The Disintegrating Republican Party
When I consider the current problems facing the Republican Party I am reminded of a story I heard as a young lad about a farmer whose small vegetable farm was failing because his costs were outstripping what he could get for his vegetables. The only principal cost within his control was the feed he bought for his horse. That prompted him to embark upon a bold plan to reduce by 60% the hay he fed to his horse. He reasoned that if he could train his horse to pull his carriage and help him plow his fields, he could train the horse to carry on with less hay. His plan called for him to reduce the quantity of the horse’s feed each day by a small amount. In this way, the horse wouldn’t notice and would become accustomed to living with less nutrition. As you have probably surmised, to the farmer’s disappointment, the horse died.
In the 1960’s the Republican Party, not unlike the farmer, was faced with a problem; it was attracting fewer voters than its Democratic rivals. That was because more American voters then favored the agenda of the Democratic Party which had enabled the nation to lift itself out of the Great Depression and to improve the lives of working class Americans. In response, the Republicans Party adopted a bold plan to place itself into a position to regain (and retain) control of our federal government. Like the story of the farmer, the Republicans’ plan seemed to be working well until it encountered an unanticipated flaw. That flaw was that it presumed that it could continue to hold the loyalty of its middle class supporters while effectively starving them economically. Now, a significant percentage of those supporters are openly revolting placing the Party’s survival in jeopardy. To appreciate how this looming crisis came about one needs to understand the history of the America’s middle class since the end of World War II and the Republican Party’s ill-conceived plan to reverse its own waning political power.
In many respects the period between the end of World War II and 1980 was the Golden Age of working class Americans. The war had largely destroyed the manufacturing capabilities of Japan and the European nations, leaving the United States with a virtual monopoly in producing industrial, commercial and domestic goods. During that period the U.S. economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.8% and working class Americans, with the help of their trade unions, were able to share in the wealth that was being created.
By 1980, however, those nations that had been devastated by the war had rebuilt their economies and were starting to compete with U.S. manufacturers which had grown complacent during the intervening 35 years with little or no external competition. Thus, began the era of globalization. As a result, profit margins began to tighten and U.S. manufacturers which had disproportionately high labor costs had to adjust their operations to compete. Those adjustments included curtailing wage growth, mechanizing production techniques to reduce the number of required employees and off-shoring operations that could be more economically conducted in counties with lower labor costs. These changes dealt a heavy blow to American wage earners.
With fewer available high paying factory jobs, many factory workers were forced to take employment in the retail and service industries where profit-margins and pay levels were lower. In the 1990s the American economy was beset by another economic tidal wave in the form of the high-tech revolution. Technological advances destroyed additional jobs in all sectors of our economy. Although the high-tech revolution also created many new jobs, those jobs generally required workers with higher levels of education for which most former factory worker were ill-equipped to perform. In addition, the high-tech revolution gave birth to e-commerce which adversely affected many retail and services enterprises (both large and small) as well as the individuals employed by them.
The very factors that improved the lives of working class Americans in the post-war period had an equally devastating effect on the viability of the Republican Party whose free-market policies had led our nation into the Great Depression. That fact became painfully obvious to Republican political strategists when President Lyndon Johnson scored a resounding defeat over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.
At that time, the costs of conducting national political campaigns had increased greatly due to the growing use of televised political advertisements. This considerably increased the importance of the Republican Party’s strong support among wealthy business leaders, support which had been gained by the Party’s long-held pro-business policies. This led the Party to fashion a survival plan creating a symbiotic relationship with its business supporter. Under that plan the Party would endeavor to cut the taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals and reduce regulations that increased the operating costs of businesses. In return, the beneficiaries of these measures would supply Republican politicians with sufficient funds to wage political campaigns that could win the support of low-information voters.
