Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  The Trump context changed the formula for political engagement in this so-called off-year election when a lot of presidential-year voters go to the sidelines. The anti-Trump, women college graduates were consolidated and motivated to resist the Trump presidency. They turned a simple “fact sheet” passed around a focus group into an organizing weapon. They were seeking out tools and information to win arguments and maximize their engagement and were increasingly intent to vote. The college-educated women seemed as much an anti-Trump base as African Americans who were discovering they too must be involved.

  The Trump presidency so invaded the public’s consciousness that it was hard to talk to previously disengaged and unregistered unmarried women, people of color, and millennials without them going right to Trump. How is it going with your family and community? No, they wanted to talk about what was going wrong with the country. When asked how often they think about national issues, they said, “every day.” “Donald Trump’s everywhere … all over the news” and the big conflicts he stirs up were inescapable (African-American man, Detroit). Even the white unmarried women who were most likely to “try not to watch the news” said they “don’t have a choice,” including one bartender who said she hears “Trump all day long” at work (white unmarried woman, Cleveland).

  They were being pulled into the political debate by members of their families who wanted them to pick a side. These were people who said they “are not interested in politics” and in the past, some avoided political decisions they didn’t feel informed enough to defend before their more passionate family members. Others, particularly the African-American men and women were “more likely to vote, now, because I hear my mom on my head about voting” (African-American woman, Detroit). The Hispanic women were most likely to say they were sharing information with their families and friends because “we don’t want to make the same mistake twice” (Hispanic millennial woman, Orlando).

  These groups were very conscious that their parents’ generation and the country had sacrificed for their rights and lives. And here we have a president of the United States who was “dividing our country.” He was forcing us to fight again for the gains our parents won for us:

  Just the way he talks it allows you to—it incites something. He incites some type of crazy feeling, like, oh no, all these criminal aliens are coming. It just sounds like something you hear a crazy dude on the side of the street saying.

  —AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN, DETROIT

  I don’t want him to be the example for my daughter, like the president of our country being accused of sexual harassment.

  —WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, CLEVELAND

  I remember a line in the movie Remember the Titans, where the guy told his teammate that attitude reflects leadership, and I just think right now America’s attitude is not good because of our leadership.

  —AFRICAN-AMERICAN MAN, DETROIT

  Trump produced a similar transformative shift in the consciousness of unregistered voters. They saw people who suffer from Trump’s new policies and saw “protections” that “were written in place,” and suddenly “they go.” You can’t change that “if we did not vote.” That double negative was now part of the new formula to get people mobilized:

  We all have to do something. Can’t just sit and watch.

  —HISPANIC MILLENNIAL WOMAN, ORLANDO

  We already lost our health care, a bunch of rights and laws, it’s been racist, all in the white Congress, if you don’t vote, your just handing over America to the KKK.

  —AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN, DETROIT

  A white unmarried woman from Cleveland wondered, “Where are we going to be in the next 4 years if we are so miserable right now?”

  Nobody struggled anymore to explain the risks of the wrong person winning an election. Donald Trump transformed our politics by showing people they must resist this horror-show representation of America.

  AND WITH NEW CLARITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  This new engagement made itself felt first on immigration, where every Trump outrage increased the proportion of Americans who said, We are an immigrant country.

  America was created by more than a century of virtually unregulated, open immigration from Europe until after World War I, after which America closed its doors. The Chinese were barred after 1882. But the civil rights period in the 1950s and 1960s saw major immigration reforms that reopened the doors and got rid of national quotas. Legal immigrants were mostly Hispanic and Asian, the numbers accelerated by Republican presidents who granted asylum to undocumented immigrants and expanded legal immigration. The most recent decade saw a surge in foreign-born people living in the United States, and Trump was able to exploit it to get the election to break for him.

  Voters do want the country to better manage immigration, but this stoking the anti-immigrant fires will end badly for Trump’s GOP. The proportion believing immigrants “strengthen the country with their hard work and talents” surged to 65 percent. Just as Trump was charging that immigrants fueled gangs and included murderers and rapists, the proportion who said immigrants “burden the country by taking jobs, housing, and health care” plummeted to just 26 percent in mid-2017. Three quarters in mid-2018 favored granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.21 The country settled these issues. They are not contested.

  America believes it is an immigrant country, but Trump’s election as an anti-immigrant candidate and his daily anti-immigrant provocations, unchallenged by his own party, made us all uncertain what Americans really believe. Well, individually, Americans recognize in larger numbers the benefits of immigration and, collectively, they have rushed to airports to protest the Muslim travel ban, to welcome refugees, and to protest babies being separated from their mothers at the Mexican border.

