Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 15

 

Political Dysfunction

Last week, Ezra Klein had a fascinating column in the New York Times titled “Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams.” After a brief introduction and a comparison of the state of the two major parties at the present moment, he says, “So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.” I found his three explanations rather insightful into the question of why the GOP has become such a politically dysfunctional mess.

His first reason is that Republicans are caught between money and the media. As Klein puts it, “For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing, and secularizing.” This split can be seen in the ongoing GOP effort to cut taxes, deregulate corporate misbehavior, and decrease Medicare and Social Security benefits while at the same time stoking racism and attempting to drastically curtail immigration. It succeeded at this balancing act for many years, but since Trump’s arrival on the political scene (and maybe before), this strategy has not worked. As Theda Skopol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, puts it, “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters.”

The GOP is a senior-heavy party, especially seniors who are less wealthy, and these voters certainly do not want politicians messing with their Social Security checks or Medicare coverage. Voters are also not supportive of losing jobs to low-wage countries, something GOP free-trade policies hastened. And nobody except the wealthy like to see tax cuts that benefit primarily the top 10 percent of households. But the corporate-dictated GOP policy agenda also alienated the grass roots, who were influenced by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators who pushed a white-nationalist, white-grievance message.

So, as Klein summarizes his first explanation for what has happened to the GOP, “It’s caught between a powerful business wing that drives its agenda and an antagonistic media that speaks for its ethnonationalist base, and it can’t reconcile the two.”

The second explanation is that we have the illusion that in each era, the GOP is composed of the same people, but it’s not. It is the same party, but with different voters. “A few decades ago, the anti-institutional strain in American politics was more mixed between the parties. Democrats generally trusted government and universities and scientists and social workers, Republicans had more faith in corporations and the military and churches. But now you’ll find Fox News attacking the ‘extremely woke’ military and the American Conservative Union insisting that any Republican seeking a congressional leadership post sign onto ‘a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.’”

Republicans have turned against institutions, including their own party, which is an institution, or at least used to be. Republicans also increasingly do not have college degrees. According to author Matt Continetti, “When Mitt Romney got the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. was basically split between college and non-college whites. That’s gone. The Republicans have just lost a huge chunk of professional, college-educated voters.” As the GOP becomes more anti-establishment, it loses voters who trust institutions and gains voters who mistrust them. What this also means is that Republicans are losing voters in the suburbs, the real heart of America, and are becoming a largely rural, non-college-educated party. This can be seen in the voting patterns of recent elections. But what kind of government can a party that is against institutions provide. As we’ve seen recently, it is a patently dysfunctional government.

And this brings us to Klein’s third explanation: Republicans need an enemy. The GOP does not really have an identity of its own anymore. As President Biden put it, What are they for? A party that has no platform is simply rudderless. Klein says, “When I asked Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, what the modern Republican Party was, he replied, ‘it’s not the Democratic Party.’ His point was that not much unites the various factions of the Republican coalition, save opposition to the Democratic Party.” But even this is not quite right. As I’ve explained before on this blog, the Republicans have gone from being the anti-Democratic party to being the anti-democratic party. Their anti-institutional bent has turned them against democracy, as we can see in both their embrace of a corrupt, authoritarian leader (Trump) and their refusal to condemn the insurrection of January 6, 2021, that he stoked.

Sam Rosenfeld, author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, described the difference between the two parties as follows: “The anchor of Democratic Party politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals. The conservative movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”

Says Klein, “There is an irresolvable contradiction between a party organized around opposition to government and Democrats and being a party that has to run the government in cooperation with Democrats.” This reminds me of P. J. O’Rourke’s quip that is more pertinent today than it was in 1991 when he wrote it: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

Klein concludes his analysis with this assessment Kevin McCarthy, who needed 15 votes to finally win the House Speaker’s gavel: “He apparently agreed to spending caps and budgetary guarantees that will commit House Republicans to the kinds of brutal cuts and dangerous showdowns that make them look like a party of arsonists, not legislators.” The next couple of months should be particularly ugly, and maybe devastating to the country, the global financial system, and the GOP base.

