The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
(Lifelong Learning of Hilton Head Island – March 17, 2016)
The Necessity of a Reasonable Republican Party
Will Rogers once famously observed, “I am not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” Today, nearly a century after the Oklahoma writer and entertainer made his sardonic statement, the Democratic Party is still distressingly disorganized. It has few widely-publicized and affirmed core principles which most of its politicians or members are willing strongly to support.
The Democratic Party started out in 2015 with five candidates for their party’s presidential nomination. Now there are just two. One is attempting to present herself as a centrist Democrat, and the other calls himself an “Independent Democratic Socialist.” One would suppose the latter description is not a political identification which is likely to enlist the enthusiastic support of myriads of American voters. Nevertheless Bernie Sanders has engendered far more political buzz than Hillary Clinton. Their political similarities are much greater than their differences, but in temperament and spirit they are poles apart. And their campaigns have appealed to very different kinds of voters. Together, however, they represent a political tradition which, for the past 85 years has attempted to be all things to all people Democratic, and they are within the bounds of traditional Democratic politics and principles.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, has assiduously tried to appeal almost exclusively to what it calls its “base.” In so doing, up until the presidential primaries, it has allowed itself to become tacitly governed by a set of vociferously expounded principles which definitely do not represent the thinking of most Americans, or even perhaps of most Republicans. For the past 20+ years very conservative extremists have been in control of the Grand Old Party. People like Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, the Bush neo-cons, and George W. Bush himself have steered the Republicans so far to the right as to be almost totally disconnected from reasonable rightists such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Many of the original seventeen candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination are beyond the pale of traditional GOP doctrine. No one in the party seems to have been successful in thwarting the obvious takeover of the fire-breathing zealots. However, this extremist tendency is a very serious threat not only to the GOP but also to the USA and the entire world, because far too many of these extremists are politically unhinged.
What are some examples of the extremism? It has been claimed that only three of the original seventeen GOP candidates for the Republican presidential nomination affirm the facts that Barack Obama was born in the USA (Hawaii, to be exact) and that he is a Christian. Fourteen of the seventeen say he was born in Kenya (or maybe Indonesia) and that he is a Muslim. If their claim accurately expresses what the fourteen actually believe, it is appalling. How could such an ideological refusal to face facts exist in fourteen people who were striving to become the President of the United States? The answer is found in a fawning appeal to the strange mentality of millions of Republican primary voters who truly do believe that Mr. Obama is foreign-born and a closet Muslim. Rejecting proven facts is a highly dubious blueprint for electoral victory. Conspiracy theories are almost always flights of fanciful fantasy, and these two perverted notions are unquestionably conspiracy theories.
Second is the prideful and uncritical belief that America is morally superior to other countries. Historically nations which perceived themselves to be morally exceptional were more likely to engage in extremist and immoral policies than other, less ideologically oriented nations. Over the past century, Britain has been our closest and most trusted ally. But at the zenith of the British Empire, the UK committed numerous egregious assaults against its colonies and against other nations, supposing that “the white man’s burden” required it to do so. German Nazism and Japanese militarism deluded themselves into thinking their purported superiority required them to ignite World War II. Before, during, and after that war the Soviet Union convinced itself that the supposed ethical superiority of Soviet communism demanded the establishment of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as well as a satellite empire in Eastern Europe. To everyone else these actions represented brazen aggression, but to the Soviet leaders communist ideology virtually insisted they should do what they did. They did not come as close to succeeding in their imperial ambitions as many Americans chose to believe, but they certainly tried.
Since the end of World War II, many nations, including some of our best allies, have concluded that the United States has conducted much of its foreign policy on the basis of American exceptionalism. We seem to be ignorant of the fact that America is perceived by millions of foreigners to be fundamentally similar to Great Britain, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. This may shock us but, on reflection, it should not surprise us. Nevertheless, we are neither shocked nor surprised, because we blithely refuse to recognize this truth. Perhaps the most telling illustration of our imperial aggression is that the USA has flung itself into nearly every major war that has occurred anywhere on the globe since 1950.
Does the leadership of either the Republican or the Democratic Parties have any moral qualms about feeling morally exceptional? Many Democrats probably feel at least a tad guilty about it, if they do feel that way, but many Republicans actively revel in it. They honestly believe that the USA is morally superior to all other nation-states.
