From abolitionist to xenophobic, from libertarian to authoritarian: Tracing the Republican Party's historical shift from the far left to the far right.
A radical political party, the Republican Party, now enjoys more power in Washington than at any time since the 1920s. The GOP wants to eliminate not just Obamacare but most of the rest of the welfare state; to slash taxes to the point where the federal government has no alternative but to shrink into nothingness; to eliminate most restraints on capitalist activity pertaining to investment, the environment, and working conditions; to deny women their reproductive freedom and minorities voting rights equal to those of whites. In some quarters of the party, the mood has become apocalyptic. This militant GOP wing now resembles a club of Old Testament prophets, warning everyone to follow the path of the righteous or face hellfire and damnation. This end-of-times scenario has encouraged a refusal to compromise. Republican majorities in Congress denied Obama virtually every one of his legislative ambitions during his last six years in office. They even called for government shut downs and defaults on the payment of government debts as a price worth paying to get their way. They haven’t yet gotten their way and still may not. But in rendering Congress an ineffectual instrument of governance, they have accelerated decay in the world’s oldest and once most important democracy. Donald Trump has become president of a democratic polity long rotting from within.
Radicalism has been an element of the GOP (Grand Old Party) since its birth in the 1850s, though then its impetus came from the left rather than the right. It pledged to stop slavery’s advance, roll it back, and make the country safe for "free labor." Republican Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 was so shocking to southern slaveholders that they took the extraordinary step of seceding from the Union, bringing a terrible civil war on the United States. Lincoln destroyed slavery, and was killed for it. But a group in Congress calling themselves the Radical Republicans carried on his work, securing passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, then and now the most powerful instrument for remedying racial (and gender) discrimination in America.
By the 1880s, the influence of these Radical Republicans had waned. Abandoning its commitment to racial equality, the country now pursued reconciliation of the white South and white North and rapid economic growth instead. Republicans fashioned themselves into the party of economic expansion, building transcontinental railroads and telegraphs, spurring large scale manufacturing, setting high tariffs to protect the nation’s "infant industries," and insisting on rigid, deflationary adherence to the gold standard, which favored bankers (and other large creditors) over small debtors (farmers and consumers). By 1900, the GOP had abandoned the radical abolition of its birth and became the party of big business instead. It gathered up enough small businessmen, Protestants, and members of old immigrant groups from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia to make itself into the majority party from 1890s to the 1920s. It stood for the American Establishment, and against those who felt excluded from its ranks: urban workers, Catholics and Jews, and the rural (and especially southern) poor.
The Great Depression (1929-1941) plunged this Republican Party into crisis. Voters now rejected a party whose Big Banker and Big Business economic policies had so manifestly failed and embraced instead the politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his reinvigorated Democratic Party, gathering under the banner of the New Deal. New Dealers established a social welfare state, regulated financial markets, created a more egalitarian playing field for workers and employers, taxed the wealthy, and redistributed wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt’s party dominated American politics for more than thirty-five years, interrupted only by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961), who won two elections principally because he acquiesced to what New Dealers had wrought.
This long experience in the wilderness became the staging ground for a new period of Republican radicalism, this time from the right. Its pioneer was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and GOP nominee for president in 1964; its transcendent figure was Ronald Reagan, movie star, governor of California, and then president from 1981 to 1989. Its key issue was opposition to the "big government" that New Dealers had built, seen by the radical Republicans as a stepping stone to socialism, communism, and totalitarianism. But a second issue, race, was crucial to bringing these radical Republicans to power. If in the 1860s, Republican radicalism focused on the emancipation of African Americans and giving them rights, in the 1960s, it gained power by working in the opposite direction: slowing down, even reversing the civil rights revolution, which sought to bring blacks and other minorities into full and equal participation in American life.