  For most of the past decade, the public was evenly split on whether the country “needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites” or whether it has made the changes that were needed. But by being blind to discrimination and by disinviting black athletes to the White House, Trump changed all that. Suddenly, over 60 percent of Americans believe the battle for equal rights is unfinished.22 In 2014, 63 percent supported affirmative action programs to help blacks and minorities get to a university, but that grew to 71 percent in 2017.23 Trump’s counterrevolution is producing a counter-clarity for the changed America.

  Acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage has reached the level of a norm, surging to 70 percent for homosexuality and 62 percent for gay marriage.24 Just a quarter of the country believes homosexuality should be “discouraged”—the core conviction of Evangelical Republicans.25

  Three in five Americans consistently believe that stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost, and four in five believe there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has gotten warmer.”26 Since the issue of climate change was broached at the beginning of the 2016 presidential election, that belief has jumped 13 points to 92 percent.27 A majority of 53 percent said that there is solid evidence that climate change is caused by human activity.28 Only a quarter of Republicans believe that, which is why they will be sidelined.

  President Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accord and joined a battle royal with the G-7, while 60 percent of Americans believed the “U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them”—the opposite of the posture President Trump offered to the world.29

  President Trump’s one great legislative accomplishment before he lost control of the Congress was his $2.2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the richest 1 percent. It was supported by huge majorities of House Republicans and every Republican senator. His tax cut plans always favored the rich and big business, despite his promise to the working-class voter, but this corrupt tax scam was breathtaking in its benefits for Wall Street and billionaire donors. That massive tax cut was right out of the Tea Party playbook in the states where huge tax cuts for corpo
rations, the oil companies, and the millionaires were followed by huge cuts in education spending.

  Republicans didn’t notice or care that two thirds of Americans believed “the economic system in this country unfairly favors powerful interests” and “economic inequality in the U.S.” is a very big or moderately big problem.30 Nearly 60 percent thought “business corporations make too much profit.”31 The tax cut was the opposite of what most Americans wanted to see happen, which is part of why President Trump’s election and Tea Party–Evangelical agenda has produced such rage and determination to reverse it.

  So, just as the Republicans and President Trump dramatically freed up business from regulation, they lost the favor of the voting public on government and markets, nearly 60 percent of whom said the government “should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of the people,” rather than leave more things to business and individuals.32 That is hardly a country hospitable to a businessman president doing his radical work.

  Most telling was that at the beginning of 2018, as the Tea Party–dominated GOP made stopping government in its tracks its first mission, the proportion of people who wanted more government surged to its highest point in the twenty years of polling on this question by The Wall Street Journal/NBC.

  The GOP campaign against government has met its match in the New America.

  2   THE GOP COUNTERREVOLUTION AGAINST THE NEW AMERICA

  THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS TRAPPED in an ever more desperate counterrevolution against the cumulative and accelerating trends that are producing a New America. It is a party defined and divided by its leaders’ unrepentant struggle against an America that is more and more racially diverse. It is also a battle to slow the growing secularism, the decline of the traditional family, and the growing independence of women and their sexual freedom. It is a fight against the rising immigration and foreign presence. And in its Tea Party and Donald Trump stage, it is a party pitted against the growing millennial generation, the young, and against the growing metropolitan centers where very different values are taken for granted and now defended.

  THE GOP BATTLE AGAINST CIVIL RIGHTS AND SHADES OF BLACK AND WHITE

  America passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 after a huge upheaval in the country, and both political parties and their leaders faced a historic choice on whether to accept the end of legal segregation and civic inequality. The GOP’s national leaders not only opposed the laws at the time, they visibly resisted the government playing any role in protecting black Americans in the face of enduring discrimination.

  Since the passage of the civil rights laws, every Republican presidential nominee has made clear that they would resist these changes and that white voters could trust them to look out for their interests. Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act and Ronald Reagan strongly opposed it, saying it was “humiliating to the South.”1 Pointedly, Reagan gave his first post-convention speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK, and he called out the “welfare queens” who lived lavishly off the public dole.2 Richard Nixon promised to restore “law and order” and called on the “silent majority” to make itself heard.3 Nixon also railed against affirmative action. And George H. W. Bush put Lee Atwater at the head of his 1988 campaign and ran a flood of “Willie Horton” ads that depicted a convicted black murderer on weekend parole killing people again.4 John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee, the Tea Party favorite who wanted to take down Barack Hussein Obama, the “community organizer” whose pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright said such hateful things about America’s “white government.”5 And President Trump threw off all the subtlety and indirection and declared there were “good people on both sides” after the white nationalists’ violent marches in Charlottesville, Virginia.6

  So, the national GOP presidential campaigns always made clear that white people concerned about their status in America could depend on them.

