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Dedicated
to
The Women’s March
and
The Resistance
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK TELLS AN AMAZING STORY, and if you hadn’t seen what happened to America over the last four years, you wouldn’t believe it. It even has a happy ending, and that’s none too soon for all of us who’ve had enough fighting, enough division, enough politics. This time the end of politics portends a country united and finally liberated from gridlock to address the nation’s most serious problems.
It ends with the death of the Republican Party as we’ve known it, while the survivors work to re-create the party of Lincoln relevant for our times. It ends with a Democratic Party liberated from the nation’s suffocating polarization to use government to advance the public good, as the country used to expect.
You see, our country is hurtling toward a New America that is ever more racially and culturally diverse, younger, millennial, more secular, and unmarried, with fewer traditional families and male breadwinners, more immigrant and foreign born who are more concentrated in the growing metropolitan areas, which are magnets for investment and people. The New America encompasses a vast array of family types and working families in which both the men and women face growing challenges. The New America is ever more racially blended and multinational, more secular and religiously pluralistic. The New America embraces the country’s immigrant and foreign character. It now includes the college-educated and suburban women who want respect and equality in a multicultural America.
America was shaped by major social movements, civic unrest, political battles, and government action at historic junctures, and by the choices the two national political parties took that created a more modern America. Each moved America away from traditional strictures on blacks, women, and immigrants. Each juncture made America freer, more equal, and more democratic. Those choices put the Democratic Party on a trajectory that aligned Democrats with the country’s emerging civic norms and alienated the Republican Party from the country and itself.
America was changed profoundly by the battle to pass the civil rights laws that ended racial segregation and ensured blacks had the right to vote. Bipartisan immigration laws reopened the country to non–Anglo Saxon immigration in 1965 and greatly expanded it in the late 1980s. The Supreme Court put women on a path to greater independence and equality when it declared in 1965 that women have a right to privacy and birth control and in 1973, when it made abortion legal.
And these different choices came to fruition with the election and reelection of Barack Obama, the first African-American president whose activist government produced a Tea Party movement and revolt that accelerated the polarization of the country and made attitudes about race and immigration matter as never before. The Tea Party and Donald Trump battled to stop history and stop government.
At each juncture, the Democrats were deeply divided, sometimes more than the Republicans. That was true on matters of civil rights, immigration, and abortion. Nonetheless, after these defining social issues were settled in law or by the U.S. Supreme Court, national Democratic leaders embraced and defended the social changes and new freedoms that aligned the party with a modernizing America and its values. After more than five decades of such choices, the Democratic Party is associated with equal rights, equality, gender equality, tolerance, openness to diversity, and more.
The Republicans’ electoral base was in the South and later in the Appalachian Valley and rural states across the country, so at each juncture, they escalated their battle against these national changes. The party’s national leaders ignored their own deep divisions and worked inventively to show they were champions of white people during the battle over civil rights and affirmative action. Its leaders scorned the sexual revolution and champion to this day a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal. They were opposed to women breaking free of the patriarchal family and winning equality. They mobilized against illegal immigration in the states and nationally, fueled by Patrick Buchanan’s three campaigns for president.
Newt Gingrich led a revolution in the early 1990s that put the GOP into a total war footing against a Democratic Party determined to expand the “liberal” welfare state and marginalize “conservatism,” but those forces defeated him.
The Tea Party led the GOP’s life-and-death battle against President Obama and his Affordable Care Act, fueled by Tea Party protests that elevated white racial resentment and hostility to immigrants. Defeating and delegitimating President Obama was the last chance to stop the New America from winning.
Obama’s 2008 election, the Wall Street bailout, and the searing battle to pass “Obamacare” produced the Tea Party revolt and the Tea Party wave election of 2010, the most consequential election of our lifetime. It gave the Tea Party–fueled Republican Party effective control of the U.S. House and Senate, two thirds of the governorships, and more than 60 percent of the state legislator chambers, which rushed to radically redraw the legislative and congressional maps to ensure big GOP majorities for a decade.
The Tea Party–led GOP pushed the country into fiscal austerity and to deconstruct government—to stop Democrats from using government for positive ends or “paying off” its growing coalition with new entitlements. Limiting the right to vote and allowing unlimited, secret campaign spending, both sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, hardly needed to be justified.
The Tea Party–wave election put the country into a decade of suffocating polarization and gridlock, led by Donald Trump since 2016.