America’s civil rights revolution was part of a global, post-1945, rising of people of color against apartheid, imperialism, and racialized discourses that for centuries had privileged whiteness and the West. In response to black protest in America, the Democrats, under President Lyndon Johnson, passed a potent package of civil rights laws. Severe penalties were imposed on workplaces, schools and universities, restaurants and hotels, and local and state governments that either promoted or condoned racial discrimination. Institutions with poor records of hiring and promoting racial minorities were ordered to undertake aggressive remedial programmes, known as affirmative action. At the same time, the Democratic Party expanded the federal government’s welfare apparatus, part of an effort to channel more resources to poor, minority populations. To get his "Great Society" programme through Congress, Johnson had to twist the arms of powerful Democratic senators and congressmen from southern states who, in their hearts, were not ready to render blacks equal to whites. Johnson, a master parliamentarian, got his votes, but he knew the price would be steep. Indeed it was. Between 1964 and 2004, the South went from being the most solidly Democratic region of the country to the most solidly Republican. Millions of whites who had long been Democrats now rallied around the Republican Party in order to oppose the full integration of blacks into American life.
Neither Goldwater nor Reagan was a hard-core racist. Each worried most about the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, whose principles they discerned in the New Deal and the Great Society. But they also believed that the steps that Democrats had taken in the 1960s to remedy racial discrimination amounted to another form of totalitarianism. Government, they declared, had no business telling corporations whom to hire, no right to tell restaurant owners whom to serve, and no right to interfere with the admission decisions of universities or the membership decisions of private clubs. Such interference would undermine individuality and personal freedom, America’s most precious birthright.
Not only would the Great Society’s project of social engineering interfere with the lives of liberty-loving white Americans; it would also, radical Republicans argued, ruin the lives of poor blacks receiving social benefits. Recipients of government largesse, Reagan alleged, would choose not to work; indulge in excessive drug use and sexuality; normalize out-of-wedlock births and families without fathers. Republicans thus sought to end welfare and other racial remedies and to "re-moralize" American life. Increasingly they drew into their tent white religious Americans who wanted to restore the sanctity of marriage, reinvigorate traditional gender roles for men and women, and outlaw those practices that were seen as encouraging irresponsibility and immorality: abortion, homosexuality, and pre-marital sex.
There were good reasons for these Republican failures
When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, his ideology of free markets, small government, and moral virtue supplanted the Democratic one of regulated capitalism, powerful government, and racial equality. He enjoyed immediate policy success. He weakened labour unions and slashed taxes on the wealthy; shrunk government’s role in regulating finance, industry, and the environment; locked up hundreds of thousands of drug users, a majority of them black; and carried out a massive military expansion to frighten the Soviet Union into submission. But important Republican goals remained elusive: persuading the Supreme Court to declare affirmative action and abortion unconstitutional; dismantling the welfare state and machinery of racial engineering; shrinking the American government to the point where, in the memorable words of Republican militant, Grover Norquist, "we can drown it in the bathtub."
There were good reasons for these Republican failures. Large number of Americans did not want to eliminate old age pensions or government-supported medical care for the elderly. Many favored the cultural diversification that flowed from the civil rights revolution and renewed immigration. Majorities of women treasured the reproductive freedom that Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s and 1970s had bestowed on them. Thus even as the American people were electing Reagan president, they were keeping one and sometimes both houses of Congress in the hands of Democrats.
Republicans might have interpreted this preference for divided government as a sign of the need to restrain their ambitions. Reagan himself combined strong ideological views with a pragmatic streak: he would get what he could and compromise on the rest. But the radical Republicans who came after him were not so easily satisfied. Believing that their philosophy was one that virtually all white Americans had embraced, they were infuriated by the partiality of their success. Increasingly, they began to believe that they were being undermined by villainy from without and quislings from within. No opponent disturbed them more than Bill Clinton, whom they saw as the snake who had slithered his way to the presidency in 1992 and then won reelection in 1996 because of his success in "stealing" elements of the Republican platform and claiming them as Democratic achievements. Already they despised Hillary, whom they depicted as cold, ruthless, and calculating.
