Saturday, February 08, 2003

No room under the tent

A thoughtful reply from Andrew at Pathetic Earthlings to yesterday's post about the Republican record on the Japanese-American internment:
I certainly agree, but let's stop there. If I were to have done that, that would be revisionism (here's my post again). I didn't say word one about the Democrats. I didn't even say the Republicans were better or, on the whole, even decent. I know, and will live with, my party's history, warts and all. But isn't Governor Carr the kind of person that everyone should champion (frankly, I'm surprised -- and glad, the Democrats haven't tried to claim them as their own, just like we Republicans have, of late, latched onto Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy's tax cuts)? I certainly think so.

That's the nut graf, but there's more; go read it.

First, an important distinction to make: The point to which I was objecting was the characterization that Carr's record was somehow representative of the Republican Party's in the internment episode. Andrew does not take this leap. My objection sprang from this post by Glenn Reynolds, which did.

In any case, Andrew is forcing me off my duff to address something I had promised, in that same post, to tackle: Namely, the relevance of the example of Ralph Carr in the context of the post-Nixon Republican Party. Which, as it happens, kind of dovetails into my ongoing discussion of fascism. But getting there will take a long personal exegesis. Please bear with me.

I've discussed previously Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' and its continuing legacy in the Republican Party. What perhaps is taken for granted in most discussions regarding this sea change is the profound effect it had on the nature of the Republican Party. This passage from Aistrup is particularly instructive:
Indeed, there was much dissension in the RNC over the adoption of Goldwater’s Southern Strategy. Republican heavyweights such as former RNC chair Meade Alcorn and New York Senator Jacob Javits felt the party should not abandon its historic commitment to civil rights to the votes of Southern segregationists (Klinkner 1992, 24). Kentucky Senator John Sherman Cooper agreed with Alcorn and Javits, emphasizing the amoral dimension of this strategy: “But in the long run, such a position will destroy the Republican party, and worse, it will do a great wrong because it will be supporting the denial of the constitutional and human rights of our citizens” (Bailey 1963).

These fears came directly home to roost, of course. What Nixon, and other mainstream New England-type Republicans -- say, George H.W. Bush -- did not reckon on was the gravitational pull that their new racist right-wing partners in the electorate would exert on their own party. While the flood of new white Southern votes helped the Republicans electorally, particularly in the presidential elections, the party also found that it was driving out many of its longtime members, particularly those who considered themselves "progressive Republicans" -- that is, Republicans in the mold of Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ralph Carr.

I know about this very well. I was one of those Republicans.

Growing up in southern Idaho in the 1960s, I was immersed in Republican culture. My parents were Republicans. So were my paternal grandparents (though not my maternal grandparents, who were devoted FDR Democrats). Nearly all my neighbors -- who mostly worked at "the site," the nuclear-reactor testing station west of town -- were Republican.

I was an avid newspaper reader and politically aware, and active at an early age. When our junior-high school held a presidential political debate in 1968, I played the role of my then-hero, Richard Nixon (hey, c'mon; I was 12), and delivered his positions in the debate (Nixon won handily, though I doubt that had anything to do with me). When I reached high school and then college, I worked on the campaigns of various Republican candidates for Congress and the Senate, leafleting and doorbelling, manning booths at the county and state fairs, that sort of thing.

We were good, middle-of-the-road, Methodist Republicans. This in fact separated us from many of our neighbors, who were much more conservative, Bircherite Mormon Republicans. But we were proud of the tradition of progressive politics in the Republican Party, and I considered the GOP's longtime advocacy of sound civil-rights positions a major component in my identification with the GOP.

What I didn't realize, of course, was just how much havoc the devil's pact by Nixon, in signing on to the Southern Strategy, would wreak on the party itself. But it became immediately manifest by the late 1970s that the conservative movement -- which was more of a Trotskyite ideological movement than genuine conservatism, in my estimation -- had taken over the party's larger machinery. This may not have been apparent in much of the rest of the nation, but it played out starkly in Idaho, where Republican idiot Steve Symms managed to unseat one of the state's political lions, Frank Church. And I was enough of a progressive, though Republican, to admire someone like Church, and despise an outrageous liar and demagogue like Symms. (For those who need a refresher: Symms was the mentor of another Idaho icon, Rep. Helen Chenoweth.)

By 1980, guys like Bob Baumann, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were running the Republican show in Congress, and Reagan was ascendant and clearly headed for the White House. A few progressive Republicans -- John Chaffee, for instance -- trooped on, but everyone knew they were utterly voiceless within the party. And it has been that way for them ever since.

