Republican Abraham Lincoln would be appalled
The deterioration of the Republican Party and the coarsening of national politics began with Newt Gingrich. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, Gingrich arrived in Washington from Georgia with the goal of destroying politics as usual, which relied on Republicans and Democrats working together, compromising, and being civil toward each other. He argued that if the GOP ever wanted to defeat Democrats – who had controlled both the House and the Senate since the elections of 1954 – they needed to adopt an unforgiving style of partisanship employing character assassination and tearing down of governing institutions.
“If you teach them [Republicans] how to be aggressive and confrontational,” Gingrich wrote to House Minority Leader Robert Michel, “you will increase their abilities to fight Democrats on the floor.” If the GOP was not more aggressive, Gingrich believed, it would always remain be the minority party.
When he became the Speaker of the House, Gingrich played a key role in undermining democratic norms in the United States and hastening political polarization and partisanship. According to Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, Gingrich’s speakership had a profound and lasting impact on American politics and the health of American democracy. They argue that Gingrich instilled a “combative” approach in the Republican Party, in which hateful language and hyper-partisanship became commonplace.
Gingrich frequently questioned the patriotism of Democrats, calling them corrupt, comparing them to fascists, and accusing them of wanting to destroy the United States. University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason cites Gingrich’s instructions to Republicans to use words such as “betray, bizarre, decay, destroy, devour, greed, lie, pathetic, radical, selfish, shame, sick, steal, and traitors” when speaking about Democrats, a breach of social norms and fueling partisan prejudice.
Gingrich is a key figure in the 2017 book The Polarizers by Colgate University political scientist Sam Rosenfeld about the American political system’s swing to polarization and gridlock. Boston College political scientist David Hopkins argued that Gingrich helped to nationalize American politics such that Democratic politicians on the state and local levels were increasingly tied to the national Democratic Party. Hopkins noted that Gingrich’s approach “directly contradicted the conventional wisdom of politics...that parties in a two-party system achieve increasing electoral success as they move closer to the ideological center...Gingrich and his allies believed that an organized effort to intensify the ideological contrast between the congressional parties would allow the Republicans to make electoral inroads in the South. They worked energetically to tie individual Democratic incumbents to the party’s more liberal national leadership while simultaneously raising highly charged cultural issues in Congress, such as proposed constitutional amendments to allow prayer in public schools and to ban the burning of the American flag, on which conservative positions were widely popular, especially among southern voters.”
Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in actually legislating, a task that had previously been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. He paved the way for Republicans who have almost no interest in governance. How is it that the party of Lincoln allowed itself to become the party of Trump, controlled by the president, Senator Mitch McConnell, and the Freedom Caucus? For years, Republicans had sent their base into ever-greater rage with paranoia, conspiracy theories, lies, and denialism. In the Fox News universe, all good Americans are under constant threat from brown hordes, all Democrats are criminals and traitors, and all inconvenient problems are fake or somebody else’s fault.
As Ryan Cooper wrote in The Week magazine, “That was an effective tactic for a while. It provided not only the constant political sugar high of ideological frenzy, but also absolved Republican elites from having to grapple with any uncomfortable threats (like climate change). But when Trump came along in 2015, the other Republican presidential primary candidates could not effectively confront his crackpot campaign because it was just a more shameless version of the same garbage they had been selling for years.” He defeated and absorbed the Republican establishment because he exploited the irresponsibility of previous generations of Republican leadership and the right-wing press. “So now we have a president who is utterly incapable of dealing with any real problems, and a political movement behind him that has lobotomized itself so thoroughly that it cannot think at all. Just like Trump, tendentious debating tricks and propaganda are all it has left.”
McKay Coppin, writing about “The Man Who Broke Politics” for The Atlantic magazine, wrote, “Tomorrow morning, when these people turn on the news, they will see footage of a reckless president who ascended to the White House on the power of televised politics. In a few months, their airwaves will be polluted with nasty attack ads. They will read stories about partisan impeachment efforts, and looming government shutdowns, and lawmakers more adept at name-calling than passing legislation. And though he won’t be there to say it in person, Gingrich will be somewhere out in the world…thinking, ‘You’re welcome.’”
Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.