R.I.P. THE GOP

RIP THE GOP

“I think what we’re witnessing now is a full-on frontal assault on conservatism, and you can look at the platform walking away from issues like life and traditional marriage, embracing tariffs across the board, but I feel like yesterday and last night went a step further when you have speakers that are basically saying NATO was at fault for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and referring to job creators as ‘corporate pigs’ and announcing national right to work.”

–- Marc Short, former Chief of Staff to Mike Pence

The Republican Party hasn’t been an actual “conservative” party since Richard Hofstadter described them as “Pseudo-Conservative” 70 years ago.

Here’s the heart of what Hofstadter wrote back in 1954 in his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt”:

“There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the tone of our political life and to establish throughout the country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is certainly not radical — there are hardly any radicals of any sort left — nor is it precisely conservative. Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

“From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

“The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the Orient — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.3 He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like Soviet communism, what distinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis Russia. He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where communism is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its expenditures.

“One of the most urgent questions we can ask about the United States in our time is the question of where all this sentiment arose. The readiest answer is that the new pseudo-conservatism is simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary pressures of the contemporary world. This answer, true though it may be, gives a deceptive sense of familiarity without much deepening our understanding, for the particular patterns of American isolationism and extreme right-wing thinking have themselves not been very satisfactorily explored. It will not do, to take but one example, to say that some people want the income tax amendment repealed because taxes have become very heavy in the past twenty years: for this will not explain why, of three people in the same tax bracket, one will grin and bear it and continue to support social welfare legislation as well as an adequate defense, while another responds by supporting in a matter-of-fact way the practical conservative leadership of the moment, and the third finds his feelings satisfied only by the angry conspiratorial accusations and extreme demands of the pseudo-conservative.

“What I wish to suggest — and I do so in the spirit of one setting forth nothing more than a speculative hypothesis — is that pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity. Normally there is a world of difference between one’s sense of national identity or cultural belonging and one’s social status. However, in American historical development, these two things, so easily distinguishable in analysis, have been jumbled together in reality, and it is precisely this that has given such a special poignancy and urgency to our status-strivings. In this country a person’s status — that is, his relative place in the prestige hierarchy of his community — and his rudimentary sense of belonging to the community — that is, what we call his “Americanism” — have been intimately joined. Because, as a people extremely democratic in our social institutions, we have had no clear, consistent and recognizable system of status, our person status problems have an unusual intensity. Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty. We boast of “the melting pot,” but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have been melted down.”

All of that could have been written about the “conservative movement” at any time since Ronald Reagan ran for President in 1980. All that Trump has done is come along and take what was waiting for someone like him since he was six years old and punching his teacher in her face.

Rick Wilson - to my mind one of the best observers of the modern incarnation of the party Hofstadter described - describes well what has risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old GOP, that he calls The Party of Putin:

“The Party of Putin springs from three sources; the first is some flat-out hate fetishism; there is a cohort of MAGA Republicans who believe Vladimir Putin represents a leader whose government is white, Christian, and hates LGBT folks in the same way they do. The second cohort is the Bannonite nat-pop isolationists who believe NATO and a strong U.S. role in the world prevent an alliance with Russia and Putin. This is the J.D. Vance/David Sacks wing of the MAGA GOP. The final element of the MAGA GOP’s Russia realignment is the Trump family itself. Their business dealings there remain a black box full of dark secrets.”

Hour by hour since the Republican National Convention was gaveled to order this past Monday morning, what is going on in Milwaukee more and more resembles a combination of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg so well captured by Leni Riefenstahl in “Triumph of the Will,” and the 1938 Moscow Show Trials where the Old Bolsheviks publicly confessed their crimes against the people, the revolution and Joe Stalin, in hopes that when they returned to their cell in the Lubyanka Prison they wouldn’t be met by the bullet in the back of the head each got in the end.

Milwaukee has the mass adoration of The Leader from Nuremberg and the humiliation of the non-Trumpers from Moscow.

After Trump was “saved by God” in Pennsylvania last Saturday - where, oh where, is the medical report regarding the status of what he described Sunday morning as “the world’s biggest mosquito bite”? - he decided that in the name of “unity” his former opponents Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis would be invited to speak to the convention after all.

Like the upstanding Old Bolsheviks they are, Haley and DeSantis willingly participated in their public humiliation.

Haley’s revolting speech was a knife in the back of every Republican who voted for her in the primary. She confessed her error, her lack of belief in The Leader, threw herself on his mercy and implored her voters to join her in returning The Leader to his proper position in the White House.

DeSantis performed his ritual confession of error in a demonstration of his true character in a smug collection of warmed-over bullet points, being sure to slavishly kiss Trump’s ass like the trained professional he is.

In the end, both proved they were never anything important to begin with.

Both can rest easy. There will be no barrel of an NKVD Tokarev put against the base of their skull as the last sound they hear is the gunshot that ends them. Both are now “Nikki Who?” and “Ron Who?” and they will be until the day they die in their beds at home. They are now the perfect warnings to any would-be politician in the Trump Party who thinks there is any road to advancement other than the one taken by Widdle Jimmy Vance.

Two years before Hofstadter sat down at his typewriter, Adlai Stevenson saw the same thing Hofstadter wrote about, and said it out loud in a speech at Columbus, Ohio, during the 1952 presidential campaign: “The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.”

Both Hofstadter and Stevenson are still correct 70 years later, only moreso.

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