“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that.”
“People as they make more and more money can pay a higher percentage” of taxes.
Does that sound to you like the Republican frontrunner in 2016?
It is.
While many fail to understand how, possibly, Donald Trump could be leading the Republican Presidential primary, that's because -- as Michael Lind points out in the linked piece -- they really don't understand the modern Republican Party.
I stand here today, as Governor of this sovereign state, and refuse to willingly submit to illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government.
And it is a sad day in our country that you cannot walk even in your neighborhoods at night or even in the daytime because both national parties, in the last number of years, have kowtowed to every group of anarchists that have roamed the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and throughout the country. And now they have created themselves a Frankenstein monster, and the chickens are coming home to roost all over this country.
Yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks -- the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we’re going to show, there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.
It’s people—our fine American people, living their own lives, buying their own homes, educating their children, running their own farms, working the way they like to work, and not having the bureaucrats and intellectual morons trying to manage everything for them. It’s a matter of trusting the people to make their own decisions.
What are the Real issues that exist today in these United States? It is the trend of the pseudo-intellectual government, where a select, elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions, have spoken from some pulpits, some college campuses, some newspaper offices, looking down their noses at the average man on the street.
The first quote obviously wasn't Trump, but it could have easily been somebody like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. But almost any of these quotes could easily have come from a GOP Presidential contender in 2016 -- perhaps even Donald Trump. But, no, if the title of this diary wasn't a dead giveaway, those quotes all came from 1968 Presidential candidate George Wallace.
And Trump has inherited the mantle of right-wing populism that has largely been dormant since 1968. Wallace was the canary in the coal mine that showed that in 1968, the Democrats' long-running New Deal coalition was not viable in the long term. Trump is doing the exact same to the GOP's Reagan-era coalition. Join me below the fold for more.
When FDR won his first election in 1932, he assembled a coalition that would effectively win six of the next eight Presidential elections -- with the only break caused by Dwight D. Eisenhower, essentially a Republican-In-Name-Only who promised not to threaten the New Deal programs which had made FDR so popular.
That coalition -- Northern liberals, union members, white ethnics, African-Americans (where they were allowed to vote), and Southerners -- certainly did not agree on every single issue, but they were united in support of the New Deal. And the New Deal was exceptionally popular in the Southern states: the Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity to much of the South; the Works Progress Administration and similar programs built new courthouses, many of which still stand in county-seat towns throughout the South, as well as other public works projects that created jobs and pumped federal dollars into Southern states. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about was a major employer in the South, with numerous military installations and defense plants. And, of course, Medicare and Social Security -- the keystones of the New Deal -- were immensely popular. Granted, Southern politicians insisted on exempting domestic and agricultural workers -- which happened to be about the only jobs available to African-Americans in the South -- but other than that constituency (which couldn't vote in the Southern states in the 1930s, anyway), the New Deal was wildly popular throughout the South.
Of course, that was the one major disagreement between white Southerners and the rest of the New Deal coalition: white Southerners just couldn't support the party's leftward push on Civil Rights. The first battle came back in 1948, when Strom Thurmond won 39 electoral votes (winning his home state of South Carolina along with Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) as the candidate of the States' Rights (or Dixiecrat) Party. But the South mostly stayed in the Democratic fold for the next 20 years -- though the Deep South went for Barry Goldwater in 1964, it continued to be almost uniformly Democratic in other races -- before Wallace launched his independent run in 1968.
By 1968, the Civil Rights issue had become so flammable that the New Deal coalition could not stand much longer. White Southerners figured out that the Democratic Party would not, and could not (with so many other key constituencies favoring civil rights for African-Americans), stand by them on segregation, and George Wallace won 46 electoral votes -- and the Deep South would only vote for a Democrat once more (Jimmy Carter, in 1976) afterwards.
And yet, the Dixiecrats have been an even worse fit in the GOP than they were in the New Deal-era Democratic Party. While Republican politicians have regularly thrown red meat to the Dixiecrats in the form of dog-whistle rhetoric, at its core the GOP has always been committed to cutting spending and taxes -- and while tax cuts and spending cuts, to the Dixiecrats, mean tax cuts for people like themselves and spending cuts on relatively small-potatoes programs seen as mostly benefitting people not like them (welfare, food stamps), to the GOP's donor class it means tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts on big programs like Medicare and Social Security. About the one thing they can agree on is that defense spending -- which benefits both people like the Dixiecrats (again, note the large number of military installations in the South) and wealthy defense contractors.
But the specter of right-wing populism has long haunted the GOP. Since Wallace, many white Southerners have reluctantly entered the Republican fold, in large part because (in their minds) the Democrats are an even worse alternative, and because Republican politicians cut taxes on the middle class (in exchange for even larger tax cuts for the wealthy) and feed them a stream of rhetoric. The GOP's donor class has long acted as an effective check on right-wing populism: for most politicians, you can't possibly fund a Presidential campaign (or really any campaign) without support from big-money donors, and populism on tax-and-spend issues is such complete anathema to that group that few politicians can hope to compete while running such a campaign. So while past candidates like Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum have run somewhat populist campaigns, none have crossed the line into full-bore populism. Accepting GOP orthodoxy on tax-and-spend issues remains a must.
That is, unless you're Donald Trump. The difference between Trump and Santorum is that Trump doesn't need the support of the GOP donor class. Trump IS the GOP donor class. And he's running a full-blown campaign of right-wing populism, sounding extremist positions on issues like immigration that get the Dixiecrat (and the infamous Reagan Democrat) base riled up, while simultaneously taking the Wallace position on tax-and-spend issues. Replace "immigration" with "segregation," and there are few differences between Trump's platform and Wallace's. The only thing that's changed since 1968 is that active support for de jure racial segregation is no longer viable -- but active support for deporting 11 million people and building a giant wall to keep them out is very much a viable position.
So, the blatant right-wing populism that the reluctant Republicans of the Wallace stripe have long supported is finally coming home to roost. The only question is, what happens now that that Pandora's box has been opened? In the 1970s and 1980s, old-line Dixiecrats could simply take over the virtually empty Republican Party apparatus in their states and counties (and, though it took a long time, essentially take over the Republican Party in the process.) But taking back the Democratic Party in the South isn't an option -- the Democratic Party in the South in 2015 is not the Republican Party in the South of 1972, as it's not unpopulated but instead populated with white liberals, African-Americans, and Hispanics whose views are entirely at odds with the Tea Party.
The only other option is a complete split, with either the right-wing populists or the remaining business base of the GOP forming a new party -- but without the support of the other side, there still is no viable national party there. Trump is showing that once a candidate opens the box of right-wing populism (and, let's be honest, he's being joined in that effort by Ben Carson and Ted Cruz), there is no way for the two groups to continue to coexist as a coherent national party. You can have a party in which different groups have disagreements on minor issues -- but you cannot have a party in which one group wants to actively court Hispanic voters, cut taxes on the wealthy, and cut Medicare and Social Security, while another group wants to alienate Hispanic voters, raise taxes on the wealthy, and protect Medicare and Social Security. When different segments of a party disagree even on the most basic issues of the day -- much like when white Southerners disagreed with the rest of the Democratic Party on segregation -- that party can't exist for much longer.