“American exceptionalism” is bound to create untenable problems in long-term foreign policy. It elicits enemies and germinates grudges. And yet the GOP makes no serious attempts to disabuse the extremists within their ranks of their noxious notion.
Within the Republican Party extremist positions on immigration continue to go largely unchallenged from within the party leadership. Candidates have brazenly talked of deporting all illegal immigrants, as though that policy could easily be enforced. Creating the bureaucracy to accomplish such a draconian policy, were it ever adopted (which it would not be), would require enormous federal expenditures. And if nothing else, the GOP always strongly resists new government agencies which require new expenditures of federal funds. Still, that does not prevent Republican politicos from perpetually pandering to uncritical voters to become over-excited about the purported hordes of dangerous “illegals” who are flooding into our otherwise pure and unsullied homeland.
Months ago, the conservative but eminently sensible New York Times columnist David Brooks began an editorial by stating, “It’s no exaggeration to say that the next six months will determine the viability of the Republican Party. The demographics of this country are changing. This will be the last presidential election cycle in which the GOP, in its current form, has even a shot of winning the White House.” He went on to say that the fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric of several of the leading Republican candidates is certain to lose millions of current and future voters who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Unless someone in the GOP can convince the fire-eaters to mute their anti-foreigner sentiments, they will irreparably damage the party.
Or then there is the perpetually ongoing issue of guns. Who owns whom: Does the NRA own the GOP, or does the GOP own the NRA? Anyone who truly believes the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution mandates that there should be almost no or virtually no restrictions on firearms is, by definition, a Second Amendment extremist. No reasonable person can insist that discussions regarding firearms are forbidden topics, and yet countless Republican politicians at all levels of government thwart debates of how best to institute the necessary firearms restrictions to make our nation a safer place. It is not only unwise for the GOP to allow the zealots within its ranks to determine the nature of Republican discourse regarding firearms, it is positively dangerous to public well being for their intransigence to control the debate.
Another perennial extremist position within the Republican Party is the perennial canard about abortion. It is ethically untenable for anyone to conclude that abortion is without question an ethical good. It is not. At best it is the lesser of two bad choices, those choices being to abort a fetus or for the mother to go full-term with a baby she does not want. Neither choice is a good one. But which is the “less bad”? That is the real question, and the baleful reality is that the answer can be arrived at only individually and not by carefully-worded politically prohibitive legislation.
Conservative extremists would take the choice of the woman from her by forcing her to deliver an unwanted child. In essence those who oppose abortion under all circumstances are saying that their moral position is superior to that of those who have a different position. If that is not moral extremism, what is? Even to talk of disallowing all abortions except in cases of rape or incest is extremist, because the vast majority of pregnancies do not occur under those conditions. Should abortions be allowed, or not? Extremists say no, but many Americans, as most citizens of most other advanced nations, ruefully agree that women should be permitted to decide for themselves what they choose to do in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. Abortions are legal in almost every modern democracy in the world. To suppose that abortions shall be outlawed or severely curtailed in the various states of the USA is to ignore the freedom of choice which all advanced nations have granted to their female citizens.
But who in the national GOP leadership is loudly declaring that anti-abortion extremists should cease and desist from their protests, because they inevitably damage the reputation of a serious political party? When the totally anti-abortion battle has been lost in the US Supreme Court, at least up to the present time, does it not behoove the leaders of the opposition to admit defeat, and move on? However, by not trying to silence the moral extremists within their midst, the GOP unintentionally encourages thinking voters reluctantly to abandon the Grand Old Party. If that becomes a widespread result, it will be anything but grand. A party without a large percentage of thoughtful adherents is doomed to extinction. The nation needs a reasonable, conservative political party. Currently it does not have one. Instead the Republican Party is controlled by a minority of very loud, very ideological, very committed fanatics. The politically insane have taken over the political asylum.
Anti-tax sentiment has long been the only orthodox position for far too long and for far too many Republicans. Grover Norquist is the great high priest of this sentiment. It is he who always tries to convince every Member of Congress, especially Republicans, to take his pledge always to resist raising taxes in any form. Without question government makes mistakes in what it undertakes, and government funds, like most other institutional funds, may regularly be wasted. Nevertheless, sometimes for the good of American society taxes need to be increased. Perpetually cutting taxes is a guaranteed formula for national dissolution.
