VIEWPOINT: THE GOP’S TRANSFORMATION

By Timothy Weaver, Ph.D.

THE CONTEST FOR GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

Let’s get it right out there. Politics is about who gets what in the form of favorable treatment from the government. The two political parties represent the interests of two distinct socio-economic groups in America—the top 20% and the bottom 80% on the income scale. Many of the interests of one group contradict the interests of the other. The top group is determined to keep its wealth, and the bottom group is obsessed with upward mobility. This struggle is not explicit in their platforms, but it is the function for which two parties exist. Campaigns temporarily determine which group will win in the eternal struggle for resources.

Without ever admitting it, the struggle for primacy in America is between these two groups. There is a third group, but they share more in common with the upper 20%, even though they are in a category of their own—the top 1%. Placing them on the same graph as the rest requires using logarithms. Think of it this way. The first 99% of income is represented by a line on the wall starting at the floor and rising to about 12 inches. The top 1% would go higher than a 12-foot ceiling. 

I don’t mean to minimize the complexity of the struggle over finite resources. There is a large body of sociological research on the topic. Conflicts exist between various groups, so-called tribes, and within those groups themselves. For this article, I will step back from the granular analysis of group and individual dynamics and spotlight the larger struggle between the moneyed class and the rest of us. That is what politics boils down to today. Will those scarce resources benefit the middle class and the blue-collar workers or those who can invest and save great fortunes? The political parties have chosen. Let us examine how.

THE FAT CAT PARTY

For their part, the post-Goldwater Republican Party, the party of the well-off, keeps running the same play, and thus far, the Democrats do not have a run-stopping defensive plan. The strategy is simple but highly effective. The Party remains the fat cat party through and through, and it exists solely to allocate more privileges to the privileged through all levels of government. Don’t be fooled by the antics and noise. The current version is exactly like all the other versions. The goal remains the same: ferocious opposition to any government effort to redistribute money and privileges to the lower and middle classes, particularly those excluded from mainstream America. 

The trick is to attract enough members of the lower 80% to vote for the party of the rich. More about this later. The Democrat’s counter strategy is to accomplish the opposite through taxing policies and enacting social programs from child care, education, and health care to food stamps and prescription drugs. 

The length and breadth of the 20th century framed a struggle between these two forces—the rich using leverage to gain more government alms and the working and middle classes pushing for programs that help offset their disadvantages from being unwealthy. There used to be enough small and midsize businesses, corporate interests, well-off farmers, shopkeepers, wholesalers and retailers, wealthy investors, Northeastern Brahmins, and craftsmen and tradesmen nationwide to keep Republicans competitive in elections. 

THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY: APPEAL TO BIGOTRY

The Great Depression disrupted that coalition and converted many, except the wealthy and corporate interests, to a more liberal and democratic distribution of resources. Without the old alliance, Richard Nixon was the first postwar Republican President to grasp that the Party would become and remain a minority party for the remainder of the century if something did not change it. He conceived of the Southern Strategy in which the Republicans turned to race-baiting, evangelical causes, and socially offensive issues to convert Dixiecrats to Republicans. That approach meant bringing into the Big Republican Tent the solid white Democratic south that never abandoned Jim Crow and segregation even after the Kennedys used federal force to compel them. 

Now, the Party must deal with its newly found constituents. To a person, most new Republican voters are, as my father used to say, Democrats, but they don’t know it. They don’t know that the Democratic party has done more to help them stay in the race for intergenerational advancement by making certain expenses that the rich can easily afford also available to the rural and southern working and middle classes, the northern and midwestern successful small farmers, blue-color workers, professional classes and tradespeople. By this, I mean, for example, that college would be out of reach of everyone but the rich, as was the case initially, were it not for efforts to bring federal tax dollars to state public colleges and universities. Indeed, we can credit Lincoln for signing the Land Grant Act, the first federal action to support education. Government support for health care had the same beneficial effect on the working and middle classes by prolonging working life—but the wealthy who could afford the best health care viewed this as “socialized medicine’, something that would cost them money in the form of taxes. They viciously opposed it from the beginning and still do.

