I still think one of the most important factors in why the Republican Party is the way it is today is because they spent so much time during the 20th-Century in the minority. From 1931 to 1995, the Republicans had control of the House of Representatives only twice, and both times they had it for only a single two-year cycle.
The Republicans took back the House in the 1946 elections as the country had a kind of collective post-war freak-out. But the Republicans instantly proved why no one should entrust them with power. Today, they are not-too-fondly remembered as the Do-Nothing Congress, which was President Truman’s nickname for them. Of course, they didn’t actually do nothing; they created the CIA and passed the Marshall Act, among other things. In 1948, they were swept out of power as Truman won his surprise victory over Dewey.
But Truman decided to wage a war he couldn’t win in Korea and lost his credibility. In 1952 he wasn’t even on the ballot and a popular Dwight Eisenhower swept the House Republicans back into power for another brief two-year stint. By the 1954 midterms, the public was so sick of them that they kicked them out for what turned out to be forty consecutive years.
That is why Newt Gingrich really had no role model for how to run the House of Representatives when he became Speaker in 1995.
The history of the Senate is much the same. The Democrats took over the Senate in 1932 and held it with the same two brief interruptions (1946-47 and 1953-54) until the Reagan Revolution swept them into power in 1981. They lost their majority after the 1986 midterms and gained it back in 1994.
When you think of all the changes the country went through between 1954 and 1994, and you realize that the Republican Party didn’t have much control over the federal government in Congress during all that time, it helps explain their pathological hatred of Washington DC. And, for conservatives, who weren’t very keen on most of the changes going on in the country, the situation was even worse than for your polite Yankee banker Rockefeller Republican-types.
We’re living with the accumulated bile of a power-deprived movement. It’s no wonder that they act with the viciousness of a dog who was tortured as a puppy.
Vicious, mean and just plain pissy are side effects of fear. Just ask any cancer patient. And these people have been boxed in and fed fear now by their leaders for a couple of generations.
Yes, we can add on to this the entertainment apparatus that misinforms and motivates them.
That might be the case, but it also seems to come as a result of being so closely connected to power–the Koch brothers and the US Chamber of Commerce, the military-industrial-media complex, Wall Street and the financial industry, tobacco, oil, guns, the Supreme Court, God etc. How much more power-deprived can you get?
Yes, well, they have had considerable power over the last seventeen years. And they’ve always had power outside of Congress, whether it be in the White House or the board rooms of corporate America or the rectory.
That would be a convenient explanation if the only thing that differed between the Republicans of the 1930s and the Republicans of today was sixty years in the wilderness.
Republicans turned vicious after the loss of Richard Nixon to John Kennedy and especially after the loss of Barry Goldwater to Lyndon Johnson. In 1962, Richard Nixon was saying (after losing the governorship of California) that you wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. In 1968, Nixon was elected President. In 1972, Nixon had burglars break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to find out what the McGovern campaign – the McGovern campaign! – was doing. So one continuity from 1946 was the personality and personal bitterness of Richard Nixon–bitterness over having to make the Checkers speech, bitterness over the narrow loss to JFK, bitterness over the nickname “Tricky Dick”. And unrestrained ambition.
The reason is the turn that the GOP made in rebuilding itself in the South. It went from shunning outright racists in the pre-1964 days (most Southern Republicans were polite Buckley afficionados) to welcoming them, beginning with Strom Thumond in 1965. The “party of Lincoln” did a 180 on race relations. In 1968, it was the Nixon team’s pure cynical calculation. But during the 1970s, the creation by Nixon exiles of the religious right by joining anti-Carter Southern Baptists (most disliked his toleration of desegregation), segregationist firebrands like Jerry Falwell, Roman Catholic conservatives like Pat Buchanan, and entrepreneurial evangelists like Pat Robertson. All of these folks were pietist disdainers of the “social gospel”–that is, socially vicious in their policy approaches. And intent on hiding their viciousness under a thick layer of charm–look, see, we not as vicious as our critics claim. Not surprisingly a lot of angry Nixon operatives who went to help Ronald Reagan were among the operatives who put together the religious right.
