Escaping the Destructionists

 

I grew up in a Republican family, although my parents were never very political. In their later years, though, they, along with millions of others in their generation, got caught up by the Fox News nostalgia dragnet. Fox’s strategy was to appeal to people who felt that the world was changing too fast and who yearned for the simpler society they knew twenty or thirty years before. I can still remember Mom complaining to me one day about “all of Obama’s czars.” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I assumed her worry was due to some imaginary crisis that Fox News created to scare its listeners and keep them coming back for more. “Mom,” I said, “you’ve got to stop watching Fox News.” But she didn’t.

As for me, I was a registered Republican and usually voted that way until partway through George W. Bush’s first term. The last straw for me was all the lies the GOP was telling about the effects of tax cuts. I can do simple arithmetic, and I knew that tax cuts never pay for themselves. I figured that if they would lie about tax cuts, they would lie about lots of other things too. As I recall, I had turned in my GOP membership card before George and Dick lied us into a long and expensive war in Iraq.

For many years, I was an unaffiliated voter. But several years ago, BYU Studies published an article by political science professor and BYU’s Maeser scholar that year, David Magleby. He pointed out that based on surveys he and his students had conducted, there were really very few truly independent voters in America. Most leaned strongly one way or the other. He suggested that if you were in that boat, you probably ought to join the party you leaned toward and work to improve it. His argument made sense to me, so I followed his advice. I was voting almost exclusively Democrat by then because the Democrats, for the most part, cared about the issues I found most concerning. The Republican Party, by contrast, seemed to be going further and further off the deep end. It has been a long path that has led the GOP from Ronald Reagan (who, by the way, also lied about tax cuts) to Donald Trump (who lies about everything), and I have watched it unfold.

So has Dana Milbank, political columnist for the Washington Post. But he kept notes. And he has documented the long and crazy decline of the GOP in a book I recently finished. It is titled The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. If you are interested in how the GOP became what it is today, I highly recommend this book. Milbank doesn’t offer a whole lot of commentary. He mostly recounts the history of the GOP’s demise, complete with lots of quotes by the villains and lots of facts that document the decline and fall of this once-proud political party.

It all started, Milbank claims, with New Gingrich. But there were lots of other protagonists in this tragedy. It is a sad tale, and I recall pretty much all of it from watching it happen, but the book does an admirable service in chronicling the whole sordid affair. Toward the end of the book, Milbank offers a brief summary of the ground he has covered (and this is one place where he does do a little editorializing). Here’s a piece of what he said:

“[In November 2016,] some three hundred white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered in Washington at the invitation of Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute to celebrate Trump’s victory. At the gathering, in the Ronald Reagan Building a few blocs from the White House, attendees shouted ‘Heil’ and “Lügenpresse,’ a Nazi term that means ‘lying press.’ Some of the few hundred attendees applauded mention of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. Reality TV personality Tila Tequila tweeted an image of herself and others giving a Nazi salute and the misspelled words ‘Seig heil.’

“They clashed with counterdemonstrators in downtown Washington and again when they held a private dinner at a family restaurant, Maggiano’s, in residential Northwest Washington. . . . At Maggiano’s, Spencer proposed a jocular toast: ‘Let’s party like it’s 1933.’ The white supremacists applauded.

“There was truth in the jest. The Reichstag burned in 1933, bringing about the end of Weimar Germany and the ascent of Hitler. The blundering Trump was no Hitler, but he had the autocrat’s disdain for the rule of law, the autocrat’s instinct to blame minorities for the nation’s ills, and the autocrat’s embrace of violence as a political tool. And now this distinctly antidemocratic figure was the president-elect, enjoying the near unanimous support and validation of Republican officeholders.

“This moment had been a long time coming. Two decades earlier, John McCain had admonished the party, and the country: ‘Patriotism is another way of saying service to a cause greater than self-interest.’ But over and over again, Republican leaders chose self-interest over country. They abandoned their principles of limited government, of being international champions of freedom. They played on racial fears, they demonized opponents as un-American, they knowingly championed egregious falsehoods, and they sabotaged the smooth functioning of government—all because it suited their political self-interest. Gingrich impugned his opponents’ loyalty to country to gain power, Bush and Rove squandered the unity of 9/11 to expand power, Palin and the Tea Party crowd spread lies and racism and winked at violence to cut down their opponents. McConnell sabotaged the Senate and discredited the Supreme Court because it maximized his power.

“After so many years of choosing power over principle, self-interest of country, Republican leaders had lost their way. They stood for nothing but gaining and holding power. Then, in 2015, along came a man who showed them a way to gain and hold power. They swallowed what was left of their integrity, and they followed him” (pp. 276–77).

All of this and more is carefully documented (complete with source notes) in the pages that precede and follow this summary, but the whole sordid tale was familiar. This was not done in a corner or in darkness. This tragedy was performed out in the open, where everyone could see. I wasn’t surprised by anything I read in this book. But I was disgusted time and again.

No, the Democratic Party is not perfect. But it has not changed in the way the GOP has over the past 25 years. This is why so many current and former Republicans endorsed and voted for Kamala Harris. They disagreed with her on many policies, but they recognized that she and her party stood for the Constitution and for country above party and for the principles and standards of governing that their own party had long forsaken.

Do I ever regret leaving the Destructionist Party? Not for one second, especially as I have watched the unashamed and largely unchecked corruption of the Utah Republican apparatus. I just regret that I didn’t leave earlier.