A funny thing happened on the way to the election. The Republican Party after 2012 saw itself in danger of becoming a minority party of aging, poorly-educated, white men. It vowed to fix the problem, less by changing its policies than by changing its image. We see how that’s working out.
According to Marco Rubio we’re in a clash of civilizations with Islam – all one billion Islamic people. The party has voted to keep Islamic refugees from terrorism out of the country. Ben Carson has justified such restrictions because you can’t be too careful with rabid dogs. The Reverend Ted Cruz says gay people are waging a jihad on Christians, that most violent criminals are Democrats and that he’s for American values, not New York values.
Attempts are under way to shut down Planned Parenthood and deny less affluent women reproductive health care. Rubio, trying anything to get righter than the rest, is for zero abortions, not even in the cases of rape, incest, life of the mother. And Republican legislatures in many states have restricted voting rights, the better to suppress the vote of the young, minorities and other Democratic constituencies. For eight years the country’s first black president has been called illegitimate, not an American citizen, a Muslim, a Kenyan, a socialist and epithets unworthy of anything but the wall of an outhouse.
And then there’s the front runner, Donald J. Trump, who is running the most divisive race since the days of George Wallace. He has called for registering all American Muslims, the monitoring all mosques, and a travel ban into and out of the country for all Muslims. He has called Hispanics rapists and murderers, has denigrated women, minorities, the disabled, elected representatives of his own party and the citizens of the states in which he is campaigning. He is the master of smear and innuendo, the birther-in-chief and has encouraged his rallies to maltreat members of the press, probably because they occasionally notice he is a stranger to truth.
A few prominent Republicans have called this kind of talk fascist, but many of those running for office have imitated him. It is now cool to be politically incorrect, boorish, abusive and divisive. Do they too favor a program of racial discrimination, nativism, religious intolerance, misogyny and the curtailment of civil rights? Or are they just afraid of the aptly named base, the angry Tea Party, the talk radio hosts who serve as propaganda ministers for the right.
One can’t help thinking of Neimoller who said, they came for the Socialists, the union leaders, the Jews and I didn’t speak out. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out. Keeping silent is allowing the fringe to hijack the Republican Party and fellow travelers among independents and Democrats.
We’ve seen this story before in Europe with the Nazis and today with the National Front and similar parties from Denmark to Greece. And it has a long history in America. The Klan hated blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants. The Know-Nothing Party was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. There have been waves of anti-immigrant hysteria aimed at swarthy people from Southern Europe, at Chinese, Japanese and Hispanics. Even at Germans, which ought to temper the rhetoric of Herr Limbaugh, Herr Beck and Herr Trump whose grandfather, the illegal immigrant and brothel proprietor Frederick Drumpf, founded the family in America.
Jean Hardisty of the Political Research Association noted that such spasms of discriminatory, un-American activities coincide with conservative religious revivals and economic contractions and restructurings. They invariably feature race resentment, bigotry and scapegoating because the result of stress is a lashing out at ‘the other’ – newcomers, newly empowered minorities, women, and educated elites who are succeeding economically. Often such movements are abetted by a well-funded network of right-wing organizations.
Demographics, history and the principles of the country are against the long-term success of such a regressive program. Some believe, or hope, that if nothing is done to steer the Republican Party back toward the mainstream it will either fragment or go the way of the Know-Nothings and the Anti-Masonic Party. But there have been plenty of times when such fringe movements have caught fire and succeeded in seizing the popular imagination, and power with it. And not just elsewhere.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we have enslaved a race, then segregated them, put all persons of Japanese ancestry in camps, hosted Red Scares, witch hunts, the extermination and forced resettlement of native populations and witnessed the rise of an anti-American government presided over by a man named Jefferson. Davis, that is.
In “Broadcast News,” the Albert Brooks character warns against a TV anchor who has no morals other than careerism and calls him the Devil. Holly Hunter thinks this is extreme. Brooks says: “What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like? He will be attractive! He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation.”
Or maybe he’ll build tall buildings with gold faucets, run for president, ‘tell it like it is,’ and promise to make everything great again. So long as you aren’t on his long, long list of enemies.
It can happen here.