The Devolution of the Republican Party (Or How Trickle-Down, Pro-Corporate Politics Weakened America): Part I
From Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and what 2024 means for Progressives to undo the pro-corporate consensus of Washington DC.
Feel free to check out my past work on my Substack and Medium blogs, which feature past takes on the 2024 election cycle and exclusive write-ups on US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, among other matters. Also feel welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn with any comments or questions. And share any posts or petitions (Change.org or MoveOn) you like.
Before we begin, some startling news stories. For one, a Nixon-era minority business opportunity agency must now also serve white people, as a Texas judge just ruled. The assault on minority rights has reached new highs, from this Texas ruling, to North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, and to the campaign of voter purges across the country with the rise of the New Jim Crow (keep track of much of this with Vote.org).
And let’s not forget Ukraine, which faces a humanitarian crisis much like Israel-Gaza. Some of the victims of that humanitarian crisis include doubly-suffering Holocaust survivors. But is Mike Huckabee going to advocate for this humanitarian aid to his fellow Republicans like he has on TV (see the YouTube link above)? Call out their empty words Mike.
Yet Mike’s failure to stand up for Ukraine in the halls of Congress is a symptom of a much broader problem. This is the same Republican Party that once was an avowed enemy to Putin 10-12 years ago. What happened? What we see is clearly a pro-authoritarian, pro-strongman Republican Party in decline.
Still, that decline is the product of a much larger decay over the years and decades. It started in 1964, when Conservative Republicans opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—as Republican Party nominee and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater articulated so perfectly. Although he was crushed in a landslide, it forecast a new turn for the Republican Party.
In fact, one of Goldwater’s biggest supporters was Ronald Reagan, who stood side-by-side with him. In that year’s election, he talked about a new vision for the party of “small government” and “family values.” One that he would see bear fruit with his own 1980 election.
He ran against incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter that year. In spite of Carter’s relatively centrist approach to governance, and despite a stagflation crisis dating back to Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford, Reagan called big government the problem and the source of the country’s ills. Yes, even with the prosperity it procured from the 1930s through the 1960s. He railed against the tax burden on Americans, even though those taxes were the foundation of the enormous growth and success from the New Deal to the Great Society. And, to boot, the debt remained very low because of the amount of revenue that came from strategic investments through government programs and active intervention in American society and the economy overall. Taken together, America remained freer, stronger, and more equal with this government expansion without ever falling into the traps of Nazism, Fascism, or Communism.
But Reagan, being the clever actor he was, seized on the emotions of tough times, especially with OPEC’s price-gouging (much like today), and the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Carter, as good-hearted as he was, was easily outmatched by the smooth-talking professional Hollywood actor.
So what did Reagan do? Well, he certainly did not give tax cuts to the middle class and working families. Instead, Reagan and Republicans cut taxes for the rich, and gutted as many regulations as they could for their political allies. Ignoring the warnings of Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex, Reagan expanded the military to run more like a business (which aligned with how he thought of education and government in general). All the while, he did as much as he could to erode the social safety net—the lifelines for working families and the poor. He instigated the push to appoint justices to overturn the policies of Johnson, Kennedy, Truman, and even Roosevelt, a process which culminated in the current Supreme Court now. There was also the failed War on Crime and War on Drugs, which accelerated mass incarceration in the United States to where it is today.
As a member of a union family, it is hard to forget Reagan’s union-busting of more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, a fact also consistent with the GOP vision of corporate socialism for the wealthy, and rugged individualism for the poor. It is not the free market they envisioned, but rather a centralized, elite oligarchy pitting Wall Street against Main Street. Reagan should have known better as a former union head himself.
The consequences were dire, from Reagan, to Bush, and Trump. The wealthy got wealthier, the middle class got decimated, and the poor got poorer. Union suppression and corporate deregulation paved the way for more unequal and unstable economic conditions. Too many people felt left behind. Tax cuts did not grow revenue, nor did it shrink the need for popular social services like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Tax cutting, budget slashing, and defense spending did nothing but exponentially raise debt to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars.
During Reagan’s own presidency, farmers all across the country were on the brink of financial ruin. Outsourcing, deindustrialization, and mechanization started to affect our nation’s entire industrial base. Our country plunged into a recession in 1982, contrary to Reagan’s vision of a strong economy. Speaking more long-term though, GOP policies have made the American economy not only more unstable and unequal in its economic recoveries, but also more vulnerable to declines (such as the 2008 Great Recession, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic-induced recession).
We also cannot forget how the conservative agenda was legitimized with Bill Clinton—despite his campaigning against just this in 1992. To the contrary, Clinton expanded on many parts of it, abandoning the party coalition of organized labor, consumer advocates, farmers, small businesses, women, minorities, and immigrants in the process. With tough-on-crime measures, Big Business-backed, anti-union trade deals (NAFTA), further deregulation, and “welfare reform,” Bill Clinton legitimized, and completed, what Ronald Reagan started—thanks to the indispensable help and support of GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Sure, Reagan did not get himself into war, but if not for an elaborate network of spies across the globe, he could have easily plunged us into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The GOP/neocon vision of foreign intervention meant endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with no clear objectives in sight and high costs (a telling contrast to what 2022-2024 Ukraine has done on its own). Imagine the money that could have been invested in this country that instead went into the Middle East because of GOP war hawks like John Bolton, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, who duped George W. Bush into the Iraq quagmire (his father, George H.W. Bush and elder Bush’s most senior advisers were all against the full-scale invasion of Iraq).
That is the essence of the toll of conservative Republican Party policies over 4 decades. Now the same Republican Party wants to proclaim itself as the problem solver to the crises that have metastasized on their watch. It is because of their policies that the debt has ballooned to $34 trillion from less than one trillion in the 1980s. It is because of their policies that our economy is the most unequal it has been since the Gilded Age of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould. It is because of their policies that we had some of the greatest economic collapses since the Great Depression in 2008 and 2020. It is because of this way of governance that our lives, money, and resources have been directed overseas instead of being used for our growth and success here, with more waste, fraud, and abuse than ever before at the Pentagon. These are failed conservative policies—and really failed Republican Party policies period. And I suppose Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, Tim Hutchinson, Roy Moore, David Vitter, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Rosendale are not exactly the greatest role models for family values, though I could be wrong.
But 2024 can be the moment to change that direction. If President Joe Biden is given a 2nd term with a Democratic (and a more progressive Congress), the political landscape can be rewritten once more. Progressives could very well be on the cusp of matching the accomplishments of FDR and LBJ with a strong enough mandate by the people this coming election cycle. That will be our decision to make ultimately in November.
More to come later this weekend in the next piece, Part II: From Conservative Governance to MAGA Obstructionism.