The Republican Party is dead. We need to bury it.
If we fail, its undead corpse will kill us all.
The Republican Party has a storied place in the history of our American democracy. It was the dominant political party in the US from 1860 to 1932. Its achievements are legendary. Its first President, Abraham Lincoln, is widely counted as one of our best. It abolished slavery. Saved the Union. Supported the Transcontinental Railroad. Supported the rise of of commerce and manufactures, which converted a sleepy agricultural economy into a world economic power. Although it fell into corruption in the Gilded Age, it improbably righted itself in the Progressive Era. It became the reform party of good government, and earned Teddy Roosevelt his place on Mount Rushmore.
But the Republican Party’s small government orthodoxy never allowed it to adapt to the demands of the more complex global economy and international order it helped create. It was resoundingly repudiated at the polls in 1932. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats overcame the Great Depression, created modern safety net programs such as Social Security and Medicare, won a World War, laid the foundations of the international order we have today, and gave unprecedented support to science which produced, among much else, the computer. FDR’s successors further built our social safety net, put a man on the moon, supported science which created the internet and a cornucopia of medical advances, abolished Jim Crow laws and attacked structural discrimination throughout society.
This last achievement of the Democratic Party offered the Republican Party its chance for electoral redemption, albeit at the cost of moral degradation. Racism was under attack, and white backlash was growing. The Republican Party seized the poisoned chalice with relish. The Republican Party, having been out of power for a generation and desperate to regain it, had already been under attack from within by so-called Movement Conservatives. Movement Conservatives hijacked the Republican Party in 1964 and nominated Barry Goldwater, who went on to ignominious defeat against Lyndon Johnson. Johnson went on to sign into law Medicaid, the Voting Rights act, and Affirmative Action, taking on directly the Jim Crow legacy of our nation’s failed Reconstruction.
Nixon, evil genius that he was, seized the moment of white backlash and definitively put the Republican Party onto its downward path into electoral triumph and moral disaster. His Southern Strategy peeled off the racist South from the Democratic base, and united it with racist elements of the working and middle class in the North and West. Nixon went on to electoral triumph, solid domestic policy achievements, and stunning international success including the opening of China, but was brought down by his own excesses, paranoia, and inherent criminality.
But Nixon’s Southern Strategy lived on, to become the basis for the Republican Party’s resurgence, and eventual dominance. Reagan completed the Republican Party’s transformation into a dominant right wing political force. Though generally lauded on all sides, Reagan signaled his party’s racist leanings by beginning his presidential campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi, where three Civil Rights workers were murdered by Klansmen. He helped bring theocratic Evangelicals firmly into the Republican fold. He cemented the loyalty of the rich by cutting taxes, without alienating the middle class with offsetting cuts to spending, a winning formula the Party uses to this day. No sooner had he been inaugurated than the Republican National Committee formed the National Ballot Security Task Force to implement voter suppression at industrial scale. And finally, he also embodied his party’s descent into corruption with the Iran Contra affair, rife with criminality and treason.
George HW Bush, mostly a sunny institutionalist, won election by trafficking in racist tropes, such as the infamous Willie Horton ad. It was he, and his Attorney General Bill Barr, who engineered the corrupt pardons that made sure no one was ever punished for the crimes and treason of Iran Contra.
George’s son George W took a moment of national tragedy, the felling of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and took the opportunity not to unite our nation, but to violate the Constitution to increase Presidential power, advance partisan interests, and settle old scores. He instituted a program of illegal surveillance, rendition, and torture that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity that should be judged at The Hague. He corrupted our intelligence agencies to produce the justification for a predetermined outcome, war against Saddam Hussein. This was the beginning of the current Forever War we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, the youngest soldiers in that war were not yet born when W initiated it.
Seen in the light of this unbroken descent of the GOP into ever more brutality, corruption, and crimes against the Constitution and against humanity, Trump can be seen not as an anomaly, but as a culmination. At last, with Trump, the mask is off. The shackles of polite and decent society are thrown off, and the Republican base, assiduously assembled by the racist dogwhistles and theocratic panderings of 50 years, and kept to a fever pitch of outrage and hate by Fox News propaganda, has slipped the bonds of the Establishment and are baying at the moon with Trump.
With Trump, the entire agenda of the Republican Party is laid bare. Autocracy, theocracy, kleptocracy, and kakistocracy.
In three short years, Trump and his enablers have been able to subvert all of our democratic institutions to a shocking degree.
The only new element with Trump’s GOP is the widespread extent of the treason. Previously, as with Iran Contra, the treason was incidental and transactional. In recent years, as the GOP wrestles with how a white nationalist cabal stays in power in the face of demographic Armageddon in a nation trending toward becoming majority nonwhite, they have taken to knowingly accepting gobs of campaign cash and illegal electoral interference from hostile foreign powers, notably Russia.
