Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 10: The anti-democracy white supremacist zombie is still stalking around

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideas were never some crackpot spin on American history. They were and are an ideology to support white supremacist actions, from segregated water fountains to blocking African-American from voting.

But it's important to remember that the latter - denial of the full rights of citizenship to black citizens - was always the core of the old segregationist system.

The classic "highbrow" American conservative journal, National Review, was on the bandwagon for the old segregation system in the 1950s and 1960s. And it's on board for the new Trumpist version, too, as Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses in National Review Comes Out Against Democracy, Explicitly 04/09/2012.

He describes NR's version from the 1950s:

Theories about moving the ballot box out of the easy reach of the masses also belong firmly within the magazine’s intellectual tradition. Here’s what the National Review’s founder and guiding spirit, William F. Buckley, had to say in 1957 on the subject of how widespread the franchise ought to be:

If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened . It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority…Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn.

Sounds familiar! Unfortunately for the magazine’s current editor, Rich Lowry, who defended the Georgia law this week under the headline “Anyone Using the ‘Jim Crow’ Charge as a Political Weapon Should Hang His Head in Shame,” Buckley was specifically defending Jim Crow when he wrote it. His argument was that given “the median cultural superiority of White over Negro,” it was only appropriate to prevent Black people from joining a political majority that might favor things like integrated education—that, in the face of such a possibility, “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” The magazine would make similar arguments for years about the white apartheid government in South Africa. [my emphasis]

Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay on the "paranoid style" distinguished between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" version of rightwing radicalism. He even suggested an intermediate "middlebrow" category, which apparently never caught on.

In 1950s/1960s terms, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Council would have counted as part of the "lowbrow" part of the spectrum, although the Citizens Council tended to attract more white-color supporters. National Review positioned itself as an intellectually respectable, "highbrow" outlet. I think it's helpful to think of the John Birch Society as providing a "middlebrow" channel.

In business terms, we could describe this as a segregationist/Jim Crow market segmentation strategy: offering an (ideological) "product" to different tastes among the customers. When General Motors follows such of strategy, all customers still wind up with a car. And in the case of the anti-democracy, segregationist spectrum, sectarian and factional differences still provided variations of the same "product": the Jim Crow system that depended on suppressing Constitutional rights, promoting of white supremacist racist attitudes, and the violence of lynch murder to protect the entire Jim Crow system.

One of the best-known examples of such a marketing differentiation was Buckley's much-discussed but largely fake "purging" of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. (Cormac Kelly, William F. Buckley and the Birchers: A myth, a history