At the time, there was a general belief that our federal government, like the governments of every state, should operate on a “pay as you go” basis. Richard Nixon famously summarized this belief by saying, “Every housewife in America knows that if you spend more than you earn, you will soon find yourself in big trouble.” This meant that there would have to be commensurate cuts in federal spending to offset the tax cuts being engineered for the benefit of the nation’s wealthiest citizens. To achieve that end, Republican politicians would endeavor to roll back the host of social welfare programs put in place in the wake of the Great Depression, including Social Security, unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. Also placed in jeopardy were programs designed to maintain and enhance the nation’s infrastructure. It takes little imagination to quickly understand the costs of the benefits that would be flowing to the nation’s wealthiest citizens would effectively be borne by those in the bottom 90% of the nation’s income scale whose personal well-being, as well as that of the nation as a whole, depended on the various governmental programs that would be adversely affected.
Although the Republican political coalition had always been centered around wealthy captains of industry, it also included rugged individualists who had settled the nation’s western states and deeply religious individuals frightened by social change that was accelerating. The Johnson administration’s support of the civil rights movement also gave Republicans an opportunity to incorporate within their coalition those southerners who supported segregation and suppression of the nation’s black citizens. The problem was that each of these groups would be adversely impacted by the Party’s fiscal agenda and would have to be bound to the Party by notions of individual and religious freedom and racial prejudice.
To help this plan to succeed, Republicans needed the assistance of the nation’s news media to help sell this bitter pill to working class Americans. To that end, it encouraged its wealthy supporters to acquire media outlets that would serve as echo chambers for the propaganda the Party would be disseminating in order to gain public support for its economic agenda. Because rolling back popular social welfare programs would invite public disapproval, the plan also called for a concerted effort to take control of the courts which could simply declare as unconstitutional (or simply improperly adopted) business regulations and social welfare programs which they deemed to be inimical.
Let there be no misunderstanding, just as the plan of the farmer in the fable cited at the outset of this article was never intended to benefit his faithful horse, this plan was never intended to enhance our nation’s growth or to improve the lives of the vast majority of its citizens. It was strictly designed to convert our nation’s government into an oligopoly controlled by wealthy individuals acting through members of the Republican Party.
This plan first began to take effect during the administration of Ronald Reagan which implemented a bogus economic theory referred to as “supply-side economics” by economists and as “trickle-down economics” by its detractors. As more fully explained in “The Myth of Republican Economic Managerial Superiority” that theory hypothesized that if you cut the taxes imposed on corporations and wealthy individuals (whom Republican politicians referred to as the “job creators”), they would use their tax savings to expand or start new businesses. That, in turn, would increase the demand for workers, forcing wages to be increased. In this way, everyone would benefit. In true con man fashion, they also proclaimed:
“But wait, there’s more. With more people working and earning higher wages, the government’s tax revenues would increase and that would offset the reduction in the taxes paid by corporations and wealthy individuals.”
To justify their cuts in social welfare programs, they claimed that those programs were wastefully administrated and plagued by welfare cheats. Therefore, it was only appropriate that their budgets be reduced. In support of this agenda, President Reagan famously proclaimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” In this way he not only sought to justify limiting existing social welfare programs but also to undermine the public’s confidence in the wisdom and integrity of its federal government. Thus, the era of “small government” which had persisted up until the time of the Great Depression was resurrected.
Reagan was a successful president in the sense that during his administration the nation’s economy had continued to grow at a healthy rate (3.5%). It was marred by the fact that his tax cuts did not pay for themselves; nor did the cut-backs in social welfare programs make up the difference. The result was that during his eight years in office the nation’s accumulated fiscal deficit increased by roughly 185% from $700 billion to $2 trillion. So much for the Republican Party’s devotion to fiscal conservatism
By the time Bill Clinton became our nation’s 42nd president in 1993, wealthy Republicans had taken control of a sizable portion of the media and were supporting the efforts of Congressional Republicans to embarrass, harass and ultimately impeach Clinton (albeit it unsuccessfully). Nevertheless, Clinton had one of the most successful administrations of the 20th century with the nation’s economy growing at an average annual rate of 3.9% and leaving office with an annual fiscal surplus of over $2 billion.