In accepting the nomination for the Presidency in 1988, George H.W. Bush famously (or was it infamously?) declared, “Read my lips: No New Taxes!” But as President he realized that for the good of the country he had to eat those words. And having munched on his morsel of crow, he lost the next election. Was his mistaken proclamation the primary reason he lost? Too many Republicans truly believe their constant rhetoric of “No new taxes!” It is utter nonsense ever to make such preposterous declarations, but the nonsense continues, still largely unchallenged.
Furthermore, the GOP is ignorantly promoting class animosity, if not outright class warfare, by realistically refusing to address income inequality. Under no economic or political system would everyone ever have the same income or assets. But to ignore the growing gap between the so-called 1% and the rest of the population is to add fuel to the growing resentment of the 99%. It may even be an unwitting guarantee for another 1929 Crash. This widespread resentment has been a major factor in the popularity of two presidential primary candidates, one not surprisingly, a very liberal Democrat, but one, very surprisingly, an impossible-adequately-to-define sort-of Republican.
Traditional Republicans also seem intent on overlooking the pleas of Latino and black voters. Too many in the GOP choose to ignore the demographics which portend grave danger for their party. And the working-class whites who have supported the GOP since Ronald Reagan have been in declining numbers until Donald Trump came along, while Latino and black populations continue to grow.
Some of the positions of some of the Republican presidential candidates have been plainly perverse. Nevertheless, almost no one in the GOP leadership at any level has internally summoned up the gumption to declare these ideas to be irrational. They fear the “baseless base,” those hardliners within the GOP who refuse to relent from spouting the same old nostrums year after year and election after election. The primary terror of meekly moderate Republicans is the primaries, those pre-election elections in which the party selects which Republicans shall run against which Democrats in November. “The base” seems far more motivated to elect extremists because they themselves are extremists, and thus the far right in the GOP appears to go unchallenged year after year. But if Republican timidity allows this situation to go on indefinitely, the party shall shrivel into a group of elderly zealous fanatics with far too few moderates left to maintain any political persuasion.
There are other extremist positions which could be addressed, but time and space prevent it. However, one final issue must be highlighted, and that is climate change. If the central idea put forth by the term “climate change” is accurate, there is no matter nearly as mammoth or momentous facing our planet; none. Our current President, the one whom legions of Republicans believe is a foreign-born Muslim socialist, has declared that climate change is our Number One national security threat.
There are essentially only two positions worth considering with respect to the claims regarding climate change. One position is to deny that it is occurring, and the other is to affirm that it is occurring. By this point, agnosticism, not knowing one way or the other, is moral and political cowardice. Both sides can come up with statistics and numbers to support their position. Nevertheless, nearly all qualified experts in the field of climatology agree that climate change is happening, that human beings are its cause, and that unless major measures are taken to reverse it, our changing terrestrial climate might destroy the possibility of continued human life on earth.
Why would any Republicans insist that the world climate is not changing? Partly it is because there has long been an anti-intellectual element among Republican voters. They tend to belittle expert opinions in general, but especially when the experts oppose what they so viscerally espouse.
There may be Democratic politicians who deny climate change, but if so, they are few and far between. Yet there are countless Republican politicians who continue to deny climate change and millions of Republican voters who deny it. In the opinion of most people concerned about this issue, they are all extremists. Climate change deniers are not only engaged in mass folly, but in dangerous folly.
Many Republicans recognize the danger of this delusion. But they do not join together to describe it for what it is: a potentially lethal extremism which shall render the GOP a totally ineffective political party of ignorant grousers.
One of my favorite newspaper cartoons is Non Sequitur. A while back there was a cartoon entitled “Science Vs. Everything Else.” It showed a large group of people walking toward a “T” at the end of on their footpath. A sign above the divide said, “Answers.” Two signs below that with arrows pointing one direction or the other said “Simple But Wrong” and “Complex But Right.” A few people were walking up the pathway to the right answers, but almost everyone was following the arrow toward “Simple But Wrong,” beyond which they all plunged off a cliff. Too many Republican candidates and voters are opting for simple but wrong solutions to complex scientific issues which must be properly addressed if we are to thrive.
Many Republicans oppose the affirmation of climate change because they believe it is bad for business enterprises. They fear that businesses will have to pay for very expensive changes which will cut into profits. Further, they know that to redress the effects of climate change, new government regulations must be instituted, and libertarian Republicans are constitutionally opposed to almost all kinds of government regulations. But of course if the claims of climatologists are correct, regulations must be adopted, or life on our planet may become extinct. And still the deniers deny.
