Hopefully, you’ve heard to story of how Charles Sumner was beaten almost to death on the Senate floor in 1856. Sumner had delivered an incendiary anti-slavery speech a couple of days earlier in which he savagely abused his assailant’s cousin, Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina. When Rep. Preston Brooks entered the Senate with his cane, he was looking to protect the honor of his family and his state. What you might not know is that both Brooks and Sumner were Democrats at the time.
In truth, I am not certain how to characterize Sumner’s political affiliation on May 22, 1856. He had been elected to the Senate in 1850 as a Free Soil Democrat, but that political movement had effectively collapsed after the 1852 presidential election. The Massachusetts General Court gave him another six-year term in November 1856, “believing that his vacant chair in the Senate chamber served as a powerful symbol of free speech and resistance to slavery,” but his injuries were so severe that he didn’t return to duty in the Senate until 1859. By that time, he was clearly a member of the Radical Republican faction of a new political party.
Fortunately, we didn’t see any violence inside the Capitol when, nearly a century later, the Democrats began to come apart again. When Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota gave his blistering civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, no one beat him almost to death with a cane. Instead, 22 members of the Mississippi delegation and thirteen members of the Alabama delegation walked out of the Philadelphia Convention Hall. A States’ Rights Democratic Party was formed (the “Dixiecrats”), and they nominated Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate.
Throughout the 1950s, segregationist Democrats continued to dominate in Congress by holding many of the most powerful committee chairs, but they also continued to caucus with Humphrey and other like-minded pro-civil rights Democrats. It was only when Lyndon Johnson took Humphrey as his vice-president and passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that a true schism occurred.
Keep all of this in mind when you’re reading Jennifer Rubin’s piece today. She argues that the Republicans should “fire their base” regardless of the short-term political implications. And she uses as a moral comparison, the actions of the Democrats in the early 1960’s.
Like the proverbial dog that caught the bus, the GOP now finds it impossible to govern rationally with an irrational base and equally irrational media echo chamber…
…In other words, if politicians and voters on the right and center-right want rational, productive governance, they need a new base of voters. That sounds strange. A party or section of a party that wants to fire its base? Well, that is precisely what happened in the 1960s, when the Democrats unloaded white Southern anti-integrationists, ceding the South to the GOP.
Here is how Bill Moyers recounted President Johnson’s mood the day he signed the Civil Right Act.
When he signed the act he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come,” he said.
I think it’s pretty clear that President Johnson did not want to cede the South to the Republican Party. The prospect made him melancholy. It’s also not clear that this result was obvious to less savvy political operators. As the current Republican Party never tires of reminding us, only 61 percent of House Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act, but fully 80 percent of Republican house members gave it their support. Likewise, 67 percent of Senate Democrats voted ‘aye’ compared to 82 percent of Senate Republicans. LBJ intuited something that would not have occurred to most people that night. He could imagine something almost unimaginable, which was the GOP transforming itself into a Lost Cause party for the Jim Crow South.
Nonetheless, it’s true that the pro-Civil Rights Democrats were willing to take that risk, however remote it might have seemed to most of them. They didn’t want to “fire their base,” however. They didn’t need to. What they needed, and what they got, was a lot of Republican support.
And that’s what doesn’t seem possible today. I don’t see some great moral cause that moderate Republicans are pursuing, so it’s even less possible to envision eighty percent of the Democrats lining up to help them achieve their cherished goal. The leader of the party isn’t a courageous visionary like Lyndon Johnson, but a man whose Secretary of State thinks is “a f—ing moron.” The leadership of the party is cowed into following Donald Trump’s vision of a racially polarized electorate more like the Dixiecrats than anything else.
Now, it’s not like there aren’t any indications that Rubin is on to something. On Sunday, Ohio Governor John Kasich, a presidential candidate in 2016, appeared on CNN and told the host Jake Tapper that “If the party can’t be fixed, Jake, then I’m not going to be able to support the party. Period. That’s the end of it.”
