be allowed to continue coming into the country as long as job opportunities are scarce. He argues that while immigrants often take menial jobs that Americans are unwilling to perform, their children seek better opportunities and often receive college degrees that allow them to obtain high-skill positions. The document again blames corporations for advocating for work visas for skilled workers and says they rely on immigrants to fill low-skilled positions.

In a jumbled rant, the document rails against corporations for destroying the environment by over-harvesting resources. The manifesto chastises the government for being unwilling to confront environmental issues and most Americans for being unwilling to change their lifestyles to be more environmentally friendly. It argues that the United States therefore needs fewer people consuming resources.

The author wrote that he planned to mainly rely on an AK-47 as his weapon for the shooting, noting that it overheats after about 100 rounds and that he would need a heat-resistant glove.

The manifesto notes that many migrants return to their home countries to reunite with family, arguing that “the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide.” The author writes that such terrorist attacks will “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc.”

In the “personal reasons and thoughts” section, the author writes that he has spent his life preparing for a future that does not exist, though does not specify what that future would be. He ends on an anti-immigrant screed, worrying that Hispanics will take over the Texas government and says the Founding Fathers have given him the rights-- presumably referring to the right to bear arms-- to save the country from destruction.

“Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plaque [sic] their country. They have no choice but to sit by and watch their countries burn,” the manifesto says.

Finally, the manifesto ends by decrying interracial couples and proposes separating the United States into territories based on race. The author points to white supremacist theories that “stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones.”

The author expresses fear that he will be captured, rather than die during the shooting, because that would mean he would receive the death penalty and his family would despise him. And he stresses that he has maintained his white supremacist ideology for many years, predating President Trump and his 2016 campaign, which he says did not influence his reasons for carrying out the attack.

“This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe,” the author writes.

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above "have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please"
Ooh, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooh-ee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
That I got the crossroad blues this mornin', Lord, babe, I'm sinkin' down
And I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west
I went to the crossroad, baby, I looked East and West
Lord, I didn't have no sweet woman, ooh well, babe, in my distress

About a month ago, Joshua Zeitz, author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House, writing for Politico put the dilemma of the NeverTrumpers into some historical perspective. For years, before the Civil War broke out, there was a mass migration among northern Democrats away from "the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy. Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists [the newly-formed Republican Party] in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts. Today, a small but influential cadre of Republican elected officials, strategists and policy experts faces a similar choice. Heirs of Ronald Reagan, they have grown to believe that their party has also degenerated into something ugly and undemocratic-- hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to American institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to American democracy. During the presidential campaign of 2016, and for the better part of the past two years, these Never Trumpers could plausibly speak of extracting their party from the grip of white nationalism and angry populism. Now, with midterm elections approaching-- with broad majorities of the GOP electorate firmly in the president’s thrall and the Republican Congress all but fully acquiescent to the White House-- such talk is fanciful... [T]oday’s Never Trumpers face a stark choice: passively acquiesce to the further ascent of Trumpism, or switch parties and play a vital part in stopping it."

In the course of defecting to the new Republican Party, many former Democrats came to look back with disgust on the ways by which Southern Democrats had enforced rigid, doctrinaire support for slavery for decades. Starting in the 1830s, when Congress instituted a “gag rule” barring debate or discussion of the peculiar institution, the Democratic majority blithely tramped over the First Amendment rights of white Northern congressmen in the defense of chattel slavery.

A onetime Democrat from Ohio-- and future Republican congressman-- put the matter in sharper relief when he complained that “we have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer… I am done catching negroes for the South.” Hannibal Hamlin, a Democratic senator from Maine, lamented that “the old Dem. party is now the party of slavery. It has no other issue, in fact, and this is the standard on which [it] measures every thing and every man.” Hamlin soon switched parties and served as vice president in Abraham Lincoln’s first term.

It’s unclear whether the politicians were leading their constituents, or vice versa. The congressional district in Pennsylvania that antislavery Democrat David Wilmot and his Democrat-turned-Republican successor, Galusha Grow, represented had delivered a plurality of 2,500 votes to Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce in 1852. Four years later, Republican nominee John C. Fremont won the district with 70 percent of the vote and a plurality of 9,000. (Grow would go on to serve as House speaker.) Throughout most of the North and Midwest, Democrats were reduced to minority status overnight.

...Ex-Democrats in the 1850s and 1860s didn’t have to become Whigs. They were able to join a new political party-- albeit one dominated by former Whigs.

The shrewdest of today’s Never Trump Republicans realize that they face only one clean choice, and it is, of course, more jarring: Become Democrats or, like the prominent GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, become independents and support Democrats... Never Trumpers will find it a bitter pill to swallow.