Many Latter-day Saints are died-in-the-wool Republicans, but they don’t realize what their party has become. It is the definition of dysfunction, and this did not start with Donald Trump, although he certainly hastened it. The GOP has internal conflicts that it simply cannot resolve. Unfortunately, it is moving in the direction of chaos, extremism, anti-institutionalism, anti-education, racism, nationalism, and white grievance. This is not a party any Latter-day Saint should embrace.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 14

 

A Regressive, Backward-Looking Philosophy

If we look at the underlying philosophies that undergird our two major political parties, we come upon the terms liberal and conservative. The liberal view of society is often called progressive because it is forward looking, with an aim to improve the human condition through government and private action. Sometimes the progressive view overshoots its target and aims for goals it cannot achieve. Sometimes it does achieve its goals but at a steep price. And sometimes it falls far short of its aim, such as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It is, nevertheless, a hopeful, optimistic view of human possibilities. And this philosophy is responsible for a great many of the societal advances that we now take for granted, such as Social Security, Medicare, public education, a robust middle class, increasingly inexpensive renewable energy, and health coverage for millions of previously uninsured Americans.

By contrast, conservatism is generally a pessimistic, backward-looking philosophy that yearns for an illusory past when things were better. The fact that such a time never existed does not discourage true-believing conservatives from insisting that it did. If you look at their response almost any societal advance, conservatives have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. And even then they are not content. For instance, as I write, the Republican Party is getting ready to once again hold the world financial system hostage unless the Democrats agree to make substantial cuts to Medicare and Social Security (and, of course, Medicaid), even though these cuts are extremely unpopular even with their own base, millions of whom would be devastated to lose any portion of their retirement and health benefits.

The GOP preaches small government, tax cuts, and spending cuts, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. When Trump was president, a GOP-controlled Congress passed a deficit-enhancing $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and approved nearly $3 trillion in new spending (before COVID), none of which was paid for by increased tax revenue. But now that Biden is in office, they have again become deficit hawks and are going after Social Security, Medicare, and programs that benefit the poor and disabled. They apparently still haven’t gotten over the idea of a social safety net for senior citizens and the poor, even though Social Security has been around since 1935 and Medicare since 1965.

Maybe in 1930 the average American didn’t need much retirement funding. The world was very different back then, but we can’t go back to those halcyon days. And maybe in 1960, most seniors could get cheap health care. But that ship sailed long ago. Still, conservatives are bound and determined to take us back to at least the 1950s and maybe beyond.

Much of this backward-looking delusion is due to the Christian Right, but Latter-day Saints need to understand that they have very little in common with Evangelicals, including the Jesus they worship. It would be very difficult to depict either Jesus or Joseph Smith as anything but liberal and progressive. Both tried to turn society upside down and lead their followers into a more just, equitable future. But somewhere along the line (probably about when the ultraconservative J. Reuben Clark called right-wingers Ezra Taft Benson, Mark E. Petersen, and Delbert L. Stapley as Apostles), the Latter-day Saints turned their backs on their own progressive past and became conservatives, dedicated to stopping societal progress dead in its tracks.

We became died-in-the-wool capitalists, good corporate citizens, fully in favor of allowing as much wealth as possible to flow to the top. Our theology also took a decidedly conservative turn. We now downplay, if not outright disregard, some of Joseph’s more adventurous doctrinal forays and portray ourselves as just ordinary Christians, whatever that is.

So, if you want to ignore the pressing issues of the day—poverty, out-of-control health-care costs, public health crises, global warming, large percentages of seniors retiring without sufficient retirement savings or pensions, unchecked gun violence, and housing that is too expensive for most Americans to afford—then by all means vote Republican. They are more concerned about proving nonexistent election fraud, banning books from schools, making it harder for minorities to vote, passing tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing Social Security and Medicare, and investigating Hunter Biden.

