The Republican Party Was Never Great

GOP dissidents and Never Trumpers yearn for a party that only existed in their imagination.

Kurt Bardella recently wrote an article titled “The Republican Party Keeps Convincing Me I Was Right To Leave It,” in which he bemoans how today’s GOP has become the party of Trump.

He’s not alone. Governor John Kasich, former McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, GOP activist David French, and many others have claimed that Trump has ruined the party. But that claim implies that there was something to good to ruin. To put it another way, was the GOP ever great?

The first thing Bardella complains about is how the GOP included an anti-pornography plank into its platform, yet it was willing to look the other way when it came to Trump’s own moral transgressions.

While it’s true that Trump certainly is more flamboyantly salacious than perhaps anyone else in history, in terms of moral contradictions, he’s simply par for the course. Bardella claims he was a member of the GOP for the past 15 years, yet he seems remarkably ignorant of the party’s foibles before Trump.

Let’s start in the 1990s. During that time, the GOP’s de facto leader was House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a man who most famously tried to impeach President Bill Clinton over his extramarital affair — while he himself was having his own extramarital affair. After Newt resigned — not because of the affair, which was ‘common knowledge’ in GOP circles — he was replaced by Bob Livingston, who quickly stepped down after admitting to his own affair.

He, in turn, was replaced by Dennis Hastert. Hastert would later be forced to resign when Republican Mark Foley was caught sending sexual messages to underage male Congressional Pages. Hastert was informed about Foley’s behavior by other Congressmen earlier but did nothing about it.

Why? Because, as it was later revealed, Dennis Hastert himself was a serial child molester, and was later sentenced to prison over hush money payments. During his sentencing, former GOP officials showed up at his trial as character witnesses on his behalf, arguing he should be given a light sentence. This same officials had, during their time in Congress, argued in favor of eliminating the statue of limitations on sex crimes in order to ‘get tough’ on child molesters.

Think these were just a few bad apples? I can keep going. During the time Hastert was Speaker, the Republican National Committee was headed by Ken Mehlman, who famously decided to gin up ‘base’ support in 2004 by having ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage in as many states as possible. You’ve already guessed it, right? Mehlman was secretly gay the whole time.

Of course, we can’t forget President Bush, who won the nomination in 2000 by race baiting McCain. He signed off on torture, a war crime. He lied us into a war in Iraq, and outed a CIA agent to punish her husband for trying to expose the lie, which is reminiscent of Trump’s feuding with our intelligence agencies.

Bush claimed the war was justified because Saddam Hussein might develop and use “Weapons of Mass Destruction” on US civilian targets. Instead, it was Bush himself who used chemical weapons (which falls under WMD) on civilians in Iraq. Bush’s Mideast misadventures have cost us $5 trillion and counting.

Republicans kept being Republicans Obama years. It started on day one, when top GOP leaders and former leaders (including Newt Gingrich) plotted to bring Washington to a standstill and just oppose everything Obama did, all the time, purely for partisan reasons. They carried out that pledge, and then actually tried to claim credit for bills Democrats passed over their objections.

In 2012, Mitt Romney lay down the blueprint for Trump’s ‘lie all the time’ strategy, claiming “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” and that if he was caught in a lie, he’d simply continue to say it over and over. His disrespect for the lower class, while spoken more eloquently than Trump, was nevertheless just as palpable in his infamous 47% remarks.

And this is just the past 20 years. Go back further and you can see every generation of the GOP was dominated by Trump-style lying, hypocrisy, criminality, and racism. Reagan dishonestly and racistly campaigned against “welfare queens” who busted the budget, then busted the budget himself, tripling our national debt to pay for tax cuts for rich people. And let’s not forget the Iran Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran, then used the money to illegally fund the Contras, a right-wing terrorist group in South America.

In the 1970s, the GOP was led by Nixon, who became President by sabotaging the peace talks in Vietnam right before the election, an act that both President Johnson and the GOP Senate minority leader agreed was “treason.” Nixon did this while campaigning on a platform of “peace with honor” in Vietnam.

Nixon then initiated a “secret war” against Cambodia, which led to a genocide. Then came Watergate, in which the President first broke the law, then claimed that by virtue of his office, he was above it. Sounds a lot like Trump.

Before Nixon, there was Goldwater, who ran a stunningly racist campaign in 1964. Before that, there was the 1950s, and Senator Joe McCarthy, whose very name has become synonymous with paranoid witch hunts.

In the 1940s, still grappling with economic problems and with war on the horizon, the GOP decided its Presidential nominee would be a businessman with no political experience whatsoever. Sound familiar? Wendell Wilkie first critiqued FDR for not preparing for war enough. Then, when that line of attack failed, he switched gears and said FDR was ‘warmongering’ and pushing America into World War 2. Then, after the election, he switched his position again, this time supporting efforts to enter the war. Reminds of me when Donald Trump campaigned on peace in Syria, then embraced Hillary Clinton’s interventionist strategy once in office.

Of course, all this pales in comparison to the 1930s, when conservative businessmen hated FDR so much they actually tried to hire an army to overthrow the President.

You can’t go back much further without labels breaking down. Before FDR reshaped both political parties, the Democrats were still the party of white Southern conservatives, and the KKK was a major force in at the Democratic convention of 1924. But I’ve covered nearly 100 years, the living memory of all Americans. And its clear there was never a golden age for the GOP during this era.

So why do people keep claiming their was one? Ignorance of history is certainly a factor. But I believe there’s another explanation at work. Tribalistic loyalties can create mental blindness. Brain scans reveal is it difficult for people to recognize when people “on your side” are hypocrites. This means that the GOP in the imagination of people like Bardella, Steve Schmidt, David Frum, David French, and others, is simply the one that existed in their own minds, back when their cognitive dissonance filters were working properly.

I’m not a partisan for the Democrats. I could (and I probably will) write an article explaining all the things wrong with the Democratic party, although (spoiler alert) their crimes pale in comparison to what’s listed here. But comparing the parties is missing the point. The real takeaway here is to stop pretending Trump is some kind of aberration. That implies once he’s gone, politics and the GOP can return to normal.

But Trump isn’t a fluke, he’s the norm. He embodies all the same flaws that the GOP always has: lying, hypocrisy, racism, warmongering, and treason. He just does it while sending out mean tweets, which apparently makes all the difference for some people.