So it was that year, and that election, that I reluctantly left the GOP. Though I was a devout Christian, I feared and distrusted the theocratic right with whom Reagan had aligned himself -- I believed, and still do, that they are no respecters of other people's private religious beliefs -- and moreover I could see through Helms and Thurmond where the conservative movement was getting its ideological fires. I couldn't stand Jimmy Carter (a view I've reassessed) and voted for John Anderson.

And thereafter, it became painfully apparent that there was no place in the party for progressives. For years I've considered myself an independent, but have tended to vote Democratic because that is where the progressives have all gone. I've always voted a mixed ticket, though; I've always looked out for and encouraged smart, thoughtful Republicans where I could find them. More often than not I've wound up supporting Democratic candidates.

This is largely because the Republicans have been so wholly overtaken by the conservative movement that the two are inextricably identified now, and have been for some time. There is no place for progressivism in today's Republicanism.

Put another way: The 'Big Tent' that the Republican Party once boasted has shifted. Where once it included mainstream conservatives and moderate progressives, it now only includes those conservatives and the right-wing extremists who comprise a substantial portion of its Southern wing. When Nixon initiated the Southern Strategy, he opened the tent to those reactionaries and forced the rest of us either out of the tent or into their arms. Many of us chose the former, while the Bushes and their power-hungry kind chose the latter.

Early on in that 1980 campaign I actually rooted for the candidacy of George H.W. Bush. I thought -- considering his New England pedigree and stated positions -- that he could provide a progressive-Republican bulwark against the Reagan onslaught. Instead, once he was co-opted by the Reagan camp, he proved to be an abject apologist not only for "voodoo economics" (a phrase he invented) but the whole panoply right-wing extremism that occupied the Reagan camp in various pockets. By the primary, I had turned to Anderson -- in retrospect a bad, Ralph Nader-like vote that I've regretted ever since. Because it (and those millions of other Anderson votes) essentially let Reagan into office.

What has been most disturbing, though, in the ensuing years is the way the opening provided by the Southern Strategy has continued to expand the GOP's 'Big Tent' to include a growing variety of right-wing extremists, ranging from Moonies and Bircherites to the Lincoln-hating neo-Confederates of the Trent Lott wing of the party. And as I discussed here recently, that Big Tent in the 1990s began expanding to even new varieties of right-wing extremism, culminating in the absorption in the 2000 election of a substantial portion of the far-right Patriot movement under those awnings.

Just as the influx of segregationists into the party in the 1970s exerted a gravitational pull that drew the Republican Party's axis far to the right, so too will this new influx of government-hating conspiracists continue to draw the party even to further extremes. And it is in this nexus, as I've been discussing in the series on fascism, that the nation -- which unquestionably is in the GOP's thrall -- is in its most serious danger.

So I'd like to encourage the Andrews in the Republican Party, the hopeful idealists who still buy into the belief that the party's own heritage on civil rights will somehow re-emerge. I was there for many years. But to do that, the GOP must cease being a wholly owned functionary of the ideological conservative movement, because it is in that milieu that all the hopes of past progressive Republicans have gone to die.

It became clear to me through the entire Clinton impeachment episode that the GOP was rapidly becoming unsalvageable in its hatred of all things progressive or liberal. And after Dec. 12, 2000, I came to the conclusion that I could no longer vote a mixed ticket -- not, at least, until the GOP has been summarily dismissed from the halls of power and spends enough time in purgatory to genuinely repent of its ways. I do not anticipate this happening anytime soon.

The Republican Party has become so clearly gorged on its lust for power that it will promote outright falsehoods and simply steal elections through the fiat of corrupt and partisan courts; as a consequence, I cannot in good conscience vote for anyone who runs on its ticket. I can take an election loss, and have indeed taken many over the years. What I cannot countenance is the naked undermining of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and the abject power-mongering of the Bush Republicans who have seized power in this country without a legitimate mandate and through abject manipulation of the press via crass propaganda techniques and intimidation.

Andrew, I wish you the best of luck in your efforts to try to turn the Republican Party back to its noble heritage. I'll be rooting you on, though I don't expect to see you succeed in my lifetime.

Most of all, be careful that you are not yourself transformed, for the worse anyway, in the trying. If you find yourself slipping, look back on this paragraph you wrote:
Indeed. Ralph Carr is an example of what one should aspire to, not (sadly) a representative of the history of American politics: acting boldy in the face of unpopular opinion, championing the rights of all Americans as equal before the law and knowing that racism is wrong not only because of what it does to those discriminated against, but because it rots one's soul.

I couldn't have said it better it myself.

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