As of this writing, the odds favoring Hillary Clinton’s election stand at 92%, almost enough to allow me to breathe easily. I wish it were higher, but just think how I’d feel if it were only, say, 75%!
Yes, Donald Trump’s big mouth, and his tiny, groping hands, have made life much easier for Nervous Nellies like myself. I no longer feel like I’m riding on a falling elevator. In fact, I can spend less of my time holding my breath and more of it wondering what will happen when the doors finally open.
This election has been so uniquely awful that it is both “interesting” and, well, awful, to notice how “typical” it is—“typical” not when compared to past elections in the U.S. but to recent elections across Europe. For we fair-skinned, lactose-tolerant types seem to be undergoing a collective hissie fit that knows no longitude. In the U.S., the 150-year-old Republican Party appears to be on the rocks. Across the Atlantic, it’s the 300+ United Kingdom that’s looking shaky.
For purposes of this article, I’d prefer to stay on this side of the Atlantic. For one thing, it’s more fun. I’ve already had a chuckle or two looking at the future of the Republican Party, and I intend to have quite a few more, for rarely has a political institution more richly deserved malicious, unsportsmanlike ridicule and abuse.
What I may vaguely call “shitty Republicanism” really set in after Watergate and in the beginning of the Carter years, and perhaps its most egregious source was the Wall Street Journal. For decades an unending flow of shameless and spiteful billingsgate poured forth from the editorial pages of the Journal, uniformly portraying Democrats as corrupt, unpatriotic, backstabbing sissies incapable of either an intelligent thought or an honest day’s work, a flow that continues to this very day. This narrative was continued most triumphantly during the glory of the Reagan years, when, it seemed, God was not an Englishman so much as a Republican.
Republicans were bad winners, but they were atrocious losers. Republicans had won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, but the loss in 1992 seemed to plunge them into a sort of nightmare from which they have never fully emerged, a nightmare that now has consumed the party’s very soul. “They hate us worse than we hate them,” Bill Clinton observed. Because the Democrats, despite being steamrollered in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, always took it for granted that they would be back. Republicans lost that confidence in 1992 and they’ve never recovered it, not even in 2004, when they squeezed out the one majority they’ve managed since 1988, a majority that quickly went south in 2008, when they endured the worst beating they’d received since 1964.
In 1994, a bombastic draft-dodger named Newt Gingrich convinced WWII hero Bob Dole that from now on in the Republican Party was going to cheat to win. Instead of following the legislative procedures laid down by the Constitution, Congress would assume dictatorial powers, ramming legislation down the president’s throat by threatening to shut down the government if it didn’t get its way. Clinton won that one, of course, but, as before, defeat only made the Republicans more devious, more determined to settle scores “by any means necessary”—the mark, I believe, of a party afraid of the future.
Trump is simply the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has been, in effect, struggling for the past 25 years to become—a party entirely unencumbered by scruple because it is entirely defined by fear, a mindset perfectly expressed by the ludicrous “think piece” The Flight 93 Election, which finds the Antichrist in a pant-suited grandma with a mid-western accent. And the cream of the jest—or one of them, anyway—is that the Republican Party has now, on the road to total shamelessness, metamorphosed into the complete opposite of everything the Wall Street Journal stands for.
As recently as 2008, Sarah Palin was ridiculing Barack Obama for failing to grasp the most basic of economic truths—that free trade is the tide that raises all boats. Now the Republican base is the voice of economic nationalism, cursing both free trade and the employer-friendly immigration policies favored by both the Journal and Wall Street itself.
Trump has, in principle, endorsed the budget-busting tax cuts the Republicans have been promising Wall Street for decades, but everyone knows he doesn’t care, and the base doesn’t care either, any more than the base is interested in “reforming” entitlements or in pursuing the interventionist foreign policies that have been the centerpiece of the Republican establishment ever since 9/11. Without even meaning to—I am one of the many who think that Trump began his run simply because he no longer had a TV show and wanted a way to stay in the limelight and work his brand—Trump has decapitated the Republican Party.
Wall Street Journal stalwart Bret Stephens sums up the damage in his latest column My Former Republican Party, though one has to chuckle, just a little, over his claim that the Republicans were once the party of “civility”. Over at the National Review, David French describes what happens to conservatives who dare to criticize the Donald: a deluge of obscene, racist threats and images.
For Jews, of course, it’s even worse. At the Washington Post, Julie Zausmer cites claims by Anti-Defamation League that more than 800 Jewish journalists have been on the receiving end of anti-Semitic abuse from Trump supporters.
But Trump supporters are the Republican Party. Stalwarts like Stephens and French forget, or forget to remember, how eagerly squeaky-clean Mitt Romney begged for the embrace of Birther Donald all the way back in 2012, just as they forget the oceans of abuse poured on the Clintons and Obama in decades past.
The Republican base feels that it has lost its country. The Democratic base—much of it—feels that it has lost its party. In part, the Democratic strife is the natural result of long years in office. To rule is to choose, but it is also to compromise, and eight long years of compromising gets pretty tiresome. We won, damn it! So why do we always end up doing what they want to do?
The general reaction against global capitalism has played powerfully into the hands of the Democratic populists/paleo-liberals, who have in fact been on the outside looking in for decades. I don’t blame them much, though I don’t like them much either. The good news for neo-libs like myself has little to do with policy but a lot to do with politics. Most of the paleo-libs are white. Both Obama (of course) and the Clintons have powerful support from both black and Hispanic voters, although the connection with black voters is naturally significantly more vital. While “radical” blacks are still mad at the Clintons for their “sellout” on welfare back in the day, the large majority of black and Hispanic voters feel they’ve been well served by both Bill and Barack and won’t be interested in embarrassing Hillary in her first year or two in office. Paleo-libs, most particularly Bernie Sanders and Lizzie Warren, are clearly itching to throw their weight around come Jan. 20, 2017, but still, it’ll be Hillary up there giving the speech, not them.
