gracchusdixit

It should by now be obvious to anyone who isn’t wearing a blindfold or plugging his ears with wax that our system of government, and more particularly our foundational Constitutional arrangements, are broken.  Certainly, that’s what the American people appear to believe.  In a recent Gallup poll, they declared government to be the country’s number one problem, well ahead of the economy, jobs, or even the dreaded specter of Islamic terrorism.  It has taken Americans quite a while to catch on to this dismal and long-standing reality, but as the saying goes: better late than never.

It is impossible to say exactly when things began to fall apart, but if I had to pick a date, it would be July 16, 1964.  That is when the Republican Party, by an overwhelming margin, nominated Barry Goldwater to be its candidate for President.  Goldwater was humiliatingly trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the subsequent election, but his nomination was the first shot fired in a conservative revolution that eventually exterminated the old Republican Party, has now seized control of two branches of our national government, and, unless Hillary Clinton gets her act together, may soon control all three.

The next shot was the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was in no sense a Goldwater Republican, but he was cunning and ruthlessly ambitious.  These qualities led him to devise the “southern strategy,” which transformed the Republican Party forever from being a bastion of old-fashioned and understated conservatism, with its roots in the Northeast and Midwest, to becoming the loud and truculent voice of a New Confederacy.

Then, of course, the so-called “Reagan Revolution” came along, which was merely an extension of Goldwater’s original agenda.  It was, however, far more effective in demonizing the federal government, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and unleashing the malignant magic of the “market”.

Reagan was followed by the Reagan-idolizing Newt Gingrich, who shut down the national government for the first time in our history and launched an abortive attempt to impeach and convict a Democratic President who was (and still is) one of the popular public figures we have ever had.

All this was bad enough.  But things got infinitely worse when the Supreme Court of the United States made the unprecedented decision to intervene in a Presidential election and, by the narrowest and most partisan of margins, awarded the election to George W. Bush—despite that fact that his opponent had won the popular vote decisively.  With this act, the conservative Justices on the court abandoned all pretense of political neutrality, opting instead to advance their own ideological agenda openly and without shame.

The breakdown got worse again with the election of Barack Obama.  From the start, Republicans simply refused to recognize the legitimacy of his two election victories, doing everything in their power to ensure the failure of his Presidency.

In the last month, this ongoing breakdown reached a boiling point.

First, Republicans invited the now reelected Prime Minister of Israel to address a joint session of Congress—though “address” scarcely describes his melodramatic and deceptive performance.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance was not only a stunning breach of long-established protocol, it was profoundly disrespectful to the office of the President and to Barack Obama himself.  During the last Presidential election, Netanyahu all but endorsed Mitt Romney—an act of interference in our internal political affairs that was, and remains, inexcusable.  Despite all this, Ted Cruz hyperbolically compared Netanyahu with Winston Churchill; a comparison with Joachim von Ribbentrop would have been more apt.

A few days later, 47 Republican Senators decided to meddle in ongoing and exceedingly delicate negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities, with the clear intent of undermining those negotiations altogether.  By-passing the executive branch, they sent a letter to Iran’s leaders, lecturing them on our Constitutional arrangements.  This was not only patronizing but gratuitous, since Iran’s foreign minister, having been educated in the United States, where he received both an MA and a PhD, probably understands our Constitution better than the fatuous and smug Republicans who sent the letter.

For years, we have danced around the reasons for this scandalous behavior, pretending to be befuddled by the seemingly inexplicable opposition of the Republican right-wing to the general will of the American people and the specific actions of Barack Obama.  Let us drop the pretense once and for all, because the reasons are crystal clear.

The first is that, for all their talk of patriotism and love of country, the only country Republicans are prepared to love is one that mirrors their own theology: white, conservative, and rigidly Christian.  America as it actually is—sprawlingly diverse, increasingly “brown,” and progressively more tolerant on sexual and social questions—is a country they both loathe and fear.

The second reason is that Republicans abominate any form of government that does not serve their own, selfish interests.  They are quite prepared for the federal government to spend billions subsidizing corporations, waging war, and building prisons for the querulous poor.  But the moment government acts in the common good, its actions are denounced as socialism, a first step on the road to communism.

The final reason is blatant racism.  It is racism that lies behind the tea party’s hatred of Barack Obama.  It is racism that lurks behind Republican rhetoric of “makers and takers”.  It is racism that caused the Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act and strike down Affirmative Action.  To pretend otherwise, to suggest that legitimate and reasonable political disagreements are the cause, is a sham.

More than a century ago, the poet Walt Whitman, trying to comprehend the unspeakable carnage caused by the Civil War, described a Union that had been “insolently attack’d by the secession-slave-power” of the South.  Now, more than a century later, that same power is once again doing everything it can to break the nation apart.  That power is called the Republican Party, and its insolence will never end until it is broken at the polls for good.