Finally, there is over-inflated expectations. Ronald Reagan’s administration was going to usher in a permanent Republican majority that would ideologically put a stake through the heart of American “socialism” (meaning the New Deal). It didn’t happen. George H. W. Bush got defeated after one term. Because the permanent Republican majority should have happened (because the US is a rightwing nation, you know), Clinton was looked at as illegitimate and every trick the Republican operatives knew how to pull was used to try to bring him down, including impeachment. Then Clinton helped them out.
So they stole the 2000 election in order to get the permanent Republican majority, but Bush started two wars which were not the great successes promised and the banking industry used free enterprise to destroy the economy. And whaddya know? America elected a black man president and brought his black family into the White House. He stole the country from the permanent Republican majority!
They are vicious because they aim to lock down American politics into a permanent Republican majority — by any means necessary. Including the overthrow through a politicized Supreme Court of the Constitution.
They think they know better than the American voters what the country needs.
Reactionaries are vicious whether they are Republicans or Dixiecrats. They react with fear and hatred against changes that they perceive as threatening to them. There is no “accumulated bile”; they’ve been exactly this irrational and spiteful since the early 50’s when I remember my mother’s father jumping up to turn off the Ed Sullivan Show on TV because (ohmygawd!) Harry Bellafonte (a n*gg*r!) wasn’t allowed in his living room! He wasn’t “tortured as a puppy”; he was coddled and nurtured with lies. Being “power-deprived” hasn’t made them this way. Given a greater feeling of power–as we have seen–only makes their fear and hatred more overt.
I think the bile is more generational (and gendered), not so much historical, but also exacerbated by a now fully sealed media universe that confirms their dogmatic prejudices every day. I see republican intransigence as less a matter of the lack of a historical example of cooperation-after all, republican minorities cooperated with democrats for decades-and more a matter of ideological hardening, driven by demographic and cultural trends, as well as the pathological need to deny and repress the fact that their chosen emperor C+ Augustus and his “freedom agenda” was a catastrophic failure, as well as the pathological need to deny that party leaders are bonded servants to the plutocrats who got filthy rich wrecking the economy. Hence the fairy tales about “freedom” from the astroturf groups.
My theory is that they’re more extreme then ever because subconsciously they know that their ideology is a failure and doomed. But they have nowhere to go. As others have said, we have seen a great increase in the basic incoherence of the reactionary mentality, of which Glenn Beck was only one colorful avatar.
I meant, not so much historical in the legislative way that Booman was suggesting. Obviously it’s historical in many ways.
Hey, at least I inspired some great comments…
I’m not so sure that they have any kind of subconscious realization that their ideology is a failure and doomed. I think they are under the illusion that their ideology has not yet been perfectly put into practice, and that is the reason they keep pushing harder and harder and harder to the right. In their mind, they have not yet achieved that perfection. It is an obvious parallel to the fundamentalist religious viewpoint that man must continuously seek and strive to become more and more like god, but with the knowledge that this level of perfection will never be achieved. Man, the imperfect creature, will always fall short. But you must continue the struggle against the forces of evil.
That could just as easily be a line in the official Republican Party platform as a verse in Ephesians.
I think that is why there is such an easy linkage and synergy between the religious right wackjobs and the Republican Party. They both have the same driving force at their root. A struggle against the forces of darkness. That is how they view it. No wonder that the employment of apocalyptic language has become standard fare within the Party leadership.
The problem with this theory is that there are many other political parties with even less power that remain much less vicious. I believe the viciousness is connected to the underlying belief system of many of the party’s members.
On the other hand, I think there’s a strong connection between the lack of any real policy solutions and the years out of power.
all true.
unfortunately, the flip side of that coin is the democrats, who don’t really stand for anything other than… well, fuck with this whole high speed rail defunding I was just reading in the NYT, it’s another reminder that I don’t even know what they stand for anymore.
it’s like that Yeats line. “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”