Zeitz offers them-- in the name of "history"-- some consolation, promising the Never Trumpers control of the more conservative, less progressive Democratic Party that the ex-Republicans are all over MSNBC and on the editorial pages of the New York Times propagandizing for, as they push, push, push for Biden or-- if he proven too implausible-- Mayo Pete or Kamala "Mnuchin" Harris. Never Trumpers and Democrats can find common cause, wrote Zeitz, filled with disdain for the activist progressive roots of the FDR "wing" of the Democratic Party, in love with the Republican wing. Of the Democrats, he wrote, it "is more center than left. It’s the only American political party that has seriously attempted to develop market-based policies to expand health care access (the Affordable Care Act), address climate change (cap and trade) or upgrade the nation’s deficient infrastructure (an infrastructure bank). He celebrates half measures like RomneyCare/ObamaCare and buries his head in cap and trade as Miami and Fort Meyers sink under the waves. "If Never Trumpers are truly alarmed by Democrats’ recent embrace of single-payer health care and universal community college, they should become Democrats and develop market-based solutions to big, systemic problems. That would also require that Democratic voters understand their role in forging a new majority: They must pitch a larger tent and accommodate a broader range of ideas and perspectives. Some of them might be forced to make sacrifices like Lincoln’s and step aside in favor of former Republicans where circumstances demand it." Zeitz may be hopeful, but that doesn't make him correct.

Reed Galen offers another historical analysis. In the first half of the 19th century, the two major parties in the U.S. were the Democrats and the Whigs. The Republicans broken from the Whigs in 1854, basically to stop the spread of slavery. Six years later, they elected a president, Abraham Lincoln. "While slavery served as the lever around which the Whigs would spin into oblivion," write Galen, "it was their moral failure regarding so odious an institution to so many Americans that ultimately killed them off. Like the Whigs of old, Donald Trump’s GOP is staring at a similar fate should it continue on this path. Many evangelical Christians, seeing themselves as arbiters of moral righteousness, tout the president as the tonic to so many of the country’s problems. The reality is, however, that the party’s outward failures are distinctly grounded in a lack of moral compass, ugly politics and nonexistent policy; for which the electoral consequences have only just begun."

Between 1854 and today, the GOP has completed an about face. Founded as the party of equality for all races, its leader and new spiritual guide now intentionally stokes resentment as a matter of politics, policy and habit. Trump’s reasoning? An abiding fear that his overwhelmingly white, male base will desert him. We’re a long way from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

In last year’s midterm elections, many suburban congressional districts, long the bastion of Republicanism, saw Democrats elected for the first time in decades. Given these voters’ unwillingness to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, they took their revenge on Republicans generally, and Trump specifically, in 2018.

Based on their feelings about Trump’s language and behavior, many Republicans and conservative independents are turning away from the party. As Jonathan Martin noted earlier this week, Orange County, Calif., once the heart and soul of Reagan Republicanism, saw its GOP voter registration advantage sink from 124,000 to only 1,000 in the course of three years. The Republican Party in California is now third in line, registration-wise, behind Democrats and voters who claim “No Party Preference.”

The GOP’s decade-long war on Obamacare, and its inability to provide a credible substitute, battered and bruised the party last year. Today, health care, and the economic fallout from health crises, consistently top voters’ concerns in public surveys. Republicans are out of step with the electorate, with nothing to say and no one to say it.

The images and stories coming out of our border with Mexico cause many middle-class and suburban Americans to blanch. Despite our nation’s troubles, these voters still see America as exceptional, as humane and as an exemplar to the rest of the world. Keeping men in cages for weeks on end and taking children from their parents is beyond the pale for moderates, independents and many otherwise conservative voters.

In politics, as in life, demographics are destiny. In the 2016 election, Trump lost voters 18-29 and 30-44 by 19 percentage points and 10 percentage points, respectively. As MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki noted on Jon Ward’s podcast, The Long Game, one look at public polling shows there is a massive chasm between voters under/over 45 years of age.

Regarding how they see the world, their personal priorities, what they believe to be the most pressing issues facing the country, the GOP is out of step with a large and growing cohort. On the other hand, the older voters that Republicans have long relied on-- white, more conservative, more working class-- will represent a plurality of registered voters and their impact will drop accordingly.

This argument and warning to Republicans is not new. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, the “Growth and Opportunity Project” was commissioned by party leaders to determine a direction forward. Their belief? Without a credible position on issues such as immigration and without the ability to draw in minority and younger voters, the way of the Whigs was their likely destination.

While those GOP leaders misread the Republican electorate of 2016, looking back they understood the arc of American politics. What the country needs now is a new collection of political pioneers, willing to find their Ripon moment. The opportunity for new entrants and new energy is there. Harnessing the energy, attention and passion of millennials and Generation X to chart our course forward is completely possible and absolutely necessary.

The catastrophe for America would be for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs New Dems and corrupt careerists like Pelosi and Hoyer and their leadership team-- to be allowed to let the NeverTrumpers woo the Democratic Party into leaving the progressive instincts of the party on the side of the road in return for temporary, self-serving and expedient political dominance. For progressives, this is the time to continue the fight against conservatism, whether that conservatism is led by Trump, Biden, Romney, Mayo Pete or any random MSNBC talking head who was stupid enough to lose his or her own party to a two bit con man in a fancy suit and a long red tie.