58 The Party of Lincoln Becomes the Party of Treason: a Post New Deal History of the GOP 2.0
UPDATE: Maybe go with a MUCH shorter UPDATE
FN: Find info on Nixon’s Jewish campaign advisor who taught him much of his dark arts-was it Garry Wills? Or actually was it Roger Stone?
The thesis of this book is that the real lesson of 2016 is less about the Russians or even Trump but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Republican party as Ryan Cooper describes it:
“Even now the GOP is swatting down attempts from congressional Democrats to secure American electoral machinery from outside interference. In a domestic American context, the main story of Russiagate is that the Republican Party is so corrupt that they will sacrifice democracy to get tax cuts for the rich and reactionary union-busting judges.”
I define the ‘modern Republican party’ as the post New Deal GOP.
Trump is not the cause of the GOP’s bankruptcy he’s just its logical conclusion. Nor is the big story of 2016 the Russians. Indeed as the recent Kavanaugh hearings demonstrate the GOP most certainly did not need Russia-or Trump-to know how to hack and weaponize Democratic emails.
Putin’s Russia for its part comes into the picture because of it’s shared contempt for democracy, liberalism, and its racism against Muslims. After 2001, Putin realized that the conservative parties of the West were his natural allies, his spiritual bedfellows. But neither Putin or Trump taught the GOP how to oppose and defeat democracy and public opinion, how to enshrine minority rule.
Find Nance quotes…
As I argued in (Chapter A) one pretty useful way to view American political history is as a morality tale:
1. In 1800 the Federalists disintegrated as one of the two major political parties because they were on ‘the wrong side of history’-their tendencies towards monarchy and the the ancient aristocratic regime.
2. After that the Democrats dominated the country for the next 60 years, winning the White House 56 of 60 years, then came the Civil War. At that point the Democrats were on the wrong side of history due to their sympathies for the slaveholding, seceding South. For many years the Northern Democrats, while not necessarily liking slavery, had looked the other way, as they needed the South to win all those elections. In 1860, their bill came due as beginning with Lincoln’s win in 1860-without a single Southern state- they would hold the WH only 16 of the next 72 years. Indeed, the GOP would hold not just the WH but both Houses of Congress 42 of those 72 years.
So the Dems were effectively in the penalty box for close to three quarters of a century thanks to its being on the wrong side of history regarding to the slaveholding, seceding South, and considering its moral sins, that doesn’t seem like such an unfair judgment by American voters.
3. But then came the Great Depression and it was the GOP’s turn to be on the wrong side of history. The GOP”s laissez-faire, ‘supply side’ economic policies-to be sure they weren’t called supply side then-were blamed for the Depression. Then came FDR’s New Deal. For the Grand Ole Party, the New Deal was a ‘bridge too far.’ They opposed it vehemently.
The trouble was: most Americans supported it as the GOP itself acknowledged.
But that put them at an impasse: as they didn’t support the New Deal and the American people did, how could they hold onto power as this is a democracy? Well just so. and this remains a problem for them they can’t really answer to this day. Indeed, one answer would for them to have adjusted-in other countries-mostly in Europe, the conservative parties have accepted the modern welfare state and yet held onto power but for whatever reason, American conservatives found this unacceptable. Clearly laissez-faire for historical reasons has a deeper resonance in America than in the Western European liberal democracies.
By the time that Dewey beats Truman-oops!-the GOP must have been pretty worried. This was now 5 straight elections they were out in the cold. What could they do? Well one thing they could have done was adjust and accept the New Deal, but they refused to consider that-respecting the will of voters. Instead they:
A. First of all passed the no more FDRs Amendment that limited Presidents to two terms-something some of them regretted in the time of Reagan-though by then he had some real problems on Iran-Contra as we see in (Chapter B).
B. Then they nominated a WWII war hero with very wide trans-partisan appeal; indeed, the Democrats had reached out to Ike-I like Ike-about running. They didn’t realize that he was a confirmed conservative Republican with little love lost for the New Deal-he had smartly kept his cards do close to his breast all those years.
