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The evolution of the Republican Party in the age of Trump [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-08-18  

In 2010, I wrote a book titled “The Evolution of Everything: How selection shapes culture, commerce, and nature.” If you moved very quickly, you might have purchased a copy, but less than a month after its release, a small asteroid fell in terms of the publisher going out of business. I swear, it was not my fault. (I think.) In any case, copies are now roughly as rare as the Fernandina Island Tortoise.

That book was largely based on a series of essays I wrote at Daily Kos between 2006 and 2010, all of them around the same simple idea: The selective pressures that guide the evolution of species in nature are similar to those present in everything from what candy bars you find in the company vending machine to what will be under the hood of your next car.

Over the last 13 years, there have been plenty of opportunities to observe these pressures at work, whittling away at the news media, driving rapid changes in artificial intelligence, and limiting actions to address the climate crisis. But there may be no area where so many kinds of pressure have driven such destructive change as in the Republican Party.

In 2010, the latest Republican presidential candidate was John McCain, the Dodd-Frank Act was enacted, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in a bipartisan vote (overcoming a filibuster launched by—blowing dust from ancient notes—Joe Lieberman). If that sounds like a golden age, it definitely was not.

The Republican Party was already deeply off the rails and on an express route to the big orange swamp. Two years earlier, McCain had reached out to pluck Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin from obscurity for his vice president position. Not because she was qualified or because she was a strong advocate for his relatively moderate positions, but because she appealed to a party base that was veering madly toward a demand for less qualification and no moderation. The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal made it out of the House with Republicans voting against, 160-15, in a party that was already determined to show that the arc of history doesn’t have to bend toward justice.

Almost from its inception, the Republican Party was a pro-business, anti-labor party that grounded its positions in claims of maintaining “traditional values.” That kind of party exists in almost every democracy, usually with an inclination to pound ideas of “law and order” and to look questionably at anything that deviates from the racial/cultural alignment of their base. That is what makes the right, the right—and also what positions such parties so that they are easily tipped toward extremism in the form of authoritarianism. That fascism ended up being a melding of corporate interests and authoritarian governance wasn’t a coincidence. It’s just everything in every conservative, pro-business party turned up to 11.

Over the 16 decades of its existence, the Republican Party has backed some pretty godawful positions and earned the enmity of the public on the numerous occasions when its greed über alles policies have resulted in widespread misery. (See Depression, Great, and Recession, Great.) But by and large it has also been a party that saw its best path forward as coinciding with the health of the nation, even if there were some vast disagreements about what was best for the nation.

For example, Richard Nixon famously signed onto creating the Environmental Protection Agency, then turned around and vetoed the Clean Water Act only to have the Senate vote to override his veto just two hours later, with 17 Republicans signing on. That’s a party that was 1) willing to work in a bipartisan way to benefit the nation, and 2) not stuck in lockstep behind a single leader.

But less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was in office on a platform that wasn’t just anti-EPA, but anti-government and heavy on the cult of personality. Reagan showed that it was possible to harness the vague dissatisfaction that exists around particular government policies and turn it into a broad wave of support for crippling government in general—especially if that wave was injected with hefty doses of racism based on confidently told lies.

Reagan didn’t invent the idea that rural and suburban whites were coming out on the short end of the government stick, even though they very much were not. He just took ideas that were clearly abhorrent when spewed by George Wallace and made them more palatable to a Republican Party that was looking for some route out of the post-Watergate confusion.

Even those who didn’t think Watergate was a dinosaur-killing asteroid certainly expected the party to spend multiple election cycles wandering in the wilderness. Instead, a radical “mutation” in the form of Reagan’s racism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-government populism offered an immediate path back to the White House. It didn’t just lift the party from what seemed to be near-inevitable destruction, it gifted Republicans with three straight terms in the White House.

It’s little wonder that when Republicans lost in 1992, their next go-to guy was someone who promised to take Reagan’s positions to the next logical step. Newt Gingrich wasn’t just there to double down on the idea of limiting government, he was all in on the idea of eroding governance. The preamble to Gingrich’s “Contract with America” wasn’t about any specific policy so much as it was about making it more difficult for Congress to either pass or enforce any policies at all. Then it got back to ratcheting up the authoritarianism and racism Reagan had championed in a series of steps designed specifically to punish Blacks, militarize police, protect corporations from their own mistakes, and encourage xenophobia at home and abroad.

Very little of Gingrich’s promises ever came within a parsec of becoming law, and Gingrich himself soon became too distasteful even for his fellow Republican legislators, but the plan he laid out might as well have been a map straight to Donald Trump’s penthouse.