But if the day ever comes that Kasich and like-minded Republicans decide they can no longer support the party, the question becomes what they will do at that point. Will they walk out of the Republican National Convention and run their own presidential candidate, as the Dixiecrats did in 1948? Will they slowly morph in Democrats, as also happened (in reverse) with the Dixiecrats?
It should be remembered that this schism in the Democratic Party fairly quickly brought an end to their New Deal dominance of American politics. The Republicans are similarly at a high point in their historic power right now, as they dominate in Washington and in the state legislatures, and even on the Supreme Court. Maybe this is the ripest time for a schism. But few people would actually welcome it for its own sake.
A more likely scenario is painted by Jeet Heer in The New Republic who predicts that the Republican Party will become both more powerful and more insane.
There is a long history of analysts predicting the demise of one of the two major parties. In recent memory, the Tea Party wave of 2010 was allegedly making the GOP unelectable, and Trump’s extremism in 2016, especially on racial issues, was supposed to doom his presidential hopes. But like Samuel Beckett’s Godot, the Republican crack-up is always due to arrive, but never does.
Not only does the party stay together, it flourishes. The Tea Party helped the Republicans capture the House of Representatives. GOP extremism didn’t stop the party from winning the Senate in 2014. And Trump ran the most openly racist national campaign in decades, but won a commanding electoral college victory. If the Republican Party is on the verge of a crack-up, it’s a very strange one indeed that sees them gaining a stranglehold on all three branches of government.
For Heer, the crazier the GOP gets, the stronger it becomes.
What’s striking is that this so-called war between the establishment and the populists always ends in the same way: with the establishment absorbing elements of the populist agenda to win elections. Seen in this light, these so-called insurgencies or civil wars never really hurt the Republican Party. Rather, they give it more energy by riling up the base. The gamble that Bannon is making is that religious extremism will create a more powerful GOP. Alas, there’s no reason to think Bannon is wrong.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Democratic Party wasn’t a coherent party, and that made it vulnerable to a crack-up. For the Republicans today, we do see fissures opening up over foreign policy and trade, as well as on some cultural issues. On the whole, though, the vast majority of Republicans would still rather vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. There isn’t any regional issue like Jim Crow to break the back of the party. The closest thing we see today is a faint shadow of the civil rights battles. It’s the gap opening up between Republican-led states that expanded Medicaid and states that did not.
It remains to be seen how much trauma Trump will create for the GOP. The longer he is in office and the longer the Republicans in Congress fail to function as a governing party, the more likely it is that some kind of internal schism will arise. For now, though, their formula has brought them an almost uninterrupted string of victories, sometimes against all odds.
Without some great moral cause or crisis to split them, I don’t see them doing a course correction any time soon.
Will Trump bring that crisis?
I guess we’re all waiting to hear from Robert Mueller.
Simpson’s Paradox in action. This doesn’t say what you think it says. If you look at Northern politicians, a greater proportion of Democrats supported it than Republicans. And if you look at Southern politicians, a greater proportion of Democrats supported it than Republicans.
well, yes. plus, there were like eight Republicans in Congress at the time.
My republican friends remind me of this all the time. The dems needed republican votes to pass it. But not a majority of republicans. Just enough.
What can the Democratic Party do to broaden the GOP’s schisms and hasten its (potential) fracture?
Not one thing.
It can be the popular alternative when those occur. That rising popularity might put more stress on if it is contrary to the way the GOP is moving the argument and they are losing support.
A conversation about what the tax system that existed from 1933 through 1985 actually did for things other than revenue, deficit, debt would be helpful.
Highly progressive enforced tax brackets restrained massive wage and salary inequality and corporate ripoffs. Why scheme so hard and employ so many tax lawyers if the government gets so large a percentage of the take. Lobbyists only became cost effective when they were producing changes in tax law and direct regulation of a firm.
But Democrats have to rebuild that alternative from local and state positions where they can be known from personal dealings with constituents. And that means the need to find a less bubble-like relationship with the people who vote for them.
