8/7/2023 0 Comments Republican gop stands for![]() ![]() Their base is an angry white minority that cares nothing about government its members want their elected officials to rule by hook or by crook, the Constitution and democracy itself be damned, and they don’t want any guff about namby-pamby ideas or policies. The conservative writer George Will is right that the Republican Party in 2021 has become “ something new in American history,” a “political party defined by the terror it feels for its own voters.” ![]() Today’s Republicans exist only to stay in power, not least so that their elected officials can avoid what they dread most: being sent home to live among their constituents. But their confidence in their own ideas was unassailable-indeed, often to an unhealthy degree.Īll of that is gone. The self-assurance of the Republicans who emerged from the post-Watergate wilderness might seem impossible to comprehend now that the modern GOP is rife with know-nothings and apocalyptic hysterics. (The Cold War was still raging then.) Republican solutions-including laissez-faire economics at home and a confrontational foreign policy abroad-were born from an ideological conviction that led a prominent liberal Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, to warn his colleagues in 1981 that the GOP “has become a party of ideas.” ![]() Reagan and the resurgent Republicans fought the narrative of an America in decline after years of “stagflation,” urban decay, and rampant Soviet aggression. Joined by some disaffected Democrats, they were certain that they had the intellectual and moral strength to claim victory over domestic chaos and foreign challenges. The Republicans stepped forward in 1980 as optimistic warriors. My colleague David Frum has called the ’70s “strange, feverish years,” a time of “unease and despair, punctuated by disaster.” The liberal Columbia University professor Mark Lilla would later write about how difficult it is “to convey to anyone who wasn’t alive and politically aware at the time what a dreary place America seemed in the late 1970s, how lacking in direction and confidence.” The country then seemed to be falling apart-faced with riots, political assassinations, bombings overseas and at home. This confidence once attracted young voters (such as me, back in the late 1970s) to the party. Read: Mitch McConnell’s gift to progressives America is exceptional, and therefore America can do what its citizens believe they can do-especially if they treat government as an instrument rather than a master. After all, if human nature is eternal and rationality is unassailable, then emotional schemes and government overreach that deny these realities are bound to fail. These principles gave the Republican Party several decades of an almost preternatural self-confidence in the eventual triumph of their ideas. They believed that incrementalism is better than sudden change, that America is exceptional, that patriotism is honorable, and perhaps most important, that government is a necessity to be controlled, rather than a teacher to be revered. ![]() On policy, too, the conservatives moved along broad but common lines. Most of those ideas were predicated on some basic beliefs about human beings themselves, including the conviction that human nature is fixed rather than malleable, that intellect is a better guide to action than emotion, that tradition is valuable, and that religious faith is a cornerstone of a healthy society. But the GOP held clear lines of thought that stood as alternatives to liberalism. Strom Thurmond, Ronald Reagan, Howard Baker, and Edward Brooke were not necessarily deep thinkers, and they didn’t all agree on everything. You could fight those beliefs and policies you could argue with them, admire them, or hate them. The party of Lincoln has become, in every way, a political and moral nullity.Īmerican conservatism once meant something definite and tangible. This latest insult to the rule of law and the Constitution was possible only because the Republicans have already lost confidence in their own principles. However, this effort is more than the usual cynical mendacity and crass careerism (or, as one might say, “Elise Stefanik”) that characterize the current Republican Party. Their spines crushed by years of obedience to Donald Trump, the members of the GOP have once again retreated from civic responsibility, with one more humiliation of those last few in the party who thought that the Senate Republicans might mimic something like statesmanship. The Republicans in Congress are blocking a bipartisan investigation into the January 6 insurrection. ![]()
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