The GOP was very lucky Ike was a Republican as Eisenhower won a resounding landslide over Adlai Stevenson in 1952-and an even bigger landslide over poor old Adlai in 1956-Democrats to no avail tried to disprove the adage that it’s a pretty foolish to keep doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. But, in truth Stevenson was a pretty good guy, it’s just that no one could beat Ike-he took one for the team in 1956.
So if in 1950 the GOP was wondering if it’s possible for the party to win a Presidential election in the post FDR New Deal era, the answer was yes. This was great but it didn’t necessarily offer them much going forward in terms of how to proceed as the very popular Ike really wasn’t a repeatable event. There weren’t that many WWII war heroes of transpartian appeal though actually personally were partisan Republicans.
C. Ironically then it was Eisenhower’s Vice President who would provide the GOP blueprint for how to win elections in the post New Deal era: basically lie, cheat, suppress the vote, indeed, use any dirty trick, any means necessary to win elections-right up to, as it turned out colluding with a hostile foreign power. It’s certainly clear that the modern GOP isn’t the party of Ike but the party of his VP, aka Tricky Dick.
Nixon won his first election against California Congressman Jerry Voorhis by the dirty tricks he’d become (in)famous for. He accused Voorhis of being a Communist. This was slander and Nixon knew it.
”Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Mr. Nixon later replied to accusations that he had lied during the campaign. ”But . . . I had to win. . . . The important thing is to win.”
The important thing is to win. This sums up the entire modern Republican attitude-pure, rank Machiavelianism. The important thing is to win BY ANAY MEANS NECESSARY.
That would be their solution to how to win in the post New Deal era. As recovering Republican David Frum puts it: given a choice between conservatism and democracy conservatives will choose conservatism.
(Find tweet Mike).
Nixon’s Senate campaign against Hellen Gahagan Douglas who he slurred as the Pink Lady was even nastier. It had all the elements of GOP dirty tricks over the last 66 years-ad hominem claims of left wing radicalism, paid protesters-who threw fruit at Douglas, an attempt to assassinate their public reputations.
Indeed, it’s rather uncanny that for some reason in 2014 two of Nixon’s best students in Tricky Dick tactics, Roger Stone and Patrick Buchanan wrote books about their beloved corrupt, foreign country colluding boss. It was almost as if they were clairvoyant that soon, someone even more corrupt and illegitimate would be coming. And, of course, Roger Stone did know that as he and Trump had been planning 2016 since Obama’s takedown of Trump at the WH Correspondence’s dinner.
Stone has since updated his 2014 book-linked to in the paragraph above, and Buchanan wrote a followup in 2017 with an arresting title:
“Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Buchanan, of course, knows a lot about these battles as he was there. It’s always quite amazing to hear him rail against affirmative action., when, of course, the Philadelphia Plan was his baby. He construed it as a way to divide ‘the Democrats in labor with their black friends.’
Indeed, both Buchanan and Stone are Watergate Alum-they both worked on CREEP. Buchanan crafted the strategy, while Stone delivered the Canucks letter than knocked Muskie out-who was the one Democratic challenger Nixon feared. What is not appreciated is that, yes, Nixon stole the election of 1968 by colluding with South Vietnam to scuttle LBJ’s peace talks-more on that in the next chapter. This fact has been acknowledged the last few years with the appearance of Halderman’s diary.
UPDATE: Will it take almost 50 years to get to the truth of what Trump did in 2016?
Not if the Dems stand their ground and insist on seeing the full Mueller Report-not just the ‘unembarassing parts’ as Bill Barr and this fake ‘President’ would have it.
But what’s not appreciated sufficiently, is that the 1972 election was also stolen.
But to see this you have to construe ‘Watergate’ as more than merely the actual, physical break in to the Watergate Hotel in June, 1972.
In Buchanan’s very interesting Watergate testimony he declared he didn’t know Segretti, G. Gordon Liddy, etc, but, of course, this proves nothing.
“For the record, Mr. Chair Man, let me state the following: I did not recommend or authorize, nor was I aware of, any on‐going campaign of political sabotage against Senator Muskie, or any other Democratic candidate.
“I did not recommend, either verbally or in memoranda, that the Re‐election Committee infiltrate the campaigns of our opposition, I have never met nor spoken with, nor can I recall ever having heard the names of, Messrs. Hunt. Liddy, Mc Cord, Ulasewicz, Ragan, Barker or Segretti until those names appeared in the public press.”