I don’t see any innovation like that happening. That is like defaulting to the GOP by focusing on the GOP and not on one’s own constituents.
Voters are tired of being stampeded by phony baloney marketing campaigns that seeks only their money first and then their votes and never their opinions or advice of news of the district issues or a perspective outside of the major business leaders and lawyers of the district.
Good post with some cogent and informative historical background. One thing that’s potentially missing in the discourse is today’s powerful and influential Oligarchs, who are financing so much of this chaotic nonsense, combined with Oligarch-owned media.
The role of Fox, Hate Radio & Christiany Broadcasting cannot be overstated. IMO, much of the Republican base these days have been critically brainwashed. I can think of no other way to describe it. They’ve been reliably trained to think, believe and actually SEE things in a certain way that simply, and quite often, doesn’t accord with reality or facts. BUT it accords with what will best benefit their 1% Overlords.
Frankly the right has been reliably trained to totally hate, despise and detest whatever happens to pass for the “left” (such as it is) for no other reason that we’ve been labeled as the horrid “other” who must be detested and kicked and spat upon just because.
As even Tweetie Matthews points out, it’s not all that long ago that our Congress, while far from perfect, did work together in a more functional fashion to pass mostly rational legislation. And there was a much stronger notion of both parties negotiating with each for the good of the country.
While I think Dems have ceded a lot of ground based on their own fealty their own 1% Overlords, it cannot be denied that the Republicans are just out there in a very weird, irrational and completely bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic fashion. They are the party of NO!, other than when they’re the party of absolutely ripping off the middle and working classes to enhance the 1%. It’s clear as day, but their voters will go on endlessly (believe me, I’ve heard it often enough) about how “divisive” the left is and how the Democrats hate the USA and all the rest of the b.s. twaddle that they love to rant on about.
I very much dislike Charlie Sykes because he BUILT this base and was financially rewarded for that, and his big turn-around is STILL financially rewarding him. But he does admit that rightwing media, such as his former radio program, most definitely had a powerful influence in brainwashing these voters to behave as irrationally and nastily as they do now.
That anyone can witness Trump’s behavior and somehow find it appropriate, if not laudatory, says it all. The man is utterly UNFIT for this job; clearly doesn’t have a clue; and is bringing our country literally to the brink of utter destruction. Yet is his fans are thrilled to the marrow by his behavior. He’s GREAT! MAGA!!1!
This is clearly insane. The media – well, really, the Oligarchs – have a lot to answer for.
It’s almost impossible to see how the Republican Party can turn this around, but I don’t see those greedheads “firing” their base. They ain’t gonna do it.
Money Talks! Bullsh*t walks.
I’ve discussed my concept of “political entropy” here before and I do believe it is more relevant to the near future of the GOP than it is for the Democrats (who have different problems). The more power the GOP accrues, the greater the internal factionating occurs, mainly along ideological lines but occasionally along regional lines too. These internal divisions have combined with frankly delusional policy and legislative proposals that have little popular support to create paralysis and incompetence except at the SCOTUS level where conservatives have dominated on most (but not all) issues.
At this point, if it were not for the GOP’s all-powerful media army, they would be in very serious trouble despite the structural advantages of the Electoral College and gerrymandering. The Democrats problems are the converse of the GOP’s: the lack of an emotionally appealing message strategy to conservative and rural white people and a non-existent media force. But nothing is forever.
The GOP crackup has been happening for some time, and will certainly accelerate dramatically because of Trump. But, we have to examine what this will mean in practice. Until they start losing elections they will continue down their current path, even though it’s a hopeless dead end.
We’ve seen all this before you know. Until 1930 the GOP simply refused to permit redistricting based on the census of 1920, because that census revealed the horror of rural to urban migration that was shifting the power of numbers from the rural areas to urban areas that were inevitably havens of Democratic control, usually White minority groups like the Italians and Irish. They used the 1910 apportionment for 20 straight years.
