Last week, I wrote the Republican Party is suffering from an illness. At first my diagnosis was simply the carunculous Tea Party, but now I feel it is something different, or at least more than first suspected. The symptoms seem much more cerebral. It is as if the party has been suffering from a “brain-drain” as of late.
“The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital,” said President Ronald Reagan during a speech at CPAC in 1985, but now it seems it is his party that is out of ideas.
Ironically, it was during Reagan’s presidency when the symptoms of the “brain-drain” first arose. Reaganomics, the theory of tax cuts being a panacea for any and all problems, prevailed, along with the theory of mass deregulation in industries whose externalities (savings and loan crisis) actually posed a threat to the greater economy.
Slowly, the party has been becoming nothing more than a subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce, catering to the interest of business and taking their money. It was only a little over a decade ago the new House Speaker, John Boehner of Ohio, was caught dealing out checks from the tobacco industry to fellow Republicans as they were debating new rules for the industry.
And it isn’t simply the party lets business and industry get away with murder (quite literally, sometimes), it’s they have strayed so far away from paragons of the party, like President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, the “trustbuster,” known for breaking up Standard Oil and Northern Securities, also stood for another check against the concentration of wealth (plutocracy) – the estate tax. The Republican Party today not only wants to eliminate the levy but has given the silly moniker “the death tax.”
The party has also lost ground and regressed on issues facing the environment. After watching Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma deny global warming and Republicans in the House grill Lisa P. Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency, it’s hard to imagine the EPA was establish by a Republican president in 1970. Yeah, that’s right. President Richard Nixon created the EPA. Who knew Tricky Dick had a soft spot for trees?
The antecedent of protecting the environment doesn’t matter. Neither do the scores of scientist who continually make time for Congressional hearing only to be labeled frauds and tree-huggers. It’s all a bunch of hokum declare Republicans today, it doesn’t matter every national and international scientific organization agrees global warming is occurring. All the evidence in the world won’t stop Republicans in the Congress from trying to defund and depower the EPA or stop them from fighting off a cap-and-trade scheme that would use the very market forces they favor.
It is all so confusing. More confusing is the role Republicans have taken on as crusaders for televangelists, becoming soldiers for Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The role is not only hypocritical, as politician after politician gets caught with their pants down with hookers (all the while running on family values), the battle they wage is a losing one. The glass ceiling has been broken by Hillary Clinton, albeit all of Phyllis Schlafly’s screeching, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, despite Senator John McCain’s grumblings.
Back to my original diagnosis. I wrote the Tea Party was quickly replacing veterans and moderates within the party with wingnuts, and I still hold that to be true. However, the graver threat the Republican Party faces to its electoral success is not only this “brain-drain,” but its struggle to appeal to minority voters. It’s strange, Republicans are the party of the Great Emancipator, and yet they seem relegated to the very same strongholds as the Dixiecrats in the 1940s.
If anything, Republicans have not only adopted the landscape of the Dixiecrats, but their rhetoric as well with Republicans seemingly having to go through a mea culpa every other week after saying something bigoted about President Obama.
The tides have truly turned when it is the Democratic Party that can flash photos of Martin Luther King Jr. shaking hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson, while it was Republicans who enacted the most progressive policies on civil rights (Civil Rights Act of 1866 & Civil Rights Act of 1875).
It’s not only strange, it’s disheartening to see the Grand Old Party ailing and not knowing of any cure or swift remedy.
Maybe it needs some chemotherapy to rid itself of the Tea Party, or maybe it needs an MRI to see what is going on inside its head. Either way, the Republican Party is sick, and unless Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin or any of the front runners for the presidential nomination has the uncanny ability to diagnose and treat any illness like House M.D., I see no quick healing in the future.
