Ari, over at
The Edge of the West, provides a thumbnail sketch of the events that have demonstrated the depths reached by the Republican coalition made up mostly of fundamentalists, imperialists, nativists, racists, extremist Libertarians like Grover Norquist, and other assorted mostly antisocial weirdos. He also points out that the Republican coalition is currently falling apart. First, here is his description of the recent Republican actions, then I want to give my opinion of why it has happened and where it is going.
...the fall is unfolding as I write this post.** So I’m just guessing when I suggest that scholars will one day point to 9/11 (the taproot of overreach), the road to the Iraq War (hubris and deception run amok), or Katrina (the byproduct of incompetence and limited-government ideology) as the moment when the slide began.
Let me offer an alternative reading: on this day in 1999, Chief Justice William Rehnquist began presiding over Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The details are relatively well known. Or, if not, you can go here or here. Regardless, Clinton’s impeachment revealed the depths of the Republican Party’s depravity. It wasn’t that Clinton was an innocent; he was a cad and a serial liar. But the idea that Congress would approve articles of impeachment because of the “facts” contained in the Starr Report seemed absurd. Especially when placed in historical context.
In 1866, Andrew Johnson, who had taken office after Lincoln’s assassination the previous year, vetoed the Civil Rights Act and campaigned against ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Both eventually passed despite his opposition.) Johnson’s intransigence outraged Radical Republicans, who tried but failed to impeach him in 1867. The following year, the president attempted to sack Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the man responsible for administering most of the key elements of Reconstruction in the South. Congress responded by successfully impeaching Johnson, who came within a single vote of conviction in the Senate.
So, before this day in 1999, a president had to derail Reconstruction to get impeached. (Remember that Nixon quit.) But no longer. Not on Henry Hyde’s watch. Now, the public would be safe from a chief executive who dissimulated about his sex life.
So where did all this come from, and why has the Republican Party as a whole accepted such nasty and extreme political actions?
Here's my opinion.
To Ari's list of members of the Republican coalition, let me add Goldwaterites and John Birchers (anti-Communist extremists) as significant parts of the alliance. It is an unlikely coalition, and someone had to assemble it. I suspect that a large part of what cemented them together in the 1980's was a group of left-over Nixon loyalists (like Cheney and Rumsfeld) nurtured by the Reagan administration.
I suspect that Nixon’s resignation motivated the general acceptance of extremism in the Republican Party, combined with removing the moderate Republicans. Nixon’s resignation over “a third-rate burglary” was widely believed in right-wing circles to have been the result of an extremist dirty trick by the left wing. That has justified the extremism that we have seen in the attacks on Bill Clinton by the vast right-wing (Scaife-funded) conspiracy as well as Bill’s impeachment. The Coors family and Bob Perry of Houston (financier of the Swift Boat Veterans) are also right-wing extremists who fund such things.
As I say, I “suspect” Nixon’s resignation was the justification of the nastiness practiced by the modern Republican coalition. As a non-historian, I really don’t know how to confirm or refute that suspicion.
My next suspicion is that Reagan’s election and the resulting power of the Presidency has been the glue that has held the Republican coalition together. The Republican establishment Money-cons really don’t care much for the evangelists, as the smearing of Huckabee clearly demonstrates. The foreign policy Republicans (NeoCons) and the low-tax, small government libertarian Republicans also don’t care much for the evangelists, but they all have to work together to elect a President. Once they elect a President, each group has gotten certain areas of power out of the government that were under their control. (The categories overlap a lot.)
Bill Clinton’s election really upset their apple cart, and since it could be blamed on Ross Perot, the Republican extremists again thought they were being thwarted by a ‘Left-wing dirty trick.’ That, I think, is what
justified the extremism with which the right wing attacked Bill on a national level throughout his terms of office.
They saw Bush 43’s installation as President as being nothing more than setting right what had been stolen from them. But now, after 12 years of Republican domination of Congress and 7 years of the Bush administration, everything they have tried to install in government has literally blown up in their faces, and they can’t blame the Left Wing. There hasn’t been any left wing to blame.
The result of the massive and obvious failures of right-wing government has been that the Republican coalition has already lost Congress, and they have no real hope either to regain Congress or to win the Presidency in 2008. Power and the anticipation of power was what held the Republican coalition together, and that is gone. Now the Republicans have nothing left to unify them except the thoroughly discredited Bush administration - an administration whose policies the current candidates for nomination as President cannot abandon, because it is all that remains of the power that held the winning coalition together. Worse, the have no realistic hope of winning anything nationally in 2008. So the glue - power and the anticipation of power - that has held the coalition together is gone.
That’s why the coalition has collapsed.
They still have the insurgent’s tactic of disrupting legitimate government so severely that they can make it appear unworkable, hence illegitimate. That’s what the current Republican obstructionism in the Senate is all about. If they can destroy the legitimacy and public acceptance of the government and blame the Democrats, then there is a chance they can rebuild some form of alliance again. That is the one remaining hope the right-wing Republican coalition has of surviving as a national force. And it fits in well with the nastiness that has come to characterize Republican politics.
It might work. In fact, it might even limit Republican losses in 2008. But it won't put the Republican coalition back together this year.
