NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – NOVEMBER 07: Supporters of President Donald Trump protest outside the Clark County Election Department on November 7, 2020 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Around the country, supporters of presidential candidate Joe Biden are taking to the streets to celebrate after news outlets have declared Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden winner over President Donald Trump in the U.S. Presidential race. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Jelani Cobb has a piece in the current New Yorker that neatly encapsulates the magazine’s stock in trade when it comes to political analysis—tightly rendered arguments displaying elements of erudition but ultimately undermined by blinding ideology. In the piece, Cobb poses a question that is distilled in the headline: “How Parties Die: Will the G.O.P. go the way of the Whigs?”
It’s a pertinent question in the wake of the party’s presidential defeat last year and as the nation seeks to sort out the complexities and lingering political realities of the Donald Trump phenomenon. And Cobb provides a worthy sketch of the Whig demise as part of his thumbnail history of political parties in America, from the short-lived Federalists to our own era of partisan wrangling and positioning. But the repugnance he obviously feels toward the Trump rise, and his view that it represents a kind of political depravity, deprives him of any apparent ability to step back and consider in a probing and nuanced way a fundamental question of our time: How do we account for that guy blasting past all the political obstacles of 2016 to become the president of the United States?
To Cobb, a journalism professor at Columbia and New Yorker staff writer, it’s quite simple: The Republican Party has become a party of white, racist radicals.
It all began, in Cobb’s version, with Barry Goldwater in 1964. New York’s Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller warned the party that year that the Arizona conservative represented the politics of “racism and sectionalism,” and others warned that his nomination would lead to a party takeover by “the Ku Kluxers, the John Birchers and other extreme rightwing reactionaries.” Cobb notes that even Richard Nixon attacked John Birch Society zealots as “kooks” (an action that campaign chronicler Theodore White called “courageous”), while Goldwater refused to repudiate the organization.
And when Goldwater captured the nomination anyway, writes Cobb, “shock at his extremism…began to morph into compliance,” as moderate Republicans sought “to protect their own political prospects.” In other words, when the bad guys gained party dominance, erstwhile good guys joined up out of political expediency.
Cobb sees the same thing today in, for example, the political behavior of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell—“despising Donald Trump but knuckling under to the reality of his immense popularity among Republican voters.” And just about everything that happened in America from Goldwater to Trump is viewed through the same prism. It is a story of white Americans flocking to an increasingly extremist Republican Party as a refuge against the forces of history.
“[T]he Party’s predicament,” writes Cobb, “might fairly be called the revenge of ‘the kooks.’” And what drove this rise of a kook-dominated GOP? Not surprisingly, Cobb turns to the hoary notion of “a sensationalist right-wing media” stoking kookish sentiment across the land. But he adds “the emergence of kook-adjacent figures in the so-called Gingrich Revolution, of 1994.” Plus he throws in the “Tea Party” movement, founded in February 2009 as a protest against promiscuous fiscal policies of deficits and debt. All these factors, Cobb tells us, “have redefined the Party’s temper and its ideological boundaries.”
The analytical flaw here stems from the fact that Cobb makes no effort to identify, parse, or understand the complex and dynamic political sensibilities harbored by those Americans he writes about with such carefree censure. The analysis is both binary and static. Binary in that Cobb sees just two fundamental points of view competing in the political marketplace—the commitment to social and racial justice, on the one hand, and rejection of it, on the other. And it is static in that this binary struggle has defined American politics, and the Republican Party’s role in it, from Goldwater to Trump with hardly a zig or zag in the story.
Thus does Cobb conflate Goldwater Republicanism with the John Birch Society, Newt Gingrich with Nixon’s “kooks,” and the great mass of Trump voters with QAnon. That makes for stark polemics (and probably quite effective argumentation with most New Yorker readers). But it’s ultimately superficial political history and transparently tendentious. American politics is far more complex than that: an interaction of competing sentiments, attitudes, interests, hopes, and fears, all swirling through the polity in varying degrees of force and intensity. This wonderful process of democratic politics is never static, always multifarious. Grand victories often contain the seeds of their own reversals; abject defeats sometimes presage party rebounds (as the Goldwater debacle led to the Ronald Reagan presidency just 16 years later).