If you long for the 1950s, you should vote Republican. But before you do, at least do some research to find out what the 1950s were really like.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 13

 

Guns

With this past week’s 15-vote misadventure of the GOP in the House Speakership drama, maybe you thought I’d focus on the Republican Party’s (in)ability to govern. But other news has been the focus of my attention.

Most Latter-day Saints in Utah (and many outside the Beehive State) are probably aware of the shooting deaths of eight family members in Enoch, Utah. At first, all we were told was that police had discovered eight people dead in a home in southern Utah. Details came out gradually. We learned that a husband and father had murdered his wife, her mother, and the couple’s five children and then turned the gun on himself. My initial reaction was sadness that yet another troubled soul had taken out his anger on his family. Then my sister called.

Jolene and her husband, Jim, had spent most of their married life in the Columbus, Ohio, area, where Jim had been a professor at Ohio State until he had to retire with a disability. My sister then went to work, first as a chemist and then as a manager, for Battelle. She retired a few years ago, and they moved from Columbus to Hurricane, Utah, near St. George, to enjoy a better climate for Jim’s deteriorating health. Interestingly, they moved into a ward where two of our cousins lived. We have quite a few cousins in the St. George area, since my dad’s family had settled in Enterprise, about 40 miles north of (and 2,600 feet higher than) St. George.

When Jolene called me last Thursday, she asked if I had heard about the Enoch tragedy. I said yes. She then informed me that the victims were members of our extended family. Specifically, the perpetrator’s mother-in-law, Gail Earl, was the wife of our first cousin Boyd, who had died three years ago from cancer. Boyd’s brother is one of the cousins who live in Jolene’s Hurricane ward. The wife who was murdered would have been my children’s second cousin. This was, of course, a shock, but not as much as it would have been had I known the family.

You see, my dad was one of the younger siblings in a family of ten children. He also moved to Salt Lake City after serving in World War II, where he earned a degree in accounting at the University of Utah. He then moved further north, to Ogden, where he had been hired by his future father-in-law to work in his small CPA firm. Dad didn’t stay with Grandpa’s little business long, but he did stay in the Ogden area. Jolene and I grew up in North Ogden, where Grandpa had given our parents a lot to build a house on. Consequently, we didn’t see our Terry cousins very often, since most of them lived in southern Utah. We were especially disconnected from Dad’s older siblings, because their children (our cousins) were quite a bit older than we were.

Frances was one of Dad’s older sisters. She married Evan Earl, and they lived in St. George until their deaths. I’m not sure I ever met their son Boyd or his wife, Gail. Boyd was 14 years older than I was, so by the time I was old enough to remember our occasional visits to St. George, he may have already left home. And we didn’t spend much time with Frances’s family anyway when we visited. Dad was closer to the two sisters who were just older and younger than him, and they had kids who were near the age of Jolene and me, so we mostly spent time with them.

Needless to say, I never met Tausha Earl, Boyd and Gail’s daughter, who married Michael Haight, the unhappy husband and father who killed his family in Enoch early last week. We do know that Tausha had filed for divorce on December 21. Jolene said she had met Gail. She got together for lunch a while ago with the “Earl women,” probably the daughters and daughters-in-law of our aunt Frances.

This is of course a terrible tragedy, and quite unexpected, according to the Haights’ extended family and neighbors. We may never know what caused this active LDS husband and father to take out his anger and frustration on his children, his wife, and his mother-in-law, who was staying there to support her daughter during what had to be a difficult time. I believe it was Jolene who told me that Michael had refused to leave the house, but according to news accounts, Tausha’s attorney said she had not expressed any fear that Michael would physically harm her.

But he apparently had a gun. And in a desperate moment, he used it.

