This all seems rather counter-intuitive. After all, at the federal level the GOP has a very firm grip on the House of Representatives (and even the most optimistic scenarios for the Democrats do not foresee that control to change in the wake of the 2016 elections). In the Supreme Court, 5 of the current 9 justices are considered conservatives (even if Justice Kennedy occasionally breaks the other way). At the state level, the impression after the 2014 midterm elections, if based purely on the numbers, would be that the GOP is experiencing an upsurge, a renaissance of sorts. In terms of governorships, GOP controls 31 of the 50 states, and as far as state legislatures are concerned, it dominates in 68 of the 99 legislative houses (each state, except Nebraska, has a House and a Senate) – its best result since 1928.
That year, 1928 is rather ironic from the point of view of GOP history. Yes, it dominated the political landscape in the country, and in that presidential election Herbert Hoover won the presidency. Of course, only four short years later, in the final stages of the Great Depression, Americans elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There followed a twenty-year period in which no Republican won the White House. Put another way, Democrats won seven of the nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1964.
We may be in a similar watershed moment now. For all of its control of the House of Representatives since 2010, and its control of both House and Senate since 2014, the current GOP leadership has failed to elaborate a meaningful governing agenda, or even a coherent aspirational governing philosophy. The establishment’s actions have mostly been aimed at derailing and obstructing Obama’s agenda at every turn, from trying to overturn ACA (Obamacare), to trying to push more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, to obstructing any attempt to counteract climate change (while in fact denying that any such change is occurring – remember the jeers when Romney, at the 2012 Republican convention uttered the words “rising oceans”). Currently, the GOP Congress is engaged in another battle of wills with the President, this time over gun control.
What appears to have happened along the way, is that the GOP establishment has completely lost its independence from the wealthiest donors and corporations that continue to pour money into the party. It no longer speaks with a voice that would seem to be distinct from and more responsible than, powerful economic interests whose goal is not good government, but less regulation and more law enforcement. On the other hand, the GOP establishment has also now lost control of the base of the Republican Party. This happened when FOX News helped in the Tea Party’s creation in the wake of Obama’s 2008 election, and when those same powerful economic interests took over the financing of local tea parties.
So here we are in 2016, and the election is less than 10 months away. And what is becoming increasingly apparent is that the GOP has no constructive agenda, and no meaningful philosophy on what it would do with the reins of government, should the GOP nominee win in November. There are two reasons for this. Above all, honest and creative conservative thought has been lacking. Conservative writers and those in the media who pass for conservative opinion leaders have failed to elaborate a new governing philosophy for a new America. And so solutions being offered to complex and painful problems verge on either the trivial (more tax cuts would somehow create jobs; or, ripping up existing trade agreements would help the economy), the destructive (disband five agencies of the US government; abolish the IRS; deport all illegals) and the downright surreal (build a wall, AND make Mexico pay for it; bomb the Middle East till the sands “glow”; ban all Muslims from America; shut down “parts” of the internet). In conservative thought, there is no real answer for what to do with outsourcing, how to counter climate change (denialism reigns), or for that matter, how to address the radically changing demographic makeup of the United States that is hostile to current Republican policy choices and rhetoric.
But, secondly, the GOP establishment chose by its own preferred brand of politics and its allies in FOX News to create a new kind of voter. These are people who are promised miracles, are whipped into a frenzy by a host of FOX News personalities about alleged unconstitutional actions by the government and are then left to hold the bag after each new set of Republicans they help elect to office not merely fails to deliver on promises, but actively works against their interests. The so-called “Reagan Democrats” switched to the GOP because Republicans successfully exploited racial tensions and successfully advanced a primarily social (rather than economic) agenda. But these same voters never expected that instead of new jobs, the GOP would deliver outsourcing, instead of higher incomes, they would get income stagnation and more tax cuts favoring the highest income earners; they never expected that the Republicans that got to office on their votes would become the biggest supporters of the dismantlement of the social safety network that they (the voters) seem to need more and more. So the GOP created this new type of voter – the misinformed conservative.
And here is the problem. Any rational governing agenda, any coherent governing philosophy, is of necessity, fact-based. The GOP has fought for disinformation and obfuscation for so long that going back to rationality now is no longer an option. It is hard to base arguments on facts when FOX is there to debunk or question the facts. Throughout the last 7 years, the GOP leadership has thrived on negativity and misinformation. Perhaps many of them believed it was just an act designed to get them to office where they would shed their perceived irrationality and behave like responsible governing politicians. But a world of social media and 24-hour news cycles no longer allows that duplicity. In the rise of Trump and Cruz, therefore, we see not merely the final fruition of all that the GOP has sown for decades, but an abdication. There is no longer any pretense that a serious governing agenda is even possible. There is no longer any pretense that any of the current GOP contenders can at some point claim to speak for “all Americans.” There is no longer the pretense of unity, of common sense, of rational, fact-based debate. There is, therefore, no longer a valid claim that the GOP intends to govern responsibly, or with any care about the future of the country. It has morphed into a free-for-all, where governing is the last item on the agenda, and where hyperbole, a culture of intolerance and a resort to violence rule the day.
This is a very regrettable and dangerous development. Even if a Democrat wins in 2016, governing a disunited America where irrationality and anger define 30 to 40 percent of the electorate, will be nearly impossible, even as the stakes for both the United States and the world have never been higher.