On Republicans

Introduction

This paper is inspired by reflections on What is Happening to the Republicans?, by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker, March 8, 2021.

The thesis of the long article is that the Republicans may cease to be a major political force in the United States in the not so distant future because of their attachment to the white racial heritage of the country.  Support for this is provided by way of historical analogy to the Whigs in the 19th century who failed to make a clear stand against slavery, and subsequently were eclipsed by the newly formed Republicans.  The lesson, according to Cobb, is that to be on the wrong side of the race issue, if not downright racist, is to be on the road to oblivion.

I have the following reactions:

1.     Cobb's analogy of the racial issues of the two time frames, the 1850s and the present time, is interesting but ignores the enormous changes that have taken place in U.S. society in this regard.

2.     Cobb's assessment of current Republican "kookiness" fails to account for the overall irrationality of the current conventional wisdom for which Cobb is a spokesman.

3.     Cobb fails to consider the evolution of the Republican party in recent decades as the primary advocate for the U.S. led global empire, and also fails to note that the Democrats have taken over that role as of the Trump presidency.

4.     Cobb does not consider the role of amoral power in determining the success or failure of political parties. 

In this paper, I hope to supplement Cobb's discussion of the Republican party by adding context which he did not consider, as itemized above.

Race in America

Racial issues in the 1850s included:

●       Should whites be allowed to own blacks?

●       Should the United States claim God-given manifest destiny over the continental United States, including the remaiininng areas occupied by "heathens"?

Beginning in the 1950s, we see by way of contrast:

●       Civil rights legislation guaranteeing more equal rights for all races.  Efforts going beyond equality to address past inequality through mechanisms such as affirmative action and diversity training.  Both major parties have had numerous non-white candidates and elected officials.

●       The U.S. becoming the world's sole superpower, establishing 800 military bases outside of the United States, overthrowing governments and starting wars to enforce American political values, and enforcing American economic values via trade agreements, international financial pressure, etc.

The differences are stark.  The red v blue state differences, while superficially a continuation of the black and white era of legalized slavery, have evolved as follows:

●       traditional versus modern values

●       hierarchical versus meritocratic values

●       patriotic versus humanist values

As a humanist, I am firmly on the blue side of these issues.  But these are much more nuanced than the case Cobb makes that the Republicans are irrevocably tied to a return to white racial supremacy. 

Immigrants to the U.S. are generally considered to be racially different, yet over time may become "white".  We see this even with dark skinned immigrants such as Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley who have become governors of red states.  The case is even clearer with Hispanic and Arab immigrants who may be quite light skinned to begin with.  Many, if not most, immigrants come to the U.S. for economic reasons, while still preferring traditional values.  Once American citizens, they are likely to become patriotic.

Republicans, representing red state values, will not have trouble finding hypocrisy and corruption among the Democrats representing blue state values.  Democrats will likewise seek to publicize and exploits the weaknesses in Republican values and representatives.  This is generally healthy as no party should be above criticism.

Republicans may fail to adapt to our status as a global empire encompassing numerous people of all races, but the lesson of the Trump era does not support this.  Trump's administration included representatives of all races, and he actually improved his support among blacks and Latinos in 2020 as compared to 2016.  Overt racism is taboo in the United States (thankfully), and Republicans have had to come to terms with this.

Rationality in America

Cobb describes Republicans under Trump as "kooks".  In this, he repeats the conventional wisdom without providing much supporting documentation or analysis:

The most widely debated political question of the moment is: What is happening to the Republicans? One answer is that the Party’s predicament might fairly be called the revenge of “the kooks”...   during a Presidential debate, a sitting Commander-in-Chief gave a knowing shout-out to the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group; he also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and subsequently attempted to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into falsifying election returns; he and other Republican officials filed more than sixty lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results of the election; he incited the insurrectionists who overran the Capitol and demanded the lynching of, among others, the Republican Vice-President; and he was impeached, for the second time, then acquitted by Senate Republicans fearful of a base that remains in his thrall.

These are damning charges but do not stand up to scrutiny, in my opinion, as representing serious threats to democracy, especially in comparison to the CIA/FBI aided efforts of Democratic affiliated politicians:

 

●       Adam Schiff, Democratic leader of the House Intelligence Committee, has passed along false intelligence reports for years regarding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  See also: Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus

●       HIllary Clinton accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset because Gabbard disagreed with the intelligence community regarding events in Syria.

