Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
oon after President Obama's second inaugural address, John Boehner said the White House would try "to annihilate the Republican Party" and "shove us into the dustbin of history."
Actually, the GOP is doing a pretty good job
annihilating itself. As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal put it,
Republicans need to "stop being the stupid party."
The GOP crackup was probably inevitable.
Inconsistencies and tensions within the GOP have been growing for years -
ever since Ronald Reagan put together the coalition that became the
modern Republican Party.
All President Obama has done is finally found ways to exploit these inconsistencies.
Republican libertarians have never got along with social conservatives, who want to impose their own morality on everyone else.
Shrink-the-government fanatics in the GOP have never
seen eye-to-eye with deficit hawks, who don't mind raising taxes as long
as the extra revenues help reduce the size of the deficit.
The GOP's big business and Wall Street wing has never
been comfortable with the nativists and racists in the Party who want to
exclude immigrants and prevent minorities from getting ahead.
And right-wing populists have never got along with big
business and Wall Street, which love government as long as it gives
them subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts.
Ronald Reagan papered over these differences with a
happy anti-big-government nationalism. His patriotic imagery inspired
the nativists and social conservatives. He gave big business and Wall
Street massive military spending. And his anti-government rhetoric
delighted the Party's libertarians and right-wing populists.
But Reagan's coalition remained fragile. It depended
fundamentally on creating a common enemy: communists and terrorists
abroad, liberals and people of color at home.
On the surface Reagan's GOP celebrated Norman
Rockwell's traditional, white middle-class, small-town America. Below
the surface it stoked fires of fear and hate of "others" who threatened
this idealized portrait.
In his first term Barack Obama seemed the perfect
foil: A black man, a big- spending liberal, perhaps (they hissed) not
even an American.
Republicans accused him of being insufficiently
patriotic. Right-wing TV and radio snarled he secretly wanted to take
over America, suspend our rights. Mitch McConnell declared that
unseating him was his party's first priority.
But it didn't work. The 2012 Republican primaries exposed all the cracks and fissures in the GOP coalition.
The Party offered up a Star Wars barroom of oddball
characters, each representing a different faction - Bachmann, Perry,
Gingrich, Cain, Santorum. Each rose on the strength of supporters and
then promptly fell when the rest of the Party got a good look.
Finally, desperately, the GOP turned to a chameleon -
Mitt Romney - who appeared acceptable to every faction because he had no
convictions of his own. But Romney couldn't survive the general
election because the public saw him for what he was: synthetic and
inauthentic.
The 2012 election exposed something else about the
GOP: it's utter lack of touch with reality, its bizarre incapacity to
see and understand what was happening in the country. Think of Karl
Rove's delirium on Fox election night.
All of which has given Obama the perfect opening - perhaps the opening he'd been waiting for all along.
Obama's focus in his second inaugural - and, by
inference, in his second term - on equal opportunity is hardly a radical
agenda. But it aggravates all the tensions inside the GOP. And it
leaves the GOP without an overriding target to maintain its fragile
coalition.
In hammering home the need for the rich to contribute a
fair share in order to ensure equal opportunity, and for anyone in
America - be they poor, black, gay, immigrant, women, or average working
person - to be able to make the most of themselves, Obama advances the
founding ideals of America in such a way that the Republican Party is
incapable of opposing yet also incapable of uniting behind.
History and demographics are on the side of the
Democrats, but history and demography have been on the Democrats' side
for decades. What's new is the Republican crackup - opening the way for a
new Democratic coalition of socially-liberal young people, women,
minorities, middle-class professionals, and what's left of the
anti-corporate working class.
If Obama remains as clear and combative as he has been
since Election Day, his second term may be noted not only for its
accomplishment but also for finally unraveling what Reagan put together.
In other words, John Boehner's fear may be well-founded.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause
No comments:
Post a Comment