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The 2008 election left the Republican Party at a crossroads, according to Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson – and with another presidential campaign now under way, the GOP may be following a route that distances it further from the electorate.
Events of the past few weeks have shined a spotlight on the GOP’s difficulties, says Richardson, author of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. Public attention has focused on Donald Trump’s remarks about women and immigrants, overshadowing the 16 other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. Even though Trump has been widely viewed as incapable of securing the nod, he has been among the most popular candidates among Republican primary voters.
Trump’s rise, however it plays out, reflects nearly six decades of a rightward march by the GOP, Richardson says, a period in which the party’s stance on issues like economic equality, civil rights, gay marriage and voting laws has increasingly been outmoded at best, repressive at worst.
“Trump represents a caricature of the Movement Conservatism that’s been exerting pressure in the GOP since the 1950s,” she explains. “What he’s done, essentially, is strip away the niceties in the party’s rhetoric that, over the years, has courted people who felt dispossessed as women and people of color gained a public voice. Someone like Ronald Reagan could make opposition to sharing power sound respectable, even reasoned.
“But Trump has put it out there in plain, unvarnished words – calling Mexican rapists and drug traffickers, saying he wants to deport all immigrants, even those who are citizens by birthright, attacking women – and that language, while appealing to some, has offended and alienated many people. Now those in the GOP who cultivated or enabled this ideology have to confront what they’ve created.”
Thus the quandary for Republicans, says Richardson, as they seek to recapture the presidency: The bombast from Trump, and the various responses it has prompted among the other GOP candidates, may be effective in marshaling support in next year’s primaries, but won’t help the party maintain a majority.
“The GOP’s problem is that they’ve pushed their agenda by by convincing supporters that government activism simply redistributes tax dollars to women and minorities, and although anti-government feeling is certainly present in the US, the deep cuts of the past thirty30 years have made voters recognize that government has an important role in many aspects of everyday life – our children’s education, our roads, our environment, our health care, and so on. Moreover, the Republican ‘hands-off’ approach to government favors the wealthy and privileged, often at the expense of the poor and middle class.
“So, the Republicans need to fire up their base of disaffected, anxious voters – many of whom demonstrate attitudes that degrade non-whites, or others they perceive as ‘different’ – in the primaries, but that strategy will not play to the larger electorate.”
Throughout their history, as Richardson chronicles in To Make Men Free, Republicans – like Democrats – have endured various periods of dislocation and decline. But Richardson sees the GOP’s troubles as particularly compelling, in that they are so often tied to a recurring tension between America’s two fundamental tenets: equality of opportunity and protection of property.
If Republicans lean too far in the direction of the latter, she says – as has happened during the Movement Conservative era – the party betrays its own core belief in equality of opportunity, in the process benefiting an increasingly smaller and wealthy segment of the population over America’s majority. This puts it at electoral risk.
“When the party was formed in the 1850s, its leaders believed that society was an organism: Everyone was in it together and would all rise together. Businessmen were the job-creators who helped the ‘little guys,’ and the little guys helped the business to flourish and grow. The GOP’s view has always been that there is no limit to ‘the pie,’ and some, like President Dwight Eisenhower, really believed that the economy had unlimited potential.
“Democrats, by contrast, have had a more divisive view of the world: To them, the pie is limited, and the little guy has to fight for equality against the wealthy. Democrats believe that the people who do best financially make society’s rules. If that’s the case, at what point should a society regulate wealth and business to ensure there is equality of opportunity?”
According to Richardson, Movement Conservatives believed that the government should never dabble in regulation. She traces the Movement Conservative ideology back to the forces that aligned against the New Deal, a mix of libertarian and fundamentalist religious views. The movement found its intellectual and philosophical expression in the work of William F. Buckley during the 1950s and ‘60s, she says, proclaiming government’s purpose solely as promoting individualism and Christianity. Anything seen as infringing on those tenets – from “taxes to civil rights to Keynesian economics” – has been decried as “anti-American and evil,” she says.
Buckley’s ideas fed the Goldwater movement in 1964, and then moved into President Nixon’s administration during the turbulent 1960s with the so-called “Southern Strategy” and the president’s appeal to the “Silent Majority.” President Reagan, with his soft, folksy speaking style, took the hard edges off Nixon’s language and made the same ideas sound genteel, Richardson says.
But by the mid-1990s, as Newt Gingrich launched a revolt against President George H. W. Bush, Movement Conservative arguments had begun to take on a rougher cast, she says.
That roughness turned raw after 2008, when Americans saw, for example, a representative from South Carolina yelling “You lie!” from the floor of Congress at President Barack Obama. Now Trump has gone further, reducing the language of Movement Conservatism to crude racism and sexism that threatens to alienate all but the most extreme voters, Richardson says.
“The Trump phenomenon could sink the Republican Party, tied as it is to Movement Conservatism, but it could also revive the party by isolating extremists from the party’s traditional moderates. It was, after all, the Republican Party that first embraced equality of opportunity for all in America, and who rejected the idea that Americans must fight over a country with limited horizons. In either case, it is certain that this election season is a game-changer.”