gracchusdixit

In the four decades that followed the first inaugural of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, only one Republican occupied the White House, there were Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in all but two election cycles, and Democrats controlled the Senate without interruption.  During this long political continuum, many of the best things in our public life were accomplished:  Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, the GI bill, and, of course, the Civil Rights Act.

Then Richard Nixon came along.  It was Nixon who embarked upon what is now infamously known as the “Southern strategy,” which blatantly exploited the racial bigotry of white Southerners and drove a wedge between the two halves of the old Democratic coalition—the working-class cities of the North and the rural South.  The “Southern strategy” got Nixon elected, but it still left Congress in the hands of the Democrats.

It took Ronald Reagan to turn the strategy into something broader and far more corrosive.  Reagan cooked up a new kind of anti-government populism that deliberately preyed upon the anxieties of social and religious conservatives in every region of the country.  Thanks to Reagan, the Republican Party, once the voice of Eastern financial interests and the stolid Midwest, became the party of race, religion, and guns.

All of this suited the Party’s establishment just fine.   Reagan’s faux populism was the perfect formula for masking the Party’s true goals:  gutting the accomplishments of the New Deal, cutting taxes on the rich, and advancing the business interests of its corporate sponsors.  For a generation, this shell game was fabulously successful.  It got Reagan elected twice and gave us the phrase, “Reagan Democrats”.  It put an end to the Democratic stranglehold on Congress.  It put two Bushes in the White House.  It made Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House and very nearly got Bill Clinton impeached.

But the game was always a bargain with the devil, and the devil may soon be asking the Republican Party to pay up.

Republicans have spent thirty years distracting voters from the real issues.  They’ve used a host of irrelevant but socially divisive controversies—abortion, nativity scenes in front of town halls, prayer in the schools, flag-burning, gay unions—to make their constituents forget about lousy jobs, stagnant incomes, ludicrously expensive health care, useless wars, and a massive give-away of the nation’s wealth to the very few.

The problem with this sort of tactic is that the ante keeps rising.  The more Republicans have incited fear and anger, the angrier people have become.  To keep pace, the Party has had to become progressively more extreme.

The even bigger problem is that Republican populism has gotten completely out of control.  The original plan was to manipulate—and control—the emotions of religious and social conservatives.   They were supposed to vote as they were told but were never intended to hold office, let alone turn their cultural and religious prejudices into the predominating policies of the Party. The new Republican electorate was never, ever, under any circumstances supposed to get real power.    That would be going too far.  That would derail the whole plan.  That would bring electoral disaster.

And that’s precisely what now seems to be happening to the Republican Party.  The once pliable “base” that Richard Nixon conjured up—the evangelical Christians, the blatant racists, the gay-bashers, the immigrant-haters—are now in the driver’s seat.  They are the people who gave the “tea party” its angry energy.  They are the people who can’t abide Mitt Romney.  They are the people who are are behind Rick Santorum’s “surge”.

For Santorum is one of their own.  He actually seems to believe that birth control should be banned, that a woman impregnated by a rapist should “make the best of a bad thing,” that the legal marriages of gay Americans should be nullified, and that every citizen should be compelled to live by the Sharia Law of the Old Testament rather than the principles of the Constitution.  No wonder the Party’s establishment has become so hysterical and desperate at the prospect of somebody like Santorum becoming their nominee.   If that happens, they will have nobody to blame but themselves.  They will reap what they have sown.