Why? And why the timidity among reasonable Republican leaders to recognize the folly of climate change denial? Some fear losing their own positions of leadership in Congress or state or local governments if they speak out. They might lose the next election, or, more likely, the next primary. Some naively hope that the fanatics will soon burn themselves out. After all, isn’t that what the Latin word fanum means, “firebrand, burning stick”? And don’t all firebrands eventually burn themselves out? They do, especially if there is no more fuel next to the fire. But the Republican Party is allowing more fuel constantly to be added to the fire, because there are always more extremists to be recruited, unless extremism is broadly recognized to be a socially and politically destructive force, which certainly has not yet happened in the Republican Party.
In some respects, the 1964 GOP Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, is thought to be the founder of the modern conservative Republican movement. Perhaps the most famous statement he ever made is what he said in accepting the nomination: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That is a profound, pithy, thought-provoking proclamation, one which both deserves and requires lengthy discussion and debate.
However, as Barry Goldwater himself later declared in the years leading up to his death, some Republican politicians, but especially voters, had become far too extremist to suit his understanding of conservatism. On abortion, gun control, and other matters, he felt too many Republicans had become much too radical for the good of the party.
Sadly, many contemporary Republicans remember only one thing about Barry Goldwater, and it is the one word “extremism.” Little attention is given to the level of relative moderation he represented in many other factors of American political life. To many contemporary Republicans, extremism, of any sort, has sadly become a virtue, and moderation, of any sort, has sadly become a vice.
If the Republican Party allows those ideas on extremism to receive tacit approval within their ranks for many more years, the GOP will doom itself. America does not have a radical history, and for the most part, most Americans are not and have not been radicals. But the Radical Right, especially via Evangelical Christianity, has taken control of the Republican Party, and far too few Republicans have recognized the danger that represents or have taken the measures necessary to counteract the takeover.
Nowhere is extremism more evident than among a small group of Republicans in the House of Representatives. They drove John Boehner to resign from being the Speaker of the House, and they constantly rail at the Republican “establishment” (whatever that term might connote) at every opportunity.
Once again, conservative Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks has castigated them in a blistering editorial. Mr. Brooks is one of the most wise and thoughtful conservatives in the nation. He believes that increasingly the Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. He wrote, “The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.”
Speaking of radical Republicans in Congress, David Brooks wrote, “These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.” This insider condemnation is even more cogent because David Brooks has been such a widely respected philosopher-king for decades.
No one would ever accuse Frank Bruni of The New York Times of being a lifelong conservative. But Mr. Bruni pointed out how the radicalization of the Republican Party undermined the campaign of its heir-presumptive at the earliest stages of the Republican primary race. By all accounts when the campaign of seventeen candidates first began, almost every prognosticator was predicting that Jeb Bush would be the shoo-in nominee. However, wrote Bruni several months ago, “Bush finds himself in an almost impossible bind. In order to distance himself from Washington, to dispel any notion that he’s not conservative enough and to make the ease that he’s earned rather than inherited the Republican presidential nomination, he has understandably begun to emphasize the past and Florida – he governed that state from January 1999 through January 2007 – at the expense of tomorrow and America.” And we all know what ultimately happened to Jeb Bush in the presidential primaries of 2015-16.
What an irony! Jeb Bush could not say what needs to be said! Instead he was forced to tout his record as governor of Florida. But who wanted to hear about Florida, especially Florida from eight-plus years ago? Nevertheless, this is the corner into which radical Republicans forced the Republican candidate with the greatest name-recognition when the primary campaigns began! Is this not a prescription for how to lose a presidential election?
However, in 2015 and2016 an entirely new and utterly unanticipated threat has enveloped the Republican Party. It is encapsulated in two words: Donald Trump. In truth, though, this man has long had name-recognition of a far, far different variety.
In some respects, Donald Trump represents the most extreme extremism the GOP could ever imagine manufacturing for itself. Does that mean his positions or policies would be extreme? Up to the present we do not really know. In fact, numerous Republicans are accusing Trump of not being sufficiently conservative. In truth, he seems more moderate on several issues than those he has trounced in the primaries. He has shrewdly not clarified his level of political extremism. Is Trump himself extreme? In the past few months we have observed him to be extremely narcissistic. Anyone who does not recognize that is foolish (you should pardon the expression) in the extreme.
