I just finished reading Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative” as well as Jeff Flake’s book of the same title. In my last post I included a quote from a speech Eisenhower gave in the early 60’s that carried a tone very different from most Republican speeches today, so I decided to see if that version of the Republican Party was in fact that different from what we see today.
Spoiler alert: it was.
Jeff Flake is not running for his seat in the Senate in the next election, partly because he feels estranged from his own party. He characterizes it that his party left him rather than the other way around. And lest we think this is unique to Republicans, I would suggest that a Southern Democrat would have said exactly the same thing back in the late Fifties. But change in party positions isn’t so much my topic here as much as it is why we have such acrimony in Washington, and the legislative gridlock that goes with it. The Orange Cheeto who’s in the White House right now is not the cause of that; he’s simply the most current symptom. Understand please that I believe that he’s the most unqualified, incompetent, ignorant dishonest idiot imaginable, but he’s simply the manifestation of a movement that’s been building for a long time.
Most people trace the current Republican Party philosophies back to Goldwater or Reagan. And while a broad view of today’s Republican Party shows some of the same things that Goldwater and Reagan believed (small central government, lower taxes, a strong military), after reading both Goldwater’s and Flake’s books, I would suggest two things: the Republican Party of today, in spite of the three aforementioned Party planks, has abandoned most of the other positions they had before. Second, the strategies used by today’s Party are vastly different than back then. I’ll reserve the change in Party planks for another post and focus on their tactics in this post.
I believe most would agree that we have a national Legislative body that is broken. They seem to be incapable of getting anything of significance done. This criticism is not new; people have been critical of the legislative process practically since there was one. A saying attributed (probably incorrectly) to Otto von Bismarck was “Laws are like sausages. Better not to see them being made.” The process of crafting laws was meant to be deliberative and slow, so Congress (most specifically the Senate) was set up to ensure that would happen. People complain about how it takes forever for Congress to respond, forgetting (or never realizing in the first place) that is exactly what was intended by the framers. Legislators knew that in order to get anything passed into law, they had to work across the aisle. This led to a lot of horse trading and arm-twisting, but that’s just how things worked.
Still, things did work.
But what’s going on now is way worse. Any cross-party collegiality disappeared in the mid-nineties. The “Republican Revolution” led by Newt Gingrich took over both houses of Congress. True, the Democratic Party participated by misreading the tea leaves; I have argued elsewhere that Republican wonks worked out what they needed to do to gain power after the drubbing they got in the Goldwater/Johnson election in 1964 (Johnson won in a landslide with 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s miserable 52).
Anyhow, the Republican strategy worked and the Democrats didn’t see it coming in time. In 1994, Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate. Newt Gingrich is credited with developing the strategy that brought Republicans that victory; IMHO he did it partly by stirring up the Religious Right and partly by dog-whistle politics that pandered to fear among the disenfranchised middle class. And while it is very true that the economic growth of the country over the past 20 years has left many behind, Republicans have successfully sold those very people that giving big tax breaks to the uber-rich will somehow help them get out of poverty or allow them to send their kids to college. I’ll talk about trickle-down economics later, but for now just say that it’s never worked anywhere it’s been tried.
Anyhow, Gingrich’s strategy include a scorched-earth component. Democrats, instead of respected colleagues who had different ideas of governance, became the Enemy. Any compromise, cooperation or even collegial relationship with them by any of these new Republicans was enough to get that person frozen out of positions of power. It became “my way or the highway” politics, which led to using parliamentary tricks and legislative legerdemain to get bills passed rather than any compromise. During Obama’s first year as President, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell famously (and odiously) said that under his “leadership,” the single and most important objective of the Republican-controlled Congress was to “deny President Obama a second term.” Forgive my naivete, but I thought that actually doing the business of Congress in getting laws written and passed might have been a more important objective.
To quote Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate!”
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Failure to communicate
I just finished reading Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative” as well as Jeff Flake’s book of the same title. In my last post I included a quote from a speech Eisenhower gave in the early 60’s that carried a tone very different from most Republican speeches today, so I decided to see if that version of the Republican Party was in fact that different from what we see today.
Spoiler alert: it was.
Jeff Flake is not running for his seat in the Senate in the next election, partly because he feels estranged from his own party. He characterizes it that his party left him rather than the other way around. And lest we think this is unique to Republicans, I would suggest that a Southern Democrat would have said exactly the same thing back in the late Fifties. But change in party positions isn’t so much my topic here as much as it is why we have such acrimony in Washington, and the legislative gridlock that goes with it. The Orange Cheeto who’s in the White House right now is not the cause of that; he’s simply the most current symptom. Understand please that I believe that he’s the most unqualified, incompetent, ignorant dishonest idiot imaginable, but he’s simply the manifestation of a movement that’s been building for a long time.
Most people trace the current Republican Party philosophies back to Goldwater or Reagan. And while a broad view of today’s Republican Party shows some of the same things that Goldwater and Reagan believed (small central government, lower taxes, a strong military), after reading both Goldwater’s and Flake’s books, I would suggest two things: the Republican Party of today, in spite of the three aforementioned Party planks, has abandoned most of the other positions they had before. Second, the strategies used by today’s Party are vastly different than back then. I’ll reserve the change in Party planks for another post and focus on their tactics in this post.
I believe most would agree that we have a national Legislative body that is broken. They seem to be incapable of getting anything of significance done. This criticism is not new; people have been critical of the legislative process practically since there was one. A saying attributed (probably incorrectly) to Otto von Bismarck was “Laws are like sausages. Better not to see them being made.” The process of crafting laws was meant to be deliberative and slow, so Congress (most specifically the Senate) was set up to ensure that would happen. People complain about how it takes forever for Congress to respond, forgetting (or never realizing in the first place) that is exactly what was intended by the framers. Legislators knew that in order to get anything passed into law, they had to work across the aisle. This led to a lot of horse trading and arm-twisting, but that’s just how things worked.
Still, things did work.
But what’s going on now is way worse. Any cross-party collegiality disappeared in the mid-nineties. The “Republican Revolution” led by Newt Gingrich took over both houses of Congress. True, the Democratic Party participated by misreading the tea leaves; I have argued elsewhere that Republican wonks worked out what they needed to do to gain power after the drubbing they got in the Goldwater/Johnson election in 1964 (Johnson won in a landslide with 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s miserable 52).
Anyhow, the Republican strategy worked and the Democrats didn’t see it coming in time. In 1994, Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate. Newt Gingrich is credited with developing the strategy that brought Republicans that victory; IMHO he did it partly by stirring up the Religious Right and partly by dog-whistle politics that pandered to fear among the disenfranchised middle class. And while it is very true that the economic growth of the country over the past 20 years has left many behind, Republicans have successfully sold those very people that giving big tax breaks to the uber-rich will somehow help them get out of poverty or allow them to send their kids to college. I’ll talk about trickle-down economics later, but for now just say that it’s never worked anywhere it’s been tried.
Anyhow, Gingrich’s strategy include a scorched-earth component. Democrats, instead of respected colleagues who had different ideas of governance, became the Enemy. Any compromise, cooperation or even collegial relationship with them by any of these new Republicans was enough to get that person frozen out of positions of power. It became “my way or the highway” politics, which led to using parliamentary tricks and legislative legerdemain to get bills passed rather than any compromise. During Obama’s first year as President, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell famously (and odiously) said that under his “leadership,” the single and most important objective of the Republican-controlled Congress was to “deny President Obama a second term.” Forgive my naivete, but I thought that actually doing the business of Congress in getting laws written and passed might have been a more important objective.
To quote Strother Martin’s character in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here, is failure to communicate!”
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.