Trump is the end result of the innate qualities of the GOP, Reagan’s radical mutation, and Gingrich's road map to extremism, with a healthy dose of Roger Stone’s gleeful dirty tricks. Nothing Trump said after descending on his gold-plated escalator was original to Trump. It’s the worst of the worst derived from generations of Republican candidates. Just as evolution favored the ancestors of giraffes who had the longer necks that were necessary to best compete for their food, in election after election, the path the Republican Party took after Nixon applied selective pressure that boosted the candidate willing to adopt the most radical view of Reagan’s racist authoritarianism—even if that meant going to positions even Reagan would find abhorrent.

The primary means of making this shift was not through logical argument about the benefits of Republican policy. Movement came through the same tactics employed by “happy warrior” Reagan: hate and fear. That’s also not a new thing. Hate, especially in the form of racism, has long been the most effective means of persuading people to take actions that with any reflection would obviously be damaging to their own interests. Make people hate enough and keep them scared enough, and that reflection never happens.

But if you feel like something has changed in the last few years, you’re not wrong.

Those who have been around Daily Kos long enough may remember that political theorists used to spend a lot of time talking about the “Overton Window.” That was a metaphor based on the theories of 1990s political analyst Joseph Overton, who posited that unacceptable ideas could be made acceptable over time through gradual shifts.

There’s not much talk about that window anymore because there no longer seems to be anything that’s unacceptable.

It's easy to keep thinking that "they can always go lower," and that certainly seemed true of Trump’s time in office, but … can they? With Trump throwing away all dog whistles, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene dominating her party through a willingness to abandon anything approaching simple decency, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy signing on to every plot and scheme as he clings desperately to the illusion of power, what’s left? The most prominent Republicans in the party today are those most willing to tell the ugliest lies, to be the most overtly racist, to be the most rabidly anti-government, and to encourage the most violent divisions. That’s not just the current pantheon; it’s even more true of their “rising stars.”

Republicans have pushed their racism, anti-labor, anti-environment, and anti-government schtick to a near end game. When you've labeled your opponents satanic pedophile communist cannibals in service to a deep state conspiracy of international (read: Jewish) billionaires, what action can’t be justified? More importantly, what do you do for an encore?

Right now, Republicans appear to be running almost entirely on a syrup derived from attacking the LGBTQ+ community, but there’s only so many times you can say “drag queen story time” before it loses its punch. They’ve already consumed the good stuff.

Even if Republicans under Trump seem to have reached the end game in terms of vilifying Democrats (or any Republicans unwise enough to stick a finger into the hate stream), that doesn't mean they've done their worst. If Trump is the inevitable product of processes that have been selecting for Trump-like features over four-plus decades, it’s equally certain what comes next: Democracy itself is evil and opposing democracy is God’s will.

That shouldn't really be a surprise. Republicans have been attempting to limit the right to vote since well before that right was extended to over half the population. Right now, Republicans are pressing to raise the voting age, pushing ancient claims that only property owners should be allowed to vote, and lining up behind the idea that only parents should be allowed to vote. They’re even increasingly tapping the idea of rolling back women’s suffrage, which has become a regular theme on social media. And all of this is on top of the accelerated efforts to gerrymander, limit polling places, purge voter rolls, end mail-in ballots, increase voter ID requirements, and otherwise restrict who can vote.

Trump ended the last election with false claims that voting was unfair. Republicans are moving inexorably to the idea that voting itself is a bad idea.

Republicans have already neatly rolled up their position into the phrase, “America is not a democracy.” This statement is usually dismissed with the assumption that Republicans don’t understand that a republic is a form of democracy. But that’s not what they mean. They mean it’s not a democracy.

It doesn’t matter if this is nonsense. What matters is that it empowers them to take any action they want against democracy, whether that’s attacking election workers or storming the Capitol. Each of these things, and many more, are moving from outliers, to acceptable, to requisite positions for Republican candidates.

After all, when you’re fighting communist pedophile cannibals in the name of God, anything you do is, by definition, on the side of the angels. The racist, ignorant, hate-filled angels.

The idea that federal elections should be settled by state legislatures, not popular vote, may be the subject of court cases now. It will be the only acceptable Republican position within a handful of election cycles. Then they’ll move on to how those state legislatures are selected, including pressing for states to be able to satisfy their greatest disenfranchisement dreams.

And even that’s not the end game, because dissolving the federal government is the next step. There are probably further steps. They just won’t matter, except to the serfs unfortunate enough to live in the Duchy of Florida or the Lone Star Kingdom.

Of course, there’s another option: The Republican Party goes extinct.

It happens all the time in nature. An organism begins to exploit some specific feature of the current environment, becoming more and more dominant and more and more extreme in its adaptations … until the environment changes, and the same specialization that had been an advantage becomes an insupportable limitation.

Let’s hope it goes that way, because it really is us or them, where “us” is America.

Did anything happen while we were all taking a well-deserved break? Something about Donald Trump being indicted not once, but two times! Also in the news: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign collapse. So much is happening!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/18/2178583/-The-Evolution-of-the-Republican-Party-in-the-age-of-Trump

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