Unfortunately, many of the people who are wildly supporting Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment views seem to be unaware of what the word “narcissism” means, or how truly unbalanced this personality-defect is. But “The Donald,” as he used to prefer being called, or “Trump” as he almost always now refers to himself (in the monarchical third-person, mind you), has a super-sized ego which is unmatched in recent history since the time of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, of Mao Zedong. This is definitely not to suggest that necessarily he would behave like any of them were he elected President, but that his ego is as unbridled and undisciplined as theirs. And his bid for the Republican nomination for President is the ultimate ego trip of the ultimate egotist.
Mr. Trump seems to have no sense of shame when he berates the press, which he does incessantly. After the Paris terrorist attacks, he tried to win points with Republican presidential primary voters. He had the appalling gall to state that the attacks in the French capital took place in a country which has much stricter gun laws than the US. What a time for anyone like Donald Trump to say anything about a terrorist disaster!
In one sense, Trump illustrates that the GOP shall receive what it deserves if it allows him to continue to campaign under its recently touted big-tent banner. Whether or not Mr. Trump is a political extremist, he is certainly a very frequently self-professed personality extremist. If the Republican Party does not openly and loudly declare that truth in unmistakable terms, and then vehemently disavow him, it shall rue the day it did not. Donald Trump either has a certifiable personality-disorder or a non-certifiable personality-disorder. But it is truly astonishing and frightening that far too few elected leaders of his relatively-recently-adopted party have forthrightly warned the Republican Party and the American electorate that Mr. Trump has an unstable personality. Some people think Trump is fiendishly clever in the manner in which he is campaigning. No, he is simply fiendishly unstable in his widespread appeal to certain kinds of voters. His campaign “strategy,” if such it be, is an abomination. Breaking social norms left and right does not qualify anyone to be the President of the most powerful nation on earth. Obviously it should disqualify him. But with Donald Trump, nothing seems to be obvious.
Most polls and pundits indicate that the most enthusiastic followers of Donald Trump are older blue collar white males, high school graduates, and young unemployed white males. Apparently they are not deep political thinkers, as may be illustrated by their support of Mr. Trump. Nevertheless, they are strong political reactors. They, like many of the people who have supported other anti-establishment Republican candidates and the anti-establishment Bernie Sanders, have a visceral realization that Congressional politicians in Washington are doing little if anything to help improve the lives of people like them, and that they are falling farther behind everyone else.
In that they are certainly correct. Congress is doing very little for anyone. Anyone not disgusted with Congress knows very little about Congress. The Congressional political impasse is as alarming as it is easily evident.
Donald Trump, and other candidates such as he who are appealing to the large number of disaffected Americans, have struck a responsive chord in a sizeable segment of the American electorate. But it is one thing to appeal to disgruntled voters, and quite another to be able to promote legislation in a very partisan Congress to alleviate the problems viscerally identified by disgruntled voters. Despite his many declarations that he is excellent at everything, Mr. Trump has done nothing to assure anyone that he would know how to schmooze a recalcitrant Congress into taking significant actions he has yet clearly to elucidate.
Prior to 2016, Ronald Reagan was the only Republican presidential candidate who had good success in attracting blue collar votes. With the astonishing emergence of Donald Trump on the scene, another purported Republican is making another apparently successful attempt to attract other such voters to his cause. However, the base of the Republican Party has never largely included lower income workers who are struggling financially and economically. It is has been upper- and middle-income people and the very wealthy who have been the GOP base for many decades. Should Trump win the nomination, he will be forcing himself and his ill-formed ideas onto a political party whose philosophy has consistently rejected an appeal to the kind of voters who are flocking to The Donald.
It is possible, of course, that someone else might win sufficient primaries to have a majority of the delegates at the Republican National Convention this summer. Ted Cruz seems to be the more likely spoiler. But he is almost unanimously so disliked by everyone in Congress and in the Republican Party that his nomination would prove as problematic to the GOP as Trump’s nomination, although from quite another direction. At times Ben Carson, Marco Rubio or possibly John Kasich seemed to have been the only other possibilities. But Carson is gone, Rubio is gone, and Kasich could be the only viable candidate left in the event of a brokered GOP national convention, besides Donald Trump. John Kasich is probably the only moderate and traditional Republican who can reasonably derail The Donald. And Ted Cruz makes the late Antonin Scalia look like a wishy-washy moderate by comparison.