TAXING AS A MEANS OF REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH 

These federal and state tax dollars have offset the cost of college, without which no person below the top quintile would ever attend. It was not the Republican Party that made this happen, although I give Eisenhower credit for signing the Defense Education Act. But how do you stay in the game with a party that openly states it aims to help the working and middle classes gain an advantage? That is the challenge–—fighting the party that appeals to 80% of all voters–with a message of being for the rich. 

Nixon realized the impossibility of doing so. He reasoned that some of those voters could be converted by appealing to such base instincts that they would be blinded or made oblivious to the reality of the Republican cause—to harm them indirectly by helping their wealthy benefactors. How harmed? Taking away union options with right-to-work laws, allocating revenues to the rich through tax cuts that would otherwise be used for better child care, elder care, Pre-K education, better and less expensive healthcare, and more college opportunities.

DEFINING THE ENEMY

That is a chore, and Nixon set out to implement it with alacrity. He got his first opportunity with the Vietnam war protest. He had to make young people who hated him and the war appear to hate America by appealing to the innate and more profound feeling of patriotism, especially among rural Americans and those in the south. His law and order appeal to the emotions of those voters began to work until it didn’t work. But Reagan saved the cause. The southern conversion of Dixiecrats—meaning arch-conservative southern Democrats—is put into focus in an interview with Jesse Helms, a Democrat in name only who converted in 1970 to the Republican Party. More later about Helms and the pro-life agenda of the Republican Party. 

Reagan’s magic was the Nixon plan done with a smile, charm, and uplifting rhetoric. It fooled me, and it fooled a lot of disgruntled professionals who found themselves left behind in the inflationary spiral President Carter couldn’t or wouldn’t aggressively curb. Reagan swept into office with his reputation as a father figure, talking tough love to the unruly kids at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and USC. He not only spoke tough love, but he also issued harsh measures. He made it more difficult for middle-class and working-class Californians to attend college in the first place. He had protestors arrested and dragged off campuses. He went after their ringleaders, such as Angela Davis. 

Reagan was not a racist in the classic sense—he kept his contempt hidden. Here is an excerpt from Reagan’s recorded conversation with Nixon: Referring to African nations voting against accepting China at the UN, Reagan said to Nixon, ‘To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!’ Nixon gave a huge laugh.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-reagans-racist-conversation-richard-nixon/595102/ 

Reagan had other prejudices, but it was not au courant then for Republicans to blabber racial or homophobic tropes in public. He was not overtly homophobic and defended gay friends. His differences with Ron Jr. seem more political and centered around religious differences. Ron Jr. was a well-known gay atheist and a liberal, while Reagan was a Christian and a conservative. Homophobes surrounded him, but none of it seemed to affect his views. His record on AIDS is another matter, partly explaining why he was sometimes estranged from his gay son. But none of this was Reagan’s MO as the leader of the Republican Party. He was a kinder, gentler Nixon but a Nixon nonetheless. 

Reagan perfected the Nixon southern strategy and made it seem acceptable, almost expected, that Southerners should be Republicans. He added a feature of his own: Union busting. This effort alone was highly detrimental to the advancement of the working class and large numbers of the middle class and highly beneficial for the biggest corporations and service industry. Right-to-work laws spread like wildfire among the red states and many purple states. For this, we must thank Reagan. Yet, Reagan appealed to a widespread audience. The working class admired his get-tough attitude. Small and midsize companies liked his tax cuts and union busting, and corporations loved him for Reaganomics. Reagan convinced blue-collar workers that he was their pal. Thus began the Republican strategy that would jell around appeals to a targeted group’s ugliest emotions and passions to brainwash them into forgetting that the Party they support is against them, root and branch. Reagan convinced the working and middle classes that his massive tax cuts would lift all boats. It only lifted the mega yachts of the rich and famous.