  Successive GOP national presidential campaigns starting in 2000 did everything legally possible to suppress the black vote. They were unbothered by the dramatic television coverage of black voters forced to wait in long queues to cast their ballots in the critical swing states of Florida and Ohio, where Republican governors and secretaries of state created shortages of voting machines, limited early voting, and challenged ballots at voting locations.7 Republican state leaders were even accused of blocking traffic to make it difficult for blacks to get to their polling stations. With Republican secretaries of state battling with the U.S. Department of Justice and the federal courts to bar early voting and to purge voter rolls close to the election, the GOP sent a defining signal that it wouldn’t be governing for black people.8

  But despite the GOP’s top leaders’ efforts to nationalize and politicize the racial divides and gain from white fear of blacks in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the full racial polarization of the parties would have to wait at least another three decades for the election of an African-American president in 2008 and of Donald Trump in 2016.

  In 1964, both the Democratic and Republican parties considered equal rights part of their legacy and both genuinely competed for the growing black vote. They were able to pass new civil rights laws only after President Lyndon Johnson broke the longest-ever filibuster by the southern Democratic senators and the gridlock created by southern committee chairs in the House. It took both Democratic and Republican votes in Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which deepened the country’s commitment to equality and barred racial discrimination in public accommodations and government facilities and by employers and government agencies.9

  After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, President Johnson told his close adviser and speechwriter, Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”10

  President Johnson did deliver a red-hot racial baton that would have a deep, enduring impact on the Republican Party’s core values and identity. Barry Goldwater carried only his home state of Arizona and the five Deep South states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, where slavery, plantations, tenant farming, racial segregation, and opposition to black equality and the voting franchise ran deep. Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy four years later added the rest of the South to the GOP’s national Electoral College base.

  The GOP won its strongest support in the Black Belt counties with the highest proportion of slaves prior to the Civil War.11 These were the voters with the most attenuated democratic sensibilities who had struggled to preserve white status and were conscious of their region’s history of being willing to do everything to hold on to political power.

  This GOP base of twelve southern states explains why GOP presidential campaigns let white southern voters know they still get it and why the Republican Party has had so much trouble transcending its racially charged history. This was the original sin of the GOP, when it first chose to fight America’s historic steps toward modernity.

  Moreover, the federal system gives states their own elected leaders, and a U.S. Senate and Electoral College where the GOP’s base of southern and more rural states could have disproportionate, prolonged influence on national affairs.

  But President Johnson’s prediction about the shift in voter identification with the parties did not turn out to be true for at least another three decades. For sure, the Democratic vote for president among white southerners collapsed after Johnson signed the civil rights laws, but only to be pushed back up a few percentage points by the next two southern Democratic presidential nominees, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

  Professor Larry Bartels thought identification with the Democratic Party should have crashed, too, if reasonably rational southern white voters had taken out their anger with a Democratic Party that backed civil rights, desegregation, and integration and had begun identifying with the GOP.12 But Bartels gets that wrong, because he assumes that the black-white divide was all
that mattered for those voters and that the black-white divide defined the parties. Many of these white southern voters were New Deal Democrats who continued to identify with the party. Democrats won the support of many white Evangelical voters and elected progressive governors in the South for four decades after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  And critically, prominent Republican leaders outside the South continued to be strong supporters of civil rights, leaving the fuller black-white polarization to wait until the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.13

  THE GOP BATTLE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY

  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that women had a right to privacy and a right to use birth control to plan whether and when to become pregnant.14 In 1973, the high court extended that right to privacy to legalization of abortion and gave women the right to terminate a pregnancy.15 Those decisions would profoundly change the role of women in society and the workplace and threaten the traditional family and male breadwinner role. In time, accepting the autonomy of women in these areas was intimately linked to supporting equality for women.

  In retrospect, the Supreme Court in 1973 threw a hand grenade into a country where half the public attended church every week and families were just coming to terms with the sexual freedom made possible by birth control and mothers bearing fewer children. It landed in a country where socially conservative Evangelicals dominated the political culture in the South and Appalachia, and socially conservative Catholics dominated in the industrial Midwest. It landed in a country where the major political parties and major denominations were divided on the issue.

  While a majority of the public has always believed abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, a significant and intense minority resisted this change. The right of a woman to end a pregnancy and not be forced by government to carry a baby to term came to symbolize the freedom of women from the traditional social strictures.