Trump got vital help from the Russians and the FBI, but he is president because he seized the leadership of the Republican counterrevolution and waged an all-out, take-no-prisoners war against New America and the Democrats, which won him the undying loyalty of his Tea Party and Evangelical base. He sent racist, misogynist, and nationalist signals that branded the GOP an anti-immigrant, white, and patriarchal party.
Donald Trump auditioned for the job as a “birther.” Comfortable with the most off-putting of attacks, he denied the citizenship and legitimacy of the first African-American president. President Obama was everything conservative voters hated. Figuratively and symbolically, he represented America’s multiculturalism and its political triumph.1
Trump got the job of leading the GOP because he hated Obama and Clinton so viscerally, and he promised to repeal Obamacare and build a wall against Mexican immigrants. He was so determined to wipe out Obama’s legacy that maybe conservatives finally had a leader who would push back against the modernizing trends that were making the country more racially diverse, immigrant, millennial, secular, metropolitan, and unmarried, where working women stood over the faltering male breadwinners and their faltering traditional families.
Repealing Obamacare formed the core motivating agenda of the Republican Party in the elections of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. That impassioned call contributed to two off-year wave elections, a diminished Ob
ama reelection, and Trump’s Electoral College victory in the Rust Belt.
Donald Trump based his candidacy from the first moment on winning Tea Party support and then forming a tight alliance with Evangelicals and the most religious conservatives—and together they formed a clear majority of those who identified with the party and voted in GOP primaries.
After his Trump Tower announcement, Trump moved to the top of my polls with Republican primary voters, but that was produced by his insurmountable margin with Tea Party supporters who formed a quarter of the GOP base in my surveys at the time. I conducted surveys and face-to-face focus groups, for Democracy Corps and Citizen Opinion, organizations I founded together with James Carville. We partnered with different progressive groups who charged us with conducting representative surveys with registered voters and self-identified Republicans.2
Trump won Tea Party support because he was the most anti-Obama and anti-Obamacare, most hostile to Islam, and most anti-immigrant.
Trump won Evangelicals because they trusted the Tea Party since its revolt in 2010 to fight with most bravery against President Obama. And with the prospect of a feminist and culturally liberal president in Hillary Clinton, they became Trump’s most loyal supporters. Donald Trump was the only way to defeat Clinton and forestall Armageddon.
Trump won the white working-class base of both because he was angry that the elites didn’t respect working people and those living outside the metropolitan centers.
Steve Bannon became the chief strategist in the campaign and the White House, and he embedded the base’s aversion to social modernity and new freedoms into a bigger call to put America first and promote Christianity over Islam. The president embraced an economic nationalism and scorned the “globalists” who head up the establishment parties everywhere.3
That Tea Party strategy would badly divide the GOP and energize Democrats and the New America to resist, but it worked for Trump.
I had been long critical of center-left parties for not showing that managing immigration was a first principle and not showing they would prioritize citizens over non-citizens. John Judis was right that a failure to adapt to these global pressures would create opportunities for “Brexit” and the election of Donald Trump.
The contrasting choices of the Democratic and Republican parties produced a hugely more polarized and politicized country where partisan identity became everything, yet don’t assume the current madness produces an America that is even more polarized. That history is over. In statistical terms, the line can’t get any steeper.
A shrinking coalition of voters who must do everything to stop a modernizing America identifies with the Republican Party. A growing coalition that values a modernizing America identifies with the Democratic Party. A shrinking coalition of voters that is determined to stop government identifies with the Republican Party. A growing coalition that wants government liberated from the gridlock identifies with the Democratic Party.
That won’t be sustained.
The coming elections may well look like prior periods in our history—the Whigs during the 1850s when it could not resolve its deep divisions over slavery, or the Republican Party during the 1930s and 1940s with its deep divisions over the welfare state. The anti-slavery Whigs broke and formed a new party, today’s Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln. After two decades of electoral defeats, the Republican Party under Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan accepted and expanded the welfare state.
Before Trump’s takeover, the GOP was already becoming the party of the oldest, most married, most religious, whitest, and most rural voters while the country was becoming much younger, immigrant, unmarried, secular, and urban—and it had won the popular vote only once in thirty years. But the Trump-Tea Party-Evangelical–dominated GOP horrified women most of all. It impelled college-educated and affluent women, millennials, and people of color to vote in record numbers against Trump’s GOP.
What so surprised the country since Trump’s election and inauguration as president was his decision to govern nationally as he had before, as a militant Tea Party and Evangelical conservative, like the ones that got elected to the House and Senate in the Tea Party wave of 2010 and have made life miserable for the GOP establishment.