●       Black Lives Matters supporters engaged in many violent acts for months on end, while being described as mostly non-violent protestors. 

●       In contrast, the Republicans who overran the capitol were unarmed and mostly non-violent but falsely accused of acts of violence. See also: As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever

●       Trump's first impeachment was instigated by a CIA agent and former Biden assistant who disagreed with Trump's policy with regard to the Ukraine.  This was never disclosed to the public, and the impeachment was falsely portrayed as being instigated by a CIA whistleblower as opposed to a CIA insider.

●       Democrats were unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election and have been trying to sow the seeds of distrust in the system ever since

Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate madness. Two years later, one in three Americans believed a foreign power would change vote tallies in the 2018 midterm elections...  Unrestrained speculation about the illegitimacy of the 2016 election had a major impact on the public. Surveys showed 50 percent of Clinton voters by December of 2016 believed the Russians actually hacked vote tallies in states, something no official agency ever alleged even at the peak of the Russiagate madness. Two years later, one in three Americans believed a foreign power would change vote tallies in the 2018 midterm elections...

What makes the current situation particularly grotesque is that the DNI warning about this summer stated plainly that a major goal of foreign disruptors was to “undermine the public’s confidence in the Democratic process” by “calling into question the validity of the election results.”

 

Our own domestic intelligence agencies have been doing exactly that for years now. On nearly a daily basis in the leadup to this past Election Day, they were issuing warnings in the corporate press that you might have reason to mistrust the coming results: ...

 

None of the links above are from news outlets or writers who support Trump.  On the contrary, they are all anti-Trump. 

In my view, the Republicans have long been the more irrational and corrupt party.  However, in recent years, the Democrats and supporting mainstream media outlets have matched them in this regard.

Evolution of the Republican Party

Cobb describes the Republican turn toward its current incarnation as an all white party on the road to oblivion as beginning with Goldwater in the early 1960s:

Richard Nixon, the former Vice-President, who had received substantial Black support in his 1960 Presidential bid, against John F. Kennedy, told a reporter for Ebony that “if Goldwater wins his fight, our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party.” The Chicago Defender, the premier Black newspaper of the era, concurred, stating bluntly that the G.O.P. was en route to becoming a “white man’s party.”

Goldwater’s crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedy’s assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwater’s ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.

The context here is that Nixon foresees the coming realignment of the political parties along racial lines, and that LBJ merely delayed this realignment.  However, the truth is that LBJ and Nixon were tools of Allen Dulles and the military-intelligence complex.  The racial revolution supported by Kennedy was allowed to proceed, but the empire's needs as defined initially by the Cold War, but ultimately a matter of naked power, took precedence behind the scenes.

This story begins in 1947: 

The political relationship forged between the rising politician from California and Dulles’s East Coast circle would become one of the most significant partnerships of the postwar era. Nixon grew into a potent political weapon for the Dulles group, a cunning operator who managed to accrue solidly conservative credentials with the Republican Party’s popular base while dependably serving the interests of the GOP’s privileged leadership class. Together, the Dulles circle and Richard Nixon would bring about a sharp, rightward shift in the nation’s politics, driving out the surviving elements of the New Deal regime in Washington and establishing a new ruling order that was much more in tune with the Dulles circle’s financial interests. The Dulles-Nixon alliance proved masterful at exploiting the Cold War panic that gripped the nation, using it to root out Rooseveltian true believers from government, along with a few genuine Communist infiltrators who posed a marginal threat to national security. When Washington’s anti-Communist witch hunt raged out of control and threatened to consume even those who had lit the flame, Nixon again proved of great use to Dulles, working with him to keep the inferno within safe boundaries. In return for his services, Nixon won the patronage of the kingmakers in the Dulles circle, ensuring the politician’s steady rise toward Washington’s top throne.