This swirl of civic energy can be seen in the high-voltage issue of immigration. Cobb doesn’t explore it in detail, but in heralding the Democrats’ emergence as “a multiracial coalition emphasizing civil, women’s, and immigrants’ rights,” he places the issue within the framework of his binary analysis—social justice vs. those who oppose social justice.
But the issue is far more multidimensional than that. Back in 1964, during the Goldwater controversy, the proportion of foreign-born people in America was about 5 percent—a number that generated little popular pushback based on economic or cultural concerns or anxiety about the challenge of assimilation. Today that number is at least three times higher, matching the percentage at the turn of the last century, when immigration stirred the kind of political energy we see today. It isn’t as simple as immigration-good, anti-immigration-bad; fluctuating realities often generate legitimate political concerns that deserve respectful acknowledgement in the messy process of political adjudication.
In an unguarded moment, Cobb quotes historian Ira Katznelson as saying Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, a major black mark against him at the time in the minds of liberals, largely for libertarian reasons. That suggests there were other factors, not involving race, that influenced the debate. And yet Cobb can’t seem to get beyond race to explore such considerations with any seriousness. Similarly, he castigates Republican senators who voted against Trump’s conviction in his impeachment trial after January 6 without noting legitimate constitutional questions involving the propriety of the Senate convicting a private citizen. In his effort to portray those Republicans as craven Trumpists, Cobb conveniently glosses over that aspect of the story.
Of course, it should be noted that Trump has consistently opened the way for attacks like Cobb’s with his often odious behavior and jarring rhetoric. He certainly committed an impeachable offense on January 6 by inciting angry supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol and thwart the certification of the Electoral College outcome. But Trump’s great political achievement was seeing in 2016 what almost no one else seemed capable of perceiving—that vast numbers of heartland Americans felt marginalized and put upon by the country’s ruling class. Trump leveraged that potent political reality in often crude ways, but those agitated Americans weren’t going to stay quiescent forever, and they’re not going away.
Cobb’s effort to draw a direct line between what he sees as Goldwater’s extremism and Trump’s excesses meets a powerful counternarrative in Christopher Caldwell’s latest book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. The reforms of that decade, writes Caldwell,
came with costs that proved staggeringly high—in money, freedom, rights, and social stability. Those costs were spread most unevenly among social classes and generations. Many Americans were left worse-off by the changes. Economic inequality reached levels not seen since the age of the 19th-century monopolists. The scope for action conferred on society’s leaders allowed elite power to multiply steadily and, we now see, dangerously, sweeping aside not just obstacles but also dissent.
Caldwell packs more enlightenment in that single paragraph than Cobb musters in his nearly 6,000-word essay. The Democratic Party has become the party of American oligarchy, and that is going to generate powerful political counterforces well into the future. The Republican Party likely will supply the dialectical coherence and political energy to those counterforces.
Which brings us to Cobb’s suggestion that the GOP may be going the way of the Whig Party, which succumbed to the crushing force of the slavery debate after the 1856 presidential election. He writes that the Federalists died out because they failed to expand their demographic appeal, while the Whigs faded because of internal incoherence over what they stood for at a time of powerful political passions. “Among the more striking dynamics of the Trump-era G.O.P.,” he writes, “is the extent to which it is afflicted by both of these failings.” He marshals plenty of vote statistics and demographic data to bolster his case, following generally the work of political analyst Ron Brownstein of Atlantic Media and his exploration of what he calls the “coalition of the ascendant.”
