WRITERS GROUP
The Republican Party today is little more than the Dixiecrats of decades ago
Jacqueline R. Smetak
Writers' Group
The Republican Party is now walking dead. Inevitably someone is going to come along and blow out what's left of its brains. And that will be the end of the Grand Old Party.
It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when this process of decay began, but it is obvious that the Party of Trump is not the Party of Lincoln. Did it begin in 1877 when President Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction, leaving millions of freed slaves to the mercy of their former masters? Or in 1924 when the Immigration Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, closed our borders and barred practically everyone who wasn't white and Protestant from entering the country as an immigrant? Or did it begin with Republican opposition to the New Deal, which continues to this day in the form of Republican efforts to dismantle Social Security? Sen. Joe McCarthy was certainly a harbinger of things to come. Republicans didn't mind when he went after communists, labor unions, Democrats and the Hollywood elite, but calling President Eisenhower a "pinko" did not sit well.
But it's more accurate to say the beginning of the end began with Sen. Barry Goldwater's campaign for president in 1964. He ran on a "state's rights" platform. He lost the election but he won five of the old Confederate states. This was not lost on Richard Nixon who ran on a platform of "law and order"in 1968 and won in a landslide. "Law and order" was not a TV show. It was a dog whistle. Nixon was not about to go after popular social programs or get tangled up in a culture war, but bashing hippies, pacifists and black people was right up his alley. 1968 was wracked by race riots, unruly demonstrations, political assassinations, and increasing crime and violence. It was the world spinning out of control. Nixon's law-and-order response appealed to those frightened and appalled by this violent end to the Norman Rockwell 1950s.
And it was just what Southern Democrats had been waiting to hear.
Since the end of the Civil War, the Democratic Party had been two parties yoked together that had little in common and hated each other. Southern Democrats/Dixiecrats, with the election of a heathen Catholic as president, were losing their grip on the party. But they'd been looking to jump ship ever since Democrats had adopted a civil rights plank in the party platform in 1948. In 1968, Nixon gave Dixiecrats something to jump to. The full transformation, however, would take another 25 years.
In 1980, moral-majority evangelicals made the switch when they rejected fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter in favor of a divorced actor who never attended church. In the following decade, Newt Gingrich was elected speaker of the House and became the leader of the Republican revolution of 1994. High on the agenda was impeaching President Bill Clinton, which backfired, but it was the beginning of the end of any semblance of bipartisanship in Congress as each party withdrew into its own ideological corner.
It's a party that won't accept difference in the ranks. Robert Ray, governor of Iowa back in the 1970s, would doubtless be dismissed as a RINO (Republican in name only). Republicans did, indeed, go after Congressman Jim Leach of Iowa for that very sin.
The Republican Party today is little more than the Dixiecrats of five and six decades ago. And like its predecessor, it openly embraces racism, misogyny, xenophobia, disdain for government, guns, fundamentalism and general bad taste.
In other words, the Grand Old Party is no more. Now it's all Trump.
Writers' Group member Jacqueline R. Smetak lives in Lone Tree.