They’re doing something similar now with extreme Gerrymandering. But, just as ultimately the GOP had to give up and allow the apportionment of 1930 to be the basis of the 1932 elections, even though they understood this was the death knell of many of their careers, today’s GOP will abandon whatever portion of it’s base it needs to abandon to maintain a hold over power in a two party system.
For now it’s worked for them, just as it worked for Congressional Republicans between 1920 and 1932. But, what happens when inevitably they start losing elections? Remember all that hand-wringing and angst among Republicans about the impending demographic catastrophe? Trump’s election might have slowed, but did not change that momentum. The GOP cannot win the culture war, no matter how loud they scream. And we are seeing that they lack the power to accomplish much legislatively either. All they have really accomplished long term is to make utterly certain that every black and brown person in America views the GOP as the haven for KKK racist morons. No person of colour I know would think of voting for any Republican today. What future does the GOP have in a nation that is 50% black, Asian, Latino, other if they are the party of institutional racism and vote suppression? None whatever. And the more sensible ones know it.
But, Trump has empowered a lot of fantasy thinking among the right wing “we’re in charge now! Take that Lib-tards!”
Increasingly they are losing control however. They have already lost control over the narrative on almost every issue. It is a question whether they can hold onto the House in 2018, despite every vicious gerrymandering effort.
Their long-term future is every more bleak. What will they do? Ultimately they will become Eisenhower Republicans and the GOP base will have a choice of either supporting them, or splitting off to become a Dixiecrat party. Some will do that but most will cling to power by moving to the middle and grabbing a portion of the Democratic base that is more conservative on economic issues.
The two parties are permanent but the bases of these parties will shift over time. Without Gerrymandering the crackup of the GOP would already have taken place. They are being held in power not by numbers but having a bunch of “Rotten Boroughs.”
Booman writes:
I guess we’re all “waiting to hear from Robert Mueller.”
Meanwhile, the whole media-promulgated anti-Trump drip, drip, drip idea has dried up in the heat of the summer into
weakly…errr, ahhh, I mean weekly…dropped PR bullshit about how fine his stable of prosecutors really is and every once in a while another “unleaked” leak about the Steel dossier, Manafort’s financial shenanigans in the Ukraine and Russia or some other diversion for the rubes to chew on.What are they, aging the fucking beef!!!???
I mean…really!!!
I don’t even smell any cooking!!!
ASG
Those who point to schism in the GOP need to tell what the strong fault line is that will split it. I see on personality differences and competing political ambitions seeking opportunities on more and more phony issues. I see testing the limits of crazy of each politician’s political base. That is apparent in the Yes, No, and Didn’t Vote votes in the nonbinding budget resolution–yet another leadership temperature check of the political alignments.
It is no surprise as to the retirements. They all tend to the less crazy, except for those one step ahead of the sheriff.
I think you overstate the frailty even if minimizing Rubin’s story of schism.
The failure of conservatism and Republican power is that it has not in 49 years delivered on its promises of peace and prosperity. Its governing philosophy, economic policy, and foreign policy have delivered us a loss of economic power, a loss of international power, increased inequality of wealth and power of people, increase inequality of status and respect, and a more brutal culture. And even less freedom (whatever way you imagine what Barry Goldwater was offering). No one has called on that failure like Republicans began calling out the “failure of liberalism” (and getting nods from the Democratic “Amen corner” of the mid-1970s.) There are Republicans ready to be their corresponding “Amen corner” now, but no one yet has raised the call that the Republicans finally are worse than Hoover and Harding combined, and Trump adds “worse than Buchanan” to the equation. No one has started that line of thinking and analysis in the national conversation. That Trump is the logical conclusion of what the Goldwaterites wanted. And that that turns out to be what the World War II generation defeated overseas.
What the voters think can be overcome with enough money and rigged media and institutional corruption.
And rigging the economy for the rich results in a voting base that supports Republican policies and corruption by voting its safe anger rather than a revolutionary polity that will overthrow Republican monarchy out of an anger that overcomes risk-aversion and opposes police power. Which allows for more money-financed totalitarian control. Is that not where Bannon and company seek to make history? The media have made them the new “cool kids” on the block. Especially in affluent white techie areas of multicultural cities.