There have always been two equally devastating possibilities for the Republicans by the presence of Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nominee as President. The first is that Trump shall win the nomination. The second is that he shall lose the nomination. (If that sounds like the Republicans have already backed themselves into a corner from which they shall not likely escape, you have deduced what almost certainly is the correct scenario.) If Trump wins the nomination, the GOP will pay an insurmountable price, because he will undoubtedly lose the election. George Will has declared that if it turns out to be Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, “this will be the first election since God knows when” in which “there is no real conservative candidate.” Trump seems to long-time conservatives to be drawing people to himself who are not really conservatives, and for Republicans that is anathema. It would appear that the fear Trump is not a true conservative is a growing sentiment felt throughout the ranks of long-time active Republican operatives.
If, on the other hand, Trump loses the nomination because of his unbounded narcissistic ego and his draconian campaign tactics, he might still run as an independent, despite having resoundingly declared that he would support whoever might be the Republican presidential nominee. Predicting what Mr. Trump shall do with respect to anything is a very dicey enterprise. Were Trump to run as an independent, he would thereby guarantee whoever is the Democratic candidate the victory, even if it were the clearly very-left-leaning Bernie Sanders. Who knows when next the GOP might find a sufficiently moderate candidate to win another presidential election?
But what if Mr. Trump should both win the Republication nomination as President, and also the presidential election? That, as Hamlet might have said but didn’t, is a consummation devoutly not to be wished. However, were it to happen (and it definitely could happen), the GOP will pay a terrible price, but America and the world will pay an infinitely larger price. There is no way Donald Trump could effectively govern. The legislative branch of the federal government, most of whom he has intentionally called either “stupid” or “very stupid,” will not allow him to accomplish anything, and his wonderfully winsome personality shall not woo the electorate either. After four years of Donald Trump, the GOP might never recover. Far worse, the nation might not either. As for the world, it presumably would fare better, though potentially not much better.
Political parties which try to do politics while allowing fanatics in their leadership need to recognize that they are unintentionally playing with fire. Linguistically as well as actually, fanatics have uncontrolled fire raging within them, and they are bound to burn those who allow them to come too close to the center of the party power. It does not matter whether Donald Trump is a political extremist; he is a personality extremist with an undeniable personality disorder, and he ought to be shamed out of the Republican Party for the good of the country as well as the party. The man is a clear and present danger.
Whatever anyone thinks of South Carolina’s senior US Senator, Lindsay Graham strove nobly to win potential voters to his right-of-center but left-of-extremist candidacy. When he decided to pack it in, he made some very cogent observations which all Americans, but especially Republicans, should contemplate. “If Trump or Cruz wins the White House, then my side of the party has to re-evaluate who we are, what we stand for, and I’d be willing to do that,” Senator Graham said. “But if Trump or Cruz loses the presidency, would their supporters re-evaluate their views on immigration and other issues that would grow the party? If they do that, we can come back together. If they don’t, the party probably splits in a permanent way.”
US Senator Tom Cole of Oklahoma is a conservative Republican with excellent party credentials. In addition to being an astute politician, he had a Ph.d. in British history. Senator Cole was referring to the fall of John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Boehner also was a traditional conservative Republican. “The tragedy is, a lot of people wanted and demanded more than he could ever deliver,” Cole said of Boehner. “Fast forward to 2015, you get exactly the same people recommending the same strategy, which would have exactly the same results. I’m not saying John Boehner was a bad teacher. I think he was an excellent teacher. I just don’t think he had the brightest students in the world.” And the “students” of whom he spoke are the same ones in the House who stymied everything anyone tried to do to get any kind of serious legislation passed, and who have fanatically insisted on toeing the extremist party line. They are also the ones supporting the anti-establishmentarian presidential candidates. Do they seriously imagine they can become the New Establishment?
At this point in the 2015-16 presidential primary campaign, a brokered Republican convention in Cleveland is the best hope for the future of the GOP. Derailing Donald Trump is the No. 1 priority for such a convention, and derailing Ted Cruz is No. 2. They must dump Trump and lose Cruz. Both men represent everything that is undermining the Republican Party, though from very diverse perspectives.