They were equally agitated by signs of weakness and apostasy in their own party. They condemned President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s hand chosen successor, for raising taxes after he had pledged never to do so. They denounced the next Republican president, George W. Bush, for expanding the welfare state after promising to end it. They loathed three conservative Supreme Court Justices—Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy—for allegedly failing to do their duty: mobilize a court majority to declare abortion and affirmative action unconstitutional, and hold the line against gay marriage.
In 1994, a battalion of these new radical Republicans won election to Congress. Their leader was Congressman Newt Gringich, their manifesto the "Contract with America," a set of ten policies that they pledged to enact and from which they, declared, they would never retreat. The policies themselves did not fare so well, but the electoral success of Gingrich’s Young Turks became an occasion for purging moderates and other dissenters from the Party. This campaign to "purify" the party culminated fifteen years later in the Tea Party rebellion of 2009 and 2010. The most militant of the Tea Party legatees now form the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, where they compete with each other to depose the few remaining moderates in Republican ranks and to demonstrate the extravagance of their fealty to radical Republican principles. These principles included a determination to deny Barack Obama every achievement and to render the administration of the first black president a failed one. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 declaration that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" is the GOP battle cry. The Republican Party of today is, as a result, the most radical and uncompromising political organization ever to hold a majority in both Houses of Congress.
Analysts of the American political scene used to take some comfort in the belief that there was still a GOP Establishment capable of reining in the radicals. This Establishment, it was thought, included The Wall Street Journal; wealthy and strategically placed banking and corporate executives; the dense network of Republican donors and operatives that grew up around two generations and the various branches of the Bush family; a core of Republican senators who, in times of peril, could be depended upon to act in the national rather than the party interest. This Establishment could itself be militant in the pursuit of its goals, but its desire for a stable economic environment for capitalism both at home and abroad inclined its members to pragmatism, compromise, and multilateralism. This Establishment is gone, replaced by a series of rival power centers, some still maintaining links to the Republican party of yesterday but others in the hands of right-wing billionaires with very different conceptions of what the twenty-first century Republican party should be. The ranks of the latter include Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News and has acquired the Wall Street Journal and America’s leading tabloid, The New York Post, and who delights in defenestrating political establishments; and Charles and David Koch, who have used their billions to push the GOP hard to the libertarian right. Both the immense influence and clashing agendas of these billionaires have distorted the political environment and creating circumstances favorable to the ascent of a maverick like Trump.
What the Trump presidency means for the radical Republicans is not clear. In temperament he resembles them, relishing conflict and confrontation, delighting in the process of setting old verities ablaze. They share some aims: cutting taxes and deregulating banking and the environment; deporting illegal immigrants; undercutting minority voting rights and outlawing abortion. They are likely to get their Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, confirmed. But Trump, unlike the radical Republicans, is a populist cut from a European mold. He does not want to eliminate the government’s role in providing social welfare; he simply wants to end the stream going to immigrants and native-born minorities and direct it entirely to the right kinds of Americans (whites). He is drawn far more to the authoritarianism of Putin and Erdogan than to the libertarianism of Goldwater and Reagan.
That there is a gap between the radical Republicans and Trump is evident in their lack of coordination on legislative packages. The new President and the new Congress are squandering the First Hundred Days, long regarded as a critical moment in the formation of every new administration. The blizzard of Executive Orders Trump has issued should not be allowed to obscure how slow he has been to design and implement a legislative agenda. His staff’s failure to generate an alternative to Obamacare has compelled him to support a hastily-drafted and incoherent Congressional bill that, if passed, will unleash chaos in health care delivery. Nor has Trump made discernable progress on two of his other major campaign pledges: to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure and to overhaul its systems of corporate and personal taxation.
These initiatives may still take shape; Trump has demonstrated again and again that he can surprise his detractors. But that he will lead the radical Republicans out of the desert to the promised land is by no means assured. The success that has so long eluded these radicals may once again exceed their grasp. There can be no doubt, however, about their ability to convulse the practices and traditions of American democracy.