Russian oligarchs, mainly Soviet apparatchiks who grabbed national assets when the economy was privatized under Yeltsin, joined with the indigenous Russian mafia to form a formidable transnational crime syndicate that controls the Russian government. This syndicate has rolled up the native mafias of numerous countries, including notably the US. Their purpose is to subvert democratic governments to advance their own interests. Trump, a longstanding mafia ally, front, and confidential informant to the FBI, has laundered money for the oligarchs for decades, and is in fact their creature. Republicans wink at his almost daily acts of treason to our nation and fealty to his handler, Vladimir Putin.
At the end of decades of this decline, the Republican Party is in fact not a normal political party at all, and we continue to treat it as such at our peril. It is now a hate group that has become an arm of a transnational crime syndicate, masquerading as a political party.
It has no interest in democracy, but apes its forms and language to camouflage its autocratic intentions. It games all the norms of democracy for anti-democratic ends. It has no program but perpetuation of its own power, and to that end works to establish what can only be called a fascist state – authoritarian, white supremacist, with disdain for democratic norms and the rule of law.
This denoument is not only detestable, it is extremely dangerous. The logic of fascism requires enemies, external and internal, against which the people must be rallied. Over time, keeping up the game requires ever more extreme rhetoric and ever more extreme measures, which eventuate in a police state at home and war abroad. In a world armed with nuclear weapons, a world war will go nuclear, which will almost certainly destroy our civilization, and may destroy humans as a species. Thus we see the danger of giving the nuclear codes to a petulant man-baby who has no concept of limits or consequences. Meanwhile, our planet careens toward a climate crisis which likewise could end civilization, or even all humans. And the Republican Party, in hock to the oligarchs who owe much of their wealth to the extractive industries, including fossil fuels, actively prevent any effective response.
If we are fortunate, Trumpism and the Trumpist Republican Party will be resoundingly defeated at the polls in November. If we are that lucky, we must not rest until the entire Republican Party is destroyed forever, never to rise again. For any rebirth of the Republican Party will have to build on its current base of racist, theocratic, misogynist, homophobic, authoritarian zealots, brainwashed by Fox News propaganda into a blind rage against modernity. Such a rebirth will rapidly devolve into Trumpism or worse. The next leader of a white nationalist party will be smarter than Trump, more capable than Trump, and more disciplined than Trump – for how could he or she not? In our time of woe, we have been exceedingly fortunate that Trump is so limited and flawed. When we see the destruction of democracy that a clownish loudmouth blowhard with limited intelligence and no understanding of government can bring about in three short years, it is clear that the Next Trump will be the death knell for our democracy, our nation, our civilization, and perhaps our life as a species. There is no more important task than preventing the Next Trump by destroying the Republican Party, root and branch, and salting the land so that nothing will grow there for eternity.
How do we destroy the Republican Party? By effectively removing its illicit sources of power.
First, all of the corrupt functionaries of the Trump Administration must be prosecuted for their crimes to the full extent of the law, hopefully to pass their remaining years in prison. Trump and all who enabled and carried out crimes against humanity such as the caging of immigrant children, should be remanded for trial in the World Court at the Hague. This has the advantage of blunting any criticism of partisanship in the guilty verdict. All of the leadership of the Republican National Committee should be prosecuted for knowingly taking foreign cash. If grounds are found, the RNC should be prosecuted under the RICO Act.
All of the major donors to the Republican party, including megadonors Koch and Adelson, should be investigated for their part in the campaign cash scams and prosecuted for any crimes found, which is likely. There must be an end to dark money in our elections – all donors must be publicly identified as individuals.
All Republican members of the House and Senate should be investigated for their conspiracy to further or to hide the campaign cash scam and Russian interference in our elections And while we are at it, let’s not neglect full investigation and possible prosecution of Jim Jordan’s sex scandal and the many financial improprieties of Republican members.
Corrupt and unfit judges must be investigated, prosecuted, or impeached. The laws must be changed so that Supreme Court Justices must abide by the same Code of Ethics required of all other Federal judges.
Hate speech must be outlawed with sensible acts such as have been widely instituted in Europe after World War II. Any party using or endorsing hate speech must be decertified as a valid political party. In this way the Trumpist Republican party will be expunged from the ballot, and no Next Trump can use the laboriously assembled apparatus of the Republican Party to gain access to the ballot and voters. White militias must be named as domestic terror organizations, and treated as such with surveillance, prosecution, and imprisonment. Civil suits must be brought against white supremacist organizations to bankrupt them, the way the Southern Poverty Law Center bankrupted the Klan.
Fox News must be prosecuted for hate speech, and protections for journalists must not be extended to propagandists. The mainstream media must be held accountable for failing its Constitutional duties by eschewing educating the public for both-sidesism and toadying to autocrats.
Voter suppression and gerrymandering must become things of the past, outlawed out of existence. The Senate must be reformed – it is ridiculous for a Senator from Wyoming to have 68 times the clout of a Senator from California. The Electoral College must be reformed, so never again will the loser of the popular vote become President.
If we do all this, America may see a rebirth of democracy that will safeguard the future for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. If we do not, heaven help us, for we will have refused to help ourselves.