And so, my cousin’s wife Gail, her daughter Tausha, and five of her grandchildren have become statistics in the ongoing gun slaughter that occurs multiple times every day in America. As I write, on January 8, there have already been 17 mass shootings in America this new year that have left 23 people dead and 69 injured. According to the Gun Violence Archive, whose statistics I am using, a mass shooting is one in which four or more individuals are shot or killed.

In 2022, 44,260 Americans died from gun violence, including 20,170 homicides or unintentional shootings and 24,090 suicides. There were 648 mass shootings and 36 mass murders. In 2022, 314 children age 0-11 were killed and 680 were injured; 1,356 teens (age 12-17) were killed and 3,793 were injured. Guns are the leading cause of death among children under 18, barely edging out automobile crashes.

Comparing gun deaths and injuries in America with statistics from other wealthy countries shows that we are an outlier, by wide margins. There are, on average, 11.9 gun deaths per 100,000 citizens in the United States, compare with 1.9 in Canada, 1.0 in Germany, and 0.2 in the United Kingdom. Japan’s average is so low it registers as 0.

The reason for America’s wide statistical margin is twofold. First, Republican legislators refuse to enact reasonable gun restrictions even though a majority of Republicans favor some of them. For instance, according to fivethirtyeight.com, 91 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans favor universal background checks. Similarly, 85 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans favor “red flag” laws. It is revealing to note, however, that while 83 percent of Democrats favor banning assault weapons, only 37 percent of Republicans favor such laws. Interestingly, although there are more guns in America than people, less than half of Americans have a gun in their house (48 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of Democrats). But despite Republican voters’ support of certain gun laws, GOP legislators are seemingly cowed by the gun lobby.

The second reason for America’s outlier status among wealthy nations is that we love our guns more than we love life. And Republicans are adamant about this. Even though they claim to be the pro-life party, when it comes to guns, they would rather preserve the right to own them almost unrestricted than to save the thousands of lives that unrestricted gun access snuffs out. This is similar to the attitude toward masks and vaccinations that prevailed far more among Republicans than Democrats during the height of the pandemic. Individual freedom outweighs the greater good.

So, in the end, while this blog post will likely not move any LDS Republican to forsake the GOP, perhaps it can serve as one more straw on the camel’s back. If the Republican Party had less support, we would definitely have more effective gun laws in the United States. And there is a direct correlation between the prevalence of guns in a society and the number of gun deaths. But until we love life more than guns, nothing will change. I keep wondering when the people of this country will grow so sick of the carnage that they will willingly give up their weapons of death. Perhaps never. Perhaps some of us are fine with the carnage. It’s just collateral damage in the culture wars plaguing America, and a misconstrued and anachronistic line in the Bill of Rights prevents us from considering the obvious solution to this mess. And so we can expect to have endless repeats of the disaster that has now affected my extended family until it affects every family in America. Is that what we want?

According to news reports, all three adults in the Enoch tragedy were trained in the use of guns, and Michael had apparently removed guns from the house shortly before the shooting, perhaps to make sure his wife and mother-in-law could not defend themselves. In the statement from the Earl family, they caution against using this tragedy for political purposes, but it is exactly the staggering number of these sorts of shootings that make this a political issue. We need to talk about it, and we need political action—or else nothing will change. The family tries to make the case that if the “protective arms” had not been removed from the house, Tausha and her mother could have defended themselves and the children. But that is wishful thinking. Even with guns in the house, Michael still could have easily attacked when Tausha and Gail were nowhere near the weapons. Assuming the Haights were responsible gun owners, those weapons would have been locked away, unloaded, with the bullets stored separately from the guns, because they had small children in the house. So I don’t buy the Earl family’s attempt to depoliticize what is a very political tragedy. I’m sorry, but I have to speak out on this, even though (or especially) because it strikes so close to home.

As a final thought, a sobering though perhaps irrelevant fact in this sad calamity is the echo of family history. Michael Haight was a great-great-great-grandson of Isaac Haight, the stake president and militia officer in Cedar City who ordered the 1857 attack on the Baker-Fancher party, more widely known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.