APPEALING TO THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Another ingredient of the modern Republican Party emerged with the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade. The newly admitted to the Big GOP Tent were instrumental in pushing the party toward a pro-life stance. Jesse Helms was the chief architect of the party platform that advocated for pro-life in 1973. Helms was a racist evangelical Christian and a classic southern politician who became the core of the Republican party. Helms was bitterly opposed to abortion and called it murder. This was also a clever political tactic. It brought in Catholics, formerly Democrats, with pictures of Kennedy on the kitchen wall and Evangelical Christians. Jerry Falwell became a prominent figure in the Republican Party. Abortion and the full range of liberal open policies and programs came with the not-so-subtle racism. The Party began to adopt an aggressive position against every liberal or progressive policy the Democrats offered. They went all in on cultural issues.

The Goldwater debacle caused the whole party to crash and burn in a Democratic landslide; finding new voters and a new leader was the only solution. That leader would be Reagan, and those voters would be Democrats unhappy with the racial, abortion, and social agenda of the Kennedy-Johnson era. Yet, party leaders realized that to win over those voters, they would have to fool them, literally trick them. Thus came the new Republican Party, the Party of grievance, the Party fighting the Great Culture Wars.

The lower-middle and working-class voters had to believe that millionaires and billionaires had their best interests at heart. That is a feat, and it required a complete distraction from the real Republican agenda of perpetuating wealth among the wealthy. They understood they would lose the new Republican voters instantly if they ever awakened and realized that the consecutive tax cuts starting with Reagan and ending with Trump would remove trillions in revenue that would otherwise make it easier for their new voters to access health care, send their children to Pre-K schools, obtain subsidies for child care enabling them to work, elder care to help offset the cost of supporting parents or grandparents, much lower costs of attending college, increases in minimum wages to keep pace with inflation. The Republican creed became, if you don’t give them your money, they can’t waste it. By wasting it, the Party of Lincoln meant spending it to help the common man. Seizing upon anti-abortion passions, patriotism, anti-gay rights, and guns, the GOP has transformed its image into the everyman party. It is working. 

The new Republican voters are oblivious to what the Fat Cats in Congress are about because they are entranced with every inane utterance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Matt Gates, Paul Gosar, Ron DeSantis, Trump, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and Kevin McCarthy. They hang on their every racist, gun-loving, anti-abortion, pseudo-patriotic, homophobic, and election fraud attack on the Democratic Party. These issues for them have become something they can count on their politicians to deliver. 

Republicans have delivered. They have made these the issues their new voters weigh when they elect candidates. They have even succeeded in making their voters forget who brought them social security, Medicare, Obama Care, the student loan program, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Civil Rights Act, voting rights, minimum wage increases, workplace safety protections, the infrastructure bill, the American Rescue Plan, regulations that protect the water they drink and air they breathe, laws that prevent credit companies from fleecing them, protections against bank failures and a host of other laws that benefit them directly. 

ATTACK ON PRIVACY RIGHTS—ANOTHER ACT OF LEGERDEMAIN

We have a strange modern-day thing: A political party injects itself through laws and the courts into strictly medical matters, science, and individual privacy to win voter support. Abortion has been the main target, but it does not end there. This appeals to those who think the state must rein in social and sexual behavior and tolerance for “extreme” forms of such behavior. 

The goal on the right seems to be to extinguish conduct they believe their voters dislike by perversely using the levers of government—harming individual agency rather than enhancing it. The target is the LGBTQ+ community and forms of sexual identity these people find abhorrent—such as gender transference. This is becoming a vital part of the GOP game plan, which rests upon the clever use of legerdemain. Distract with one hand while picking your pocket with the other. While Republican voters in red states are fed a steady diet of legislation designed to erase from public education the transgender world, Black History, and queer life, these same states are all in the lower quartile in supporting K-12 education, higher education, Medicaid, Obama Care, minimum wages, child care, and food stamps. The latter are all ways government can help offset the disadvantages of not being wealthy.