President-elect Trump appointed the former leader of the House Freedom Caucus, Congressman Mick Mulvaney, to acting head of the Office of Management and Budget and, later, as acting chief of staff. The president’s first budget shockingly proposed to cut the State Department by one third, the Environmental Protection Agency by more than a quarter, and the Department of Health and Human Services by nearly a fifth. He proposed abolishing Meals on Wheels for seniors and slashing federal cancer research as not cost-effective enough to justify the tax burden it placed on hardworking Americans. The president’s 2019 budget required food stamp recipients take a job, not caring that two thirds of the beneficiaries are children, disabled, or the elderly. And his radical plan for reorganizing the federal government proposed to pull food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the Education Department and create a new “Department of Welfare.”
In President Trump’s budget for the 2020 election year, he cut the big three—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He targeted $25 billion from Social Security’s disability benefits, $845 billion from Medicare, and $777 billion from Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts were breathtaking. It would abolish the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion and slash subsidies to purchase health insurance, introduce work requirements, and turn the whole program into state block grants that would not rise with rising costs.4
Trump filled his cabinet with secretaries who fought and sued those departments in the past and promised to undermine them at every opportunity. This was a Tea Party administration intent on destroying government, something the country has never seen before. Betsy DeVos quickly became the most hated member of the administration, as she expressed such contempt for public education. The Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt turned to energy and chemical industry to run the EPA and blacklisted climate science and scientists, before the stench of corruption forced him out in favor of a former coal industry lobbyist. Trump’s secretary of state Rex Tillerson froze hiring for a year, and broad swaths of the earth were left without anyone there representing the United States of America.
Adam Schiff tweeted on April 9, 2019, his “update on our national security leadership”:
Defense Secretary: Vacant.
DHS Secretary: Vacant.
UN Ambassador: Vacant.
FEMA Director: Vacant.
Secret Service Director: Vacant.
ICE Director: Vacant.
The Trump administration had confirmed and filled just 54 percent of its civilian executive branch positions at the beginning, far below the 77 percent for President Obama and below that for all prior presidents. That is not a pretty picture, but what the hell is happening at the Department of Labor, Department of Justice, and Department of Interior where barely 40 percent of the positions are filled?5
Trump repaid Evangelicals for their loyalty by choosing Neil Gorsuch to take the U.S. Supreme Court seat denied President Obama’s selection, Merrick Garland, and by replacing swing justice Anthony Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh, thereby giving conservatives control of the highest court for generations.
It was a bargain with the devil that paid off. The president announced a return to Reagan Era policies on contraception and abortion. And the Trump administration every year has found new ways to defund Planned Parenthood, the highest priority of the Trump–Tea Party–Evangelical pact.
If you wonder why the Trump administration has sought to abolish climate science and purge the government of anyone working on the issue, or why the U.S. withdrew from the Paris climate accord, look no further than Trump’s base. Evangelicals and Tea Party supporters are the ones most opposed to recognizing the human role in global warming, the religious conservatives because they oppose anyone who questions God’s role, a
nd the Tea Party because they viewed it all as an elite hoax to expand government.
If you wonder why President Trump will never act to address the epidemic of gun violence, you need look no further than the Tea Party bloc that is so passionate about the NRA and most opposed to regulating guns in any way.
If you wonder why President Trump closed down the federal government and declared a national emergency to build his wall, remember again the Tea Party base. They were the voters most angry about immigration. If you want to scare mothers in Central America into contemplating the hard trip north, with the prospects of long jail time and long separation from their children, then look no further than the Evangelicals who believed it was the right thing to do.
President Trump and the congressional Republicans viewed repealing Obamacare as priority number one of the Trump–Tea Party–Evangelical GOP. With the Tea Party’s instinctive demand to slash government and Paul Ryan’s unfulfilled plans to reform “entitlement programs,” Trump’s GOP embarked on the most radical curtailment of federal health care spending for the vulnerable, the low-income, and retirees. That was precisely the kind of conservative agenda Trump promised voters he would never support.
President Trump, visibly frustrated by his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, did everything possible in the next three years to destroy it, with immense cost to ordinary people struggling to afford health insurance. Each day, life became more uncertain.
Donald Trump’s election moved the New America to defend itself and become conscious of what it really believed, including a bigger role for government to reform the country. It struck back and badly bloodied the GOP in 2018 and will finally crash it in 2020.
And the members of the New America asked one another, am I alone? Do I know my own country? Is this what Americans really believe? Will President Trump be reelected?
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