His successor, George W. Bush (aka “W”), deemed fiscal surpluses inappropriate and argued that monies not spent by the government should be returned to the people. That became the rationale for his two large tax cuts, the bulk of which benefitted the wealthy. Similar to the Reagan tax cuts, these were also proclaimed to be “revenue neutral.” W’s term in office, however, was a fiscal disaster; it ended in the “Great Recession” with the nation’s economy in free-fall and its major banks in fiscal extremist. In an effort to avoid a total economic collapse, the Congress passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (aka “TARP). While this program saved most of the nation’s major financial institutions from bankruptcy, it did nothing to protect the millions of Americans who lost their homes and life-savings during the financial debacle. It also was largely responsible for a $6.1 trillion (or 105.8%) increase in the nation’s debt.
This is when the seeds of fiscal discontent sowed by the Reagan administration first appeared to be bearing fruit. Until then, the growing disparity of income inequality resulting from “supply side economics” had been obscured by increases in the aggregate federal deficit which had grown to $11.9 trillion by the end of W’s administration. Although the succeeding Obama administration tried to reverse this trend by passing the Affordable Care Act and increasing federal taxes, its efforts were largely stymied by the opposition Congressional Republicans whose political security was dependent upon their continued opposition to tax increases on the wealthy. The result was that there was virtually no growth in median household income between 2000 and 2015. During that same period the income growth of those in the top quintile (20%) of annual earnings more than doubled. Stated another way, from the time Reagan took office through the end of the Obama administration there had been a transfer of wealth of in excess of $40 trillion from Americans in the bottom four quintiles of annual income to those in top quintile.
This set the stage for Donald Trump whose 2016 presidential campaign was built upon the growing discontent of American wage earners whose stagnant level of income had seemingly been ignored by their federal government. Trump presented himself as a strong and effective leader who could improve the lives of those who had not shared in the nation’s economic growth. Although Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of “special interest groups” and stop the fiscal “carnage” suffocating average Americans, this was easily the biggest con job of his career. Yes, even bigger than his sticking the banks that had financed his three Atlantic City casino hotels with $3 billion of bad debts. Among Trump’s first actions as President was the passage of his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Far from righting a bad situation, this Act (also promised to be revenue neutral) was like pouring gasoline on a burning house. Thus, while Trump did not create their economic problems, he did nothing to alleviate them.
In reality, his administration was an economic disaster with 2.7 million jobs lost, the nation’s economic growth left at a standstill and the nation’s deficit rising by $8.18 trillion (or 40.43%). These facts were largely obscured from the American public as a result of major increases in unemployment benefits and a host of other economic programs enacted to prop up the nation’s economy. Moreover, most Americans tend to excuse Trump for these problems, simply attributing them to Covid pandemic without appreciating that Trump had badly mishandled that crisis in an effort to salvage his chances of winning his 2020 reelection bid. See, “Understanding Trump’s Voter Appeal.”
Among Trump’s most important achievements (at least from his own perspective) is that he made Republican voters view their situation from a different perspective. He told them that their government was corrupt and that the media was saturating them with “fake news.” In addition, he asserted that their problems were being caused by elites who were championing “illegal” immigrants and those of differing ethnicities and skin colors. In short, whereas his Party had been subtlety stoking the hates and fears of its working class supporters, Trump did it in an open and brazen manner.