Today’s anti-gay crusade smacks of old authoritarian tendencies and an obsession with personal and private conduct. It seems to pervade every right-wing extreme political party in the western world. The Republicans are onto something. They have begun to mirror the Catholic and Evangelical treatment of women as a means to retain power. It would appear to be an attack on the least powerful to advance a political agenda. Whatever lens we use, the process is the same: attack individual rights to whip up the fervor of the masses.

DIRECTION THROUGH INDIRECTION DOTH THEY FIND

Staying competitive as a political party is a huge accomplishment for the Republicans. How did they implement this master stroke, transforming the party from a minority party headed to oblivion into a viable and competitive political force? Why has this strategy worked? How can Democrats break this spell? For several reasons discussed in other columns, the GOP strategy works with these voters for, among other reasons, their lack of conceptual complexity and ability to integrate complex issues and facts. It is tough to make the somewhat abstract case here—that the GOP is shafting them and serving the rich behind their backs. 

Take the case of education, an essential means by which the working and middle classes increase their socio-economic status. Education for these classes equals social mobility. While Republican voters are entranced by an endless spree of cultural spinning and whirling, their leaders have been busy cutting government spending on one of the vital gateways for the working and middle classes to advance—education. State legislatures and Congress have whirled and spun the abortion issue, the LGBTQ+ issues, gender-affirming treatments, the election fraud issue, the January 6 issues, and the guilt or innocence of Trump. These are headline-robbing issues. All attention at Fox News is devoted to these issues. At all levels of government, Republicans are at work reducing spending on child care, Medicaid, food stamps, child tax credits, and elementary, secondary, and tertiary education. The numbers don’t lie. Total educational spending at all levels of government has flatlined since the upsurge in the 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, the percentage of GDP allocated to education at all levels began to taper off. The rate of government spending allocated to education at the federal and state levels followed suit. 

The impact is clear. We spend less than the median on all levels of education than other OECD countries. The real hurt has been at two points–Pre-K education which Biden wanted to make universal and fund with federal dollars, and higher education, where grants were replaced with student loans, and the proportion of the education tab picked up by the state and federal government has declined significantly, leaving families to make up the rest. The net outcome is a debt bubble in student loans and family borrowing to keep pace with those above them on the income spectrum. 

This happens as wages stagnate, and the middle and working classes struggle with rising living costs. The hyper rise in college costs means they must carry an even more significant burden. All of this results from the Reagan through Trump tax cuts and accompanying similar tax cuts in Republican-dominated states, which have collectively removed trillions from the revenue stream that would otherwise support education and other social programs. West Virginia is a prime example. The legislature just passed a 50% income tax cut to remove $750 million from the state’s revenue stream. This is a state in the lower half of education spending and the lower quartile on almost every other social index.

If this trend continues, in a few decades, the middle class will have transformed into what once were the lower middle and upper lower classes. There is a steady retreat in the socio-economic status now of the middle class, and a smaller percentage of their children are attending college for the first time since the college surge following WWII. This condition carries the prospect of more angst, anomie, and unrest in what has been America’s solid core of stability. 

Hope? The GOP strategy is to pull Democrats into the culture war issues and dominate the news with tit-for-tat attacks. Political campaigns turn on these issues rather than resource distribution problems. Looked at over 40 years, the GOP has been highly influential in redistributing resources to the upper 20%. Biden did a reasonably good job of making his campaign about helping the middle and working class, but Biden is not a transformative President like Obama or Johnson or Kennedy. He is getting the job done but needs to pull in voters from the other side and convert them for the long term. Democrats succeed best with an anti-Trump leader who uplifts, whose moral core is unquestioned, and who sees and brings out the best in us, our humanitarian instincts. We need a second coming of JFK!

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