“Nor have I ever heard, until the terms were made public, the code names of Ruby 1, Ruby 2, Crystal, Sedanchair 1 and Sedan chair 2, or Fat Jack. Even today, I could not testify with certitude to whom these terms refer.”
Of course, he doesn’t have to know them: those who craft military strategy often don’t know the faces and names of the foot soldiers who execute their battle plan. It’s usually preferable that those who plan the attack don’t know anything about the foot soldiers-for plausible deniability first and foremost.
And this has been the GOP’s modus operandi going back to Nixon’s Senate win in 1950, indeed, going back to his House win in 1946. Already in 1946 the basic GOP strategy was set. The GOP had neither the facts, nor the law on its side-even less public opinion on policy-so it would have to pound the table-and much more besides.
But what about the idea that American politics is a morality tale? There’s no question that this view has taken something of a beating. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, the Democrats won the next 5 Presidential elections-FDR won it 4 times, of course, To be sure, there were eventuating circumstances-first with the Great Depression and the many years it took to recover and then the worldwide threat of Hitler’s Nazism and fascism and WWII-the Pearl Harbor attack, etc.
It’s not shocking that Americans weren’t eager to change horses in the middle of all that. But in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, the Democrats held the WH for 20 years until 1952, and, indeed, the GOP hadn’t even held Congress again until 1946. Indeed, beginning with the 1932 elections, the Democrats would hold onto Congress for the next 60 of 64 years-until the rise of Newt in 1994. In a sense you can call the period between 1994 and 2018 the Newt Gingrich era. There is reason to hope that 2018 marked the sharp end of Newt’s era.
There’s no doubt that the more the numbers come in, the breadth and magnitude of the Democrats’ election victories is all the more startling.
There’s simply no longer any doubt that this was a Democratic wave that was in absolute size actually bigger than both Newt’s 1994 House win and the Tea Party wave of 2010. Of course, the Democrats actual gain in seats is less than 1994 and 2010 but this is thanks to GOP gerrymandering and redistricting-something the Dems smartly now have in their sights.
So it was the #BlueWave we all hoped for-what remains to be seen, but there’s reason for optimism, is that it was also a major realignment, the end of the Newt era. Time will tell,
Maybe the GOP will now finally get its comeuppance. But it must be admitted that at least prior to November, 6, 2018, they clearly had escaped it. Yes, the Democrats held onto Congress 58 of 62 years, and the Senate 52 of 62 years. And the Democrats also dominated the Presidency between 1932 and 1968 holding the WH 28 of 36 years-with Ike being the exception. And let’s fact it, that wasn’t a mandate for GOP ideology but simply that he was one of the rarest things in American politics-a genuinely transpartisan phenomenon. Obama wanted to be transpartisan but only Ike succeeded.
However, Nixon’s win inaugurated a period where the GOP won 5 of 6 Presidential elections-or should I say ‘won’ them as Nixon cheated in both 1968 and 1972, and as we will see in (Chapter C) Reagan and friends may well have cheated in 1980. More than merely cheat but commited treason. But more on that in the next few chapters.
Speaking of Nixon, Ellsberg documented what he said about ‘free and fair elections’ while in Vietnam:
Getting right to business, Lansdale said, “Mr. Vice President, we want to help General Thang make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right”—Nixon was seating himself in an armchair next to Lansdale—“so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and, in a return motion, slapped his own knee. My colleagues turned to stone.”
But the GOP would hold the WH 20 of the next 24 years. Then Newt and friends would come in 1994 and hold the House 20 of the next 24 years, while holding the Senate 16 of 24. All told, then, since Ike’s win in 1952, the GOP has held the Presidency 38 of 66 years, Congress 20 of the last 24 years and in some ways most importantly: the Supreme Court the last 50 years and counting-since Nixon bullied Abe Fortas into retiring.
So it’d be nice to say that the GOP has learned that crime doesn’t pay but the truth is quite different. Until now at least crime has paid pretty handsomely. Is the GOP’s luck now going to run out-have they finally gone too far?
Stay tuned…