The schisms in the GOP are still confined to Congress. Frustrating that institutional power seems to be Democrats best move, but one that requires absolute unity over several elections. But the bigger challenge is in the conversation of the political culture. The things that government is responsible for are falling apart; there is no market that will pick them up; the private sector is looking only to their tax cuts. That is the way to a societal collapse. With military policing.
Or rapid, chaotic devolution of control away from Washington and even state capitals.
A strong, failed GOP holding on through propaganda, money, and military policing led by a narcissist with the power to launch individual assassination, regional wars, or nuclear war is a huge risk for the next 39 months.
You write:
My own answer?
Fault line Trump.
But only if he is really and provably caught with his pants down.
Nothing else will do.
AG
He’s keeping that belt pretty tight these days.
So from your perspective, there is no fault line at all that would split the GOP. But there will be retirements that bring in a realignment and a new party.
That inequality in wealth you noted is about to be greatly accelerated. The rich get even more money and the rest of us and society get nothing.
That in itself rarely causes political realignments. And the realignment institutionally under way is institutionalizing more European-like right wing ideas and US white supremacist ones even as the wider culture moves counter to those trends in government institutions.
As usual, Kasich is just flapping his gums. He’s not going anywhere. He is as, authoritarian, theocratic and misogynistic as all the rest of them, he just wears the mask better. The Villagers lap up this kinda crap.
Take a look at the rest of his record in Ohio and the legislation that he has promoted and signed, it is essentially a Tea Party/social Conservative’s dream. Throw on top of his continuing language in regard to women and women’s issues, and he comes across as a horribly sexist troglodyte.
That’s why I buy into Heer’s thesis and not Rubin’s. For her, it’s simply wishful thinking that the GOP will return to what she thinks it should be: just as disastrous to the country and the world as it is now, it’s just more polite about it.
The republicans have a lock on the white vote, especially in rural areas. And the white vote continues to shift to the republicans. The dems control the Coasts and Chicago. The middle of the country goes to the republicans even the mid west this last time around. That could even become permanent unless something is done.
It appears the dems are the party of the big social spenders who spend large deficits and the republicans are the racists. War mongers are anyone’s guess.
The truth can’t break through. Deficits are nearly meaningless excepting in some circumstances such as now when someone like Trump wants to make a gift to the wealthy and risk inflation. You can’t give money away like that without expecting inflation. You must buy available resources with it. But Trump’s free gift keeps on giving as the stock market bubble keeps getting bigger in anticipation. The question is whether he can ride this to victory next time around or the bubble breaks on inflation.
Why so much of the country cannot escape racism is beyond me. Maybe it has been drilled into us for too long. I personally have an aversion to making up “gifts”to attract the racists. They are still deplorable, like it or not. Then again… pragmatism.
The country cannot escape the racism because the institutions that have supported it for over 350 years are still strong and affluent.
ClearChannel, FoxNews, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and so on.
Billionaires like Mercer, Adelman, Kochs, and others work to geld contradictory and less purposeful media. Look at how subtly Koch shaped Ken Burns’ Vietnam.
And then there is the massive smokescreen of fear, uncertainty (fog), doubt that issues from old-line rightwing sources and increasingly from staunchly Democratic centrist sources and lefty sources as well.
Racist prejudices within one’s mental outlook are something that many people still are actively working through; it is a form of post-slave-society-stress disorder. Many of us were quite there 50 years ago and and have done a lot of mind work since. Active discrimination and abuse is another matter and quite deplorable. Setting up institutional forms and justification of discrimination and abuse is more deplorable still. Rush and the shock jocks recruit their audience from those still struggling and uneasy with racism and gives them an easy and phony out: it is they who are the victims of discrimination and racist.
That is deplorable and a patent lie that corrupts our politics in some pretty brutal ways.