Kennedy interrupted the military-intelligence complex rule from behind the scenes, but was soon displaced by Johnson:

JFK had put Johnson on his 1960 ticket to win votes in the South. But, as the 1964 campaign approached, LBJ had lost so much clout below the Mason-Dixon Line—largely because of his subservient role in Kennedy’s liberal, pro–civil rights presidency—that he couldn’t even be counted on to deliver his home state…  Rauh, a stalwart of the Democratic Party’s left wing, said, “Lyndon must know he is through. Bobby is going to be the next president.” …  The Kennedys had turned the swaggering Johnson into a useless figure… the president privately confirmed that Johnson would not be on the (1964) ticket… Dick Nixon, who had weathered his own “dump Nixon” movement as Eisenhower’s 1956 reelection campaign drew near, was keenly attuned to Johnson’s growing humiliation… 

Lyndon Johnson’s days might have been numbered as vice president, but he was not entirely abandoned in Washington. If LBJ was rapidly losing favor within the Kennedy administration, he had managed to retain the support of many key figures in the national security arena. Johnson had long been the dominant political figure in a state with a booming defense and aerospace industry, and he had long cultivated ties to generals and espionage officials…  Despite the White House rebuff, LBJ continued to enjoy a special bond with national security hard-liners during Kennedy’s reign, often embracing their aggressive positions on Cuba and other hot spots, as well as leaking inside information about White House policy developments to his contacts at the Pentagon and CIA.

Dulles was among those who maintained warm relations with the vice president, even as both men’s stars fell within the Kennedy court.

And: 

The final version of NSAM 273, signed by Johnson on November 26 (4 days after the Kennedy assassination in 1963)... is unmistakable...  this change effectively provided new authority for U.S.–directed combat actions against North Vietnam. Planning for these actions began therewith, and we now know that an OPLAN 34A raid in August 1964 provoked the North Vietnamese retaliation against the destroyer Maddox, which became the first Gulf of Tonkin incident. And this in turn led to the confused incident a few nights later aboard the Turner Joy, to reports that it too had been attacked, and to Johnson’s overnight decision to seek congressional support for “retaliation” against North Vietnam. From this, of course, the larger war then flowed.

Add this context to Cobb's story of the Republican turn to the white south initiated by Goldwater and carried through by Nixon, and we get a more complete modern history of the Republican party.  Nixon not only implemented the north-south political/racial realignment, but he also cemented the Republican alliance with the military-intelligency complex which JFK had briefly interrupted.  

LBJ and Nixon foreshadow a blending of the parties along the lines of empire, with the Republicans in the dominant position.  Just as "centrists" came together to defeat McGovern in 1972, "centrists" came together to defeat Trump in 2020.  While the cultural issue of race has by far surpassed the issues of empire in distinguishing the two political parties from 1972-2020, issues of empire have circumscribed the allowable debate and have also given the Republicans an advantage over this time period due to the behind the scenes influence of the military-intelligence complex.

From the heyday of the Dulles brothers in the Eisenhower administration, through the Bush presidencies, the Republican strategy has been synonymous with support for the military and intelligencies agencies and foreign adventures.  Only with the Trump presidency did the Democrats manage to turn this around and define the Democrats as the party of empire.  This represents a major break from the previous 64 years.

Key to understanding the behind the scenes influence of the military-industrial complex is understanding the degree to which they control the mainstream narrative on many issues, including who should be the ultimate authorities and arbiters of power. 

Amoral Power

Cobb looks at Republican prospects through the lens of democracy, which is of course appropriate for a major political party in a nominal democracy.  But, realistically, issues of non-democratic power must also be considered.  I've previously written about the importance of Being Woke to the Praetorian Guard.  Cobb is seemingly oblivious to the manner in which our political parties are manipulated by actors who care little about race, but rather are mainly interested in power, and may be playing various race cards as a means to power.  

Democracy is a difficult business, but a core value for many of us.  We can best promote democracy by not only supporting those whose values we share, but also by fighting those forces aligned against democracy, such as those who spread lies on behalf of the intelligence agencies and related political operatives. The Republican party may go the way of the Whigs, or they may adapt in order to maintain a share of power.  We live in a global empire inhabited by powerful people of all races, and both Republicans and Democrats are keenly aware of this.  Thus, for example, Democrats align with Ukrainians against Russians, while Republicans align themselves with dissident Chinese against the Chinese government.  Race is of low relative importance in such considerations of international values, power, and the effects on domestic politics.