He also caused their allegiance to be shifted from their Party to himself. While he had been embraced in 2016 by Republican Party leaders as a “useful idiot”, he quickly made them his pawns. He had spent his entire adult life depicting himself as a “winner” and had promised voters that if he were elected “they would be winning so often that they would grow tired of winning.” To underscore this message, he proclaimed that he alone could “Make America Great Again.” Throughout his term as president he never missed an opportunity to proclaim how strong and effective a leader he was and to lambast anyone who spoke disparagingly of him. Those in his administration who publicly disagreed with him were quickly and vocally terminated so as to convey a message that others who did likewise would suffer a similar fate. Thus, by the end of his second year in office he had become a cult leader with the vast majority of Republican voters accepting as true whatever he might say. This, in turn, instilled in all Republican politicians the fear that they risked their political futures by not supporting him.
As more fully described above, Trump’s presidency, like that of W’s, ended in disaster. As a result, he lost the 2020 presidential election effort by over 7 million votes. Trump, however, refused to accept defeat which led him to instigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and his second impeachment proceeding. Although this gave Republican members of the Senate an opportunity to regain control of their Party, too few of them could muster the courage to do so.
Trump has now chosen to run again for president, hoping that if elected he can avoid being incarcerated for the crimes for which he has now been indicted. His chances of being reelected, which miraculously at one point seemed promising, are currently fading as a result of President Biden’s decision to step aside and support the candidacy of Vice President Harris. In all likelihood, Trump’s reelection efforts will fail and he will again seek to reverse the will of the voters by exhorting his followers to rebel. This time, however, he will not be the President.
At this point you might be thinking that I have allowed my admitted antipathy toward Trump to cloud my judgment. After all, the latest polls indicate that the presidential race not only appears to be tied but that Trump is leading in most of the seven battleground states that are likely to decide the election. In addition, just as in 2016, Trump is likely to benefit from a disinformation campaign being conducted by Russia. My views, however, are supported by the reality that Trump is a self-absorbed habitual liar whose predictions of doom and gloom, as well as his damning portrayals of his adversaries, have universally proven to be untrue. Far from attracting new voters, his public pronouncements have become increasingly bizarre and largely unhinged from reality. This means that Trump is unlikely to increase his voter support over the remaining days before the election.
By contrast, Vice President Harris is an intelligent woman with substantial governmental experience who, in the recent debate, showed that she is not only knowledgeable and competent but also has the ability to handle vicious opponents and see clearly through chaos. In a little over two months she has raised over $550 million and attracted over 200,000 campaign volunteers (170,000 just in the seven swing states) which speaks highly for her administrative skills. This has enabled her to eliminate the vast lead in the polls which Trump had over her when she entered the presidential race in mid-July.
This week she laid out her plan to continue to build the economy, a plan which embodies the very things that Trump’s MAGA supporters have been begging for over the past twenty years. While most MAGA supporters may continue to reject reality, every day there are new groups of prominent Republicans and national security experts who are announcing their decisions to place the good of the country over their allegiance to their political party. This means that Vice President Harris will continue to build voter support, not only nationally, but also in most of the battleground states, insuring her election.
Going down to defeat in the 2024 elections will not only be Trump, but also several Republican members of the House of Representatives representing swing districts who have tainted themselves by following Trump’s more destructive marching orders. Also at risk are Senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott who have not only staunchly supported Trump, but who have also taken a number improvident actions. This, however, will only tbe he beginning of the Republican Party’s problems. Its more pressing problem is that its fiscal agenda (which is built around tax cuts for the wealthy, reduced social welfare programs and opposition to labor unions) are in direct conflict with the needs and demands of MAGA voters. In addition, in the wake of the political demise of their cult leader and his messages of hate and division, those voters could find themselves more at home in the Democratic Party.
While the Grand Old Party will in all likelihood survive (as the nation needs at least two parties to voice differing points of view), it will take time and considerable effort to return it into being a formidable political force. There is nothing wrong with political conservatism as it frequently curbs the exuberance of those who would embark upon dangerous new courses of action. What it needs, however, is to adopt an economic agenda that will appeal to the vast majority of Americans. For the sake of the country, hopefully it will also abandon its messages of hate and fear which it has used to win the votes of poorly informed individuals.