One pragmatically sets out to take down all of the institutions that are perpetuating discrimination and the promotion of bigotry. That is pragmatism. What is called pragmatism is a cop-out. And what is called purity seeks to get conversion and repentance from every person operating out of racialized prejudice by next Wednesday or it’s not worth their effort; you know where that ends up.
Evidence would be good, also too.
What was it David Koch did on that documentary?
I don’t see how you can point to “a nearly uninterrupted string of victories” when we got Barack Obama elected, twice, by overwhelming margins.
Furthermore, of their 3 most recent Presidential victories, 2 were skin-of-their-teeth popular vote losses. And the third was a less-than-overwhelming victory during wartime.
They can only barely elect a President now, under the best of circumstances. They can barely command a Senate majority, under the best of circumstances. And demography continues to push against them.
This is clear a party and coalition that has hit its apogee and is on the way down. The only question is how far and how fast.
That part of the narrative often gets overlooked. And as we look ahead to 2018, the GOP is in a position where its candidates “should” pick up enough seats to come close to having 60 seats. Had the Notorious HRC been President or had Drumpf proven effective and able to overcome his initial unpopularity, and had Drumpf not expended what little capital he had on unpopular legislative efforts, this would have been the safe scenario to bet on. Instead, the White House occupant is historically unpopular for so early in a White House occupancy, the GOP has been unable to capitalize on its locked in advantages this legislative session when it had the best chance to do so, and may be facing any of a number of headwinds by the time election day rolls along.
I seriously doubt the Senate will flip next year, but I’m increasingly with folks like Sabato or Cook who are viewing this upcoming election as one where the number of seats held by the GOP and the Democratic Party don’t change that much (if at all) once the vote counting and crying are over. Whether or not there is enough of a Blue wave to flip the House, as well as (more importantly) statehouses and Governorships in large enough quantities is an open question, and the prognosticators seem pretty uncertain as of now. Heck, I’d advise erring on the side of caution this early on anyway. I think something appears on the move (really just basing this as much on personal experience as anecdotes from friends in other red states), and that the landscape will look better for us once November 2018 comes and goes, but not at a point where I feel like making bets.
Really, a GOP crack-up, in whatever form it takes, will be a very slow moving event. I don’t expect to see miracles next year, or in 2020. If we can get to a point where we give up on the demography is destiny nonsense and get to a point where we simply do the gruntwork of running candidates for each partisan office all the way up and down the ballot, reintroducing ourselves to enough of our neighbors, and so on, it’ll pay off eventually, especially as the GOP continues to look ineffectual and corrupt.
Yeah. I don’t see where the fracture is coming from. Eventually, it will be clear that one is either a Republican or one has no power at all, so I pretty much expect the moderates to toe whichever line they are given. I also expect a bunch of folks who would be otherwise be Democrats to move over because power is worth something. As far as I can tell, there isn’t an ideological split happening under Trump and if anything when he’s out of the picture, the country will end up being more GOP than before.
Sorry, I’m a bit of a downer, but I think we might as well not put “GOP Fractures” into our models that predict the “Future Permanent Democratic Majority”. If there will be one, it will be because non-voters show up and start voting for Democrats and not because the GOP isn’t on the ticket, or runs such caustic candidates that their own voters sit things out. Hell, a good chunk of their voters from 2014 could sit out in 2018 and they’d still end up with most of the governorships, including those where the electorate is supposedly blue and purple.
Being a Republican has become uncool among the youth. Time will help.
1. With John McCain’s age and affliction, there’s going to be an opening as the most mavericky maverick Republican.
Kasich is lining himself up for that role.
It’s been 20 years since the Republicans went completely haywire with Clinton’s impeachment. They have paid exactly no meaningful price for their irrational behavior, because they are delivering what their base and the 1% want.
The lesson of Trump is really pretty simple: find a Ronald Reagan clone – someone who uses the code words better, understands who his betters are, and has a more amiable personality while destroying fiscal discipline, selling arms to Iran, empowering the hate from places like Philadelphia, MS. And doesn’t have the sexual assault history Trump has.
Basically, a more amiable dunce doing the exact same things with a different style.