The Modern Republican Party and its search for a villain

Surprise it's Democrats.

If there was a savior of modern American conservatism, it was William F. Buckley, Jr.

In 1951, he wrote a fairly well received book called “God and Man at Yale” decrying what he called the Liberal Establishment. At the time he wrote this, modern conservatism as a political philosophy had only really been examined on economic basis by Friedrich Hayek

Buckley used his intellectual skills and mastery of the written word to join the various conservative movements into a philosophy that would join economic libertarians, social conservatives, and religious conservatives together.

The glue that held them together was anti-communism.

In 1952, the contenders to be the GOP standard bearer were the President of Columbia University (and former WWII General) Dwight Eisenhower, a foreign policy interventionist, and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, a rather unapologetic isolationist. And the battle was hardly new, the GOP had been largely isolationist since its inception. Its biggest intra-party battle centered over foreign policy in the first half of the 20th Century.

Theodore Roosevelt and to a lesser degree William McKinley had pursued interventionist policies while their Republican successors William H. Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover favored isolationism. And while Wendell Wilkie and a lesser extent Tom Dewey supported FDR’s war efforts; by 1948, Dewey found himself trying to bridge the growing schism between the GOP’s isolationists and interventionists.

When Eisenhower jumped into the GOP primary to take on Taft in 1952, he needed a message to keep the GOP coalition unified as the Korean War, the United Nations, and the Marshall Plan divided conservatives and factions within the GOP.

The Republican Party sharpest divide was cleaved together with the greatest political glue ever imagined.

Anti-communism.

Communism was anti-capitalism, anti-freedom, and anti-religion. Any internal woe, crisis, or scandal within the GOP could be answered with the need for political unity to fight the communist menace. And political foes were quickly derided or dismissed as “soft on communism”, which was the ultimate push button issue for conservatives and swayed most moderates as well.

From 1952 to 1988, the GOP got more 50% of the popular vote in 6 out of 10 presidential elections and lost two election in squeakers. The one Democratic rout over the Republican Party came in 1964, with Lyndon Johnson getting elected less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And the fact that the conservative vote was split between Nixon and Wallace in 1968 (and the two received over 50% of the vote), it’s 7 out of 10 wins for conservatism.

Anti-communism and the Democratic Party’s weakness on the issue was the Republican election narrative for nearly 40 years. The 1988 election devastated the political Left as the Democratic Party seemed incapable of winning the White House (they had lost 4 out of the last 5).

Then the Soviet Union fell, the Eastern Bloc crumbled quickly, and the key to the GOP’s lock on the presidency disappeared. The post-Cold War era opened electoral possibilities for Democrats. Call it populism or renewed idealism. Whatever is was, the American electorate was attracted to it. The GOP, or maybe just its standard bearers, had no message to unify its base and no new ideas to attract moderate voters.

The proof in the pudding of conservatism’s failure to attract voters came in the 2000 Election. The GOP had lost the popular vote for the third straight election, and the GOP’s messaging, despite an Electoral College win by George W. Bush, did not excite voters beyond its core supporters.

Then in the weeks and months following an awful Tuesday morning in September, the GOP re-found its footing. Histrionics over 9/11 was a greater clarion call than the war on communism. The PATRIOT act, the infamous Cheney memos, and the rise of neo-conservatism were all born from the ashes of Manhattan, Arlington, and Stonycreek.

The War on Terror justified bloated defense budgets, sharp cuts in domestic spending, and continued fealty to tax cuts as the Right’s penicillin for every conceivable economic woe. And as an added benefit, Al-Qaeda, the religious faction responsible for 9/11, was stridently anti-America, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian. Religious conservatives suddenly saw Islam as a ready replacement for its fealty to the anti-communism message and jumped on board.

And it worked.

Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia and decorated Vietnam War veteran (he lost both legs and his right arm in a battle there), lost his reelection battle in 2002 based on nothing more than being cast as “ weak on Terror” in campaign ads, and President George W. Bush won reelection by characterizing another decorated Vietnam War veteran (Senator John Kerry) as weak on terrorism. The message of Democrats being soft on communism was replaced by the GOP claiming their superiority in the war on terrorism.

Unfortunately, the problem was it was not enough to reverse very bad demographic and generational trends. From 1976 to 1988, the GOP got an average of more than 53% of the popular vote (48.0%, 50.7%, 58.8%, and 53.4%, chronologically). From 1992 to 2004, the average dropped down to just above 44% (37.4%, 40.7%, 47.9%, and 50.7%, chronologically).

Since 2000, the GOP presidential ticket has averaged 47.2%.

Before any conservatives get too excited, the Democratic Party’s standard bearers over the same period averaged over 50% of the popular vote.

And watching how conservative intellectuals handled the Obama presidency, one would conclude the GOP had abandoned its public policy arguments for racism, conspiracy theories, and pure obstructionism.

When Joe Biden got elected, the same religious and racial invectives that were used against Barack Obama, have repackaged to attack Biden.

Why?

The level of tolerance for Donald Trump’s approach to governance, even when it fell off the rails of conservative economics (e.g. trade policies) or reversed decades of U.S. influence in world affairs, coupled with Trump’s continued influence over evangelical voters eliminated any need for philosophical continuity on the Right.

Idealists, realists, and pragmatists (who were largely sidelined after 1980 anyway) within the Republican Party have been shunted aside by nihilists since 2016.

Hatred of communism was supplanted by hatred of Islam. And what appeared to be the simply the hatred of a black man being President has morphed into simply hating Democrats.

And the GOP has no need for a philosophy to justify that