After the Ohio and Florida primaries, there has been talk of Cruz becoming “the establishment candidate.” If Ted Cruz is perceived by anyone as an establishment Republican, then the establishment is in rigor mortis. He is by all accounts a very unlikeable man whose excessive conservatism would poison the GOP, as Lindsay Graham so cogently pointed out. Trump, on the other hand, as Senator Graham hinted, would represent mere suicide.
Neither Trump nor Cruz can win the election if either of them is nominated. But if either should win the nomination but not the election, I strongly doubt that their very different factions of the Republican Party will re-evaluate anything. They will become even more determined to espouse almost two opposite streams of extremism, because they are ultra-committed extremists of two widely separated varieties who are unwilling to change their views on anything substantive.
It is imperative to recognize, however, that Donald Trump is no Ted Cruz, nor vice-versa. Trump is a personality fanatic, while Cruz is a political fanatic. But what about John Kasich as a more moderate alternative in the remainder of the Republican presidential primaries? Faced with the choice of an unlikeable and extremist Ted Cruz or an obviously mentally unstable Donald Trump, are there enough voters who still have not voted who shall pull the lever for John Kasich, and save the Republican Party from its own self-determined suicide?
Ted Cruz, relying on his purportedly extensive knowledge of the Bible, has proposed a flat income tax for everyone. He likens it to the biblical tithe. The Israelites levied a tithe of 10% on all the subjects of the kingdoms of Judah or Israel.
However, the biblical tithe was used solely to pay the costs associated with the temple, the priests, and the Hebraic religion, not the kingdom, the government, or “the state,” to use modern terminology. It was never perceived to be a means of funding the Israelite kingdom. But Ted Cruz likes the biblical “flat tax” concept so well he wants to use the income from a flat tax as a substitute for what the IRS collects, via its 2000-page tax code. And he wants to abolish the IRS as well. What a novel idea that is! Get rid of the agency which collects taxes for the federal government in order to save the federal government! Only an anti-establishment politician, apparently ignoring the Byzantine labyrinth of the way Washington does its business, could imagine such an uncomplicated idea would ever pass muster in the hallowed halls of Congress. Highly religiously-motivated candidates probably deserve more scrutiny than other candidates, because their zeal may not be effective in the mundane playing field of politics.
At the end of 2015, a poll indicated that 67% of likely GOP voters supported the three anti-establishment candidates, Trump, Cruz, and Carson, while only 18% would likely vote for any of the remaining GOP establishment candidates. It is extremely foreboding for the Republican Party that any anti-establishmentarian extremist might get the nomination. People are understandably disgusted with the political gridlock in Washington, but it is even more likely to increase the gridlock if an anti-establishment President should try to overthrow the political establishment. The odds of that happening would be 535-to-1. Why waste a vote on such an implausible candidate?
Extremism at both edges of the political spectrum, right and left, inevitably promotes political polarization. The USA is presently so polarized that we are in danger of sinking into a Bunyanesque “slough of despond” from which we might never emerge sufficiently intact. But Republican extremism far exceeds Democratic extremism, if only because Will Rogers’ observation is still regrettably valid; the Democratic Party has never been cohesive enough to represent an extremist threat.
With the debatable exception of the first eight years after the United States Constitution was adopted, we have always had essentially a two-party system of government. The Constitution certainly did not mandate that, but American experience rendered it both desirable and inevitable. To be sure, minor parties have made waves at various times, and at times independent presidential candidates have scuttled certain candidates of the two major political parties. Other parliamentary democracies, especially in Europe but also in Asia, Africa, and South America, have managed to survive with several political parties. But as a people, Americans have perhaps wisely decided that two’s company, but three (or more) is a crowd. For almost two and a half centuries we have managed to maintain a two-party government.
The Republican Party is in danger of burning itself out because of all the fanatics it has allowed into its midst without challenging them or their influence on the party. If the Republicans cease to exist as a serious and responsible political party, by default they will completely turn over the government of the nation to the Democrats. And how would sensible Republicans, or any other sensible people, truly like that?
Can you even conceive of a one-party government operated solely by Democrats? Republicans especially need to think about that. If they don’t, their worst nightmare could come to pass.
The Old Philosopher, John M. Miller, is a still-active clergyman who has regularly been preaching for over fifty years. He lives on Hilton Head Island, SC.
Copyrighted by John M. Miller