Perhaps Cobb and Brownstein are correct in predicting the looming GOP demise. But huge political battles are raging in America these days: nationalism vs. liberalism; immigration curtailment vs. open borders; foreign-policy restraint vs. American hegemony; governmental retrenchment vs. governmental expansion; Black Lives Matter vs. law and order; identity politics vs. the color-blind society; and the fiery passions incited by the question of political correctness. It’s difficult to visualize the death of the Republican Party so long as these issues are roiling America.
Robert W. Merry, former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent and Congressional Quarterly CEO, is the author of five books on American history and foreign policy, including, most recently, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster).
I do not think it is as complicated as this article or Cobb’s article make it to be. Its really rather simple. I am like most Americans, a centrist. I am also an “unaffiliated voter”. So my allegiance is to a better USA, not party. Most of us centrists fall left or right of center but nevertheless, still centrists. We can see the shades of grey between black and white and negotiate to some modicum of success. In the last election what we saw was a very binary (black or white, right or wrong) kind of system. Both parties being driven by their extremes while their centrists of both parties coward to the extremes. And you saw this if you watched the 2016 primaries. So we voting centrists were left with a choice of which extreme we were going to vote for, fully knowing that either one would improve some things while damaging others. In the last election I was leaning Trump but patiently awaiting the presidential debates to see what each man was about, particularly Biden and what their 2020 platforms would be. Trump’s behavior was so bad in the first debate that it seriously angered me like I have never been angered before because I watched for two hours and learned nothing about Biden’s platform because Trump would never let him speak, and the networks were to fearful of him to sensor him. This was the turning point for me. I felt if Trump can act this way on tv, how much worse must he be behind closed doors (and his revolving door administration proved my feeling to be true.) In the end, I concluded the GOP had a bad actor candidate with seamingly good people behind the party, while the Democrats had a good actor candidate with slightly more poor ideas than the GOP. But I was willing to take the good actor candidate and deal with the poor ideas in the 2022 election. The key to winning the next presidential election will be which party can provide a centrist that can keep their extremes under control and work across the aisle to achieve centrist ideals and compromises. That is who will get my vote.
get rid of the rino’s and continue to expose the left for the lying thieving racists that they are. Only by bringing them down(destroying them) can the GOP survive
The conversation is not complete without considering the racism of the Reagan administration. Aside from Reagan’s own comments about “welfare queens” and “big bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps”, the Justice Department under Reagan was anti-civil rights. Edwin Meese and his deputy, William Bradford Reynolds, ignored states that sought to restrict the ballot to white voters only, while intimidating black people who sought to register black voters.
In just about every area of concern, from extending the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which applied mainly to southern states, to taking the side of unions that refused to admit blacks as members, which applied to northern states, as well, the Reagan administration took the anti-civil rights position. That was predictable, given Reagan’s speech at the fair held at Neshoba County in Mississippi. That was the infamous location of the murders of three young men, Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner, who were simply working to register black voters. Reagan could have used that tragic event to make it clear to Mississippians and the entire country that violence was not the way to solve the nation’s racial problems. But that was not his purpose in giving the speech. His purpose was to convert southern white voters from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. So, he uttered the words “state’s rights” and the crowd responded to the dog whistle with cheers.
Lyndon Johnson predicted that the passages of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would lead to the Democratic Party’s loss of the southern white voter for at least a generation. Reagan and the Republican Party were willing and eager to throw black people under the bus for political gain. Yet, to this day, most politicians and political commentators, if they discuss the subject of the GOP’s “Southern strategy” at all, invariably attribute the strategy to Nixon. Reagan retains his Teflon coating, despite the fact that his lieutenant in charge of the strategy, Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, admitted to his role in it and apologized to black people for it.
The significance of all this is to recognize that no change will ever take place in the governing philosophy of the Republican Party until it comes to grips with the racism that is at the core of its culture. From Devin Nunes in California to Ron Johnson in Wisconsin to Rick Scott in Florida, the Republican Party can be counted on to take positions that are antagonistic to the best interests of black people, including voter suppression.
Do not know where you got your “information”, but it obviously from demonrat sources. That makes it non-believable
The conversation is not complete without considering the racism of the Reagan administration. Aside from Reagan’s own comments about “welfare queens” and “big bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps”, the Justice Department under Reagan was anti-civil rights. Edwin Meese and his deputy, William Bradford Reynolds, ignored states that sought to restrict the ballot to white voters only, while intimidating black people who sought to register black voters.
In just about every area of concern, from extending the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which applied mainly to southern states, to taking the side of unions that refused to admit blacks as members, which applied to northern states, as well, the Reagan administration took the anti-civil rights position. That was predictable, given Reagan’s speech at the fair held at Neshoba County in Mississippi. That was the infamous location of the murders of three young men, Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner, who were simply working to register black voters. Reagan could have used that tragic event to make it clear to Mississippians and the entire country that violence was not the way to solve the nation’s racial problems. But that was not his purpose in giving the speech. His purpose was to convert southern white voters from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. So, he uttered the words “state’s rights” and the crowd responded to the dog whistle with cheers.
Lyndon Johnson predicted that the passages of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would lead to the Democratic Party’s loss of the southern white voter for at least a generation. Reagan and the Republican Party were willing and eager to throw black people under the bus for political gain. Yet, to this day, most politicians and political commentators, if they discuss the subject of the GOP’s “Southern strategy” at all, invariably attribute the strategy to Nixon. Reagan retains his Teflon coating, despite the fact that his lieutenant in charge of the strategy, Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, admitted to his role in it and apologized to black people for it.
The significance of all this is to recognize that no change will ever take place in the governing philosophy of the Republican Party until it comes to grips with the racism that is at the core of its culture. From Devin Nunes in California to Ron Johnson in Wisconsin to Rick Scott in Florida, the Republican Party can be counted on to take positions that are antagonistic to the best interests of black people, including voter suppression.
It is typical of today’s Republican Party voter to dismiss just about anything that he/she did not hear on Fox News. Instead of assuming that the information came from Democratic Party sources, why not try the novel idea of checking each fact, yourself? I know it requires work, but when you are to lazy to do the work, you become a victim to the right-wing liars who provoked the assault on the Capitol.
You spoke more truth in two sentences than everything written above.
The entire premise that Barry Goldwater was a racist and extremist was just another fabrication by democrats to create a caricature of all Republicans as racist. In fact, this is where the template originated, as democrats began rewriting the racist history of their party after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, assigning collective guilt to all America, while absolving themselves of their sins.
While Goldwater did object to two specific titles in the ‘64 Act, his position was based on reality and his objection to what he warned would become racial preferences, enforced by the government—and he was proven right. This was far different from Southern Democrats, including LBJ, who prior to signing the 64 act, blocked or watered down every previous piece of civil rights legislation because they were racists who still embraced segregation.
Despite Goldwater’s objections, he did more to advance civil rights than any democrat and most Republicans. Even before Brown Vs Board and forced desegregation, it was Goldwater, as a city councilman, who pushed to desegregate local government and schools. He did the same when he established the Arizona Air National Guard, desegregating his units, two-years before Truman’s Armed Forces directive. He gave his own money to help save the Urban League when it was insolvent, and was among the founding members of the NAACP in Arizona.
These were radical positions for most any politician from a southern state, and yet Goldwater was out in front of everybody, especially the Democrats. Sadly, that didn’t stop them or the media from making Goldwater a racist—the catalyst for what democrats have done to Republicans for the last 60 years.
It is unfortunate that these theoretically intelligent people have no clue about the American citizen. The Good Lord made each one of us unique. We all have different gifts, faults, politics, and ideals. To lump everyone in an ‘us or them’ manner, completely ignores the diversity that is the essence of the American people.
Why is it that, when it come to politic, or religion, people are so mind-set? An open mind opens so many doors to a whole new way of thinking. Are they just so Intelligent, that they cannot open their thoughts to something new that they may, or may not agree with. What a sad state of affairs when these people are in the field of education with their minds so closed.