Today’s NYT contains a series of opinion columns under the umbrella “What Have We Lost?” Predictably, the opinions range from “nothing but our illusions–America was always a racist, fascist country” to “Trump could have been a W. J. Bryan for the 21st century, but he blew it” to “Trump alone is destroying our country.” I’m going to rephrase the question a bit and try to provide a more nuanced answer to it.
The big, fundamental change in American politics over the last 12 years has been the evolution of the GOP from a fairly standard center-right party to a Trumpist party with no allegiance to liberal democracy. How did this happen? Here’s the chronology:
- Reactionaries have been the core of the GOP since about 1980. For most of that time, however, they didn’t assert any kind of right to rule; all you had to do was throw them an occasional rhetorical bone, and they were happy. PBPs and CDs ran the party, and its real focus was on economic issues and foreign policy.
- George W. Bush severely damaged the credibility of the CD and PBP factions with his unsuccessful Iraq War and the Great Recession.
- Racial reactionaries were galvanized by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. You could see their prominence and impatience in the clear preference of the crowds for Palin over McCain during the campaign.
- Fox News emerged as the mouthpiece and the intellectual leader of the reactionaries. It told them 24/7 that they were victims–strangers in the land that they and their white Christian ancestors had built. The government hated them. It was illegitimate. The end was near.
- Demographic changes, of which the reactionaries were well aware, threatened the majority status of white people in this country.
- Supreme Court decisions, most notably on gay marriage, further convinced reactionaries that the entire establishment was stacked against them.
- For all that, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney, a quintessential establishment figure with roots in the CD and PBP factions, in 2012.
- By 2016, the drumbeats of racial and cultural annihilation, most notably in the “Flight 93” article, had become too much to ignore. Trump was the beneficiary.
- Still, Trump didn’t win a majority of the votes in the GOP primaries until very late in the process. His victory was attributable more to the number of candidates doing battle to win in other lanes than to his own doing. And so, the racial/cultural reactionary succeeded an establishment figure as the head of the party without any significant change in opinion within the GOP.
- The real shift in opinion has occurred during the Trump era. Trump’s violations of democratic norms have been accepted by the mainstream of the GOP because the rank and file have been convinced that he is the only thing that stands between them and chaos, or, even worse, the gas chambers.
The bottom line here is that the trend line was clear even before Trump, and the raw materials have been there for decades, but Trump didn’t just expose them; he made them much worse with his divisiveness and his authoritarian leanings. We would not be where we are today if Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio had not been running in the same ideological lane in 2016. A President Rubio would have taken some of the same actions that Trump did, but we would not be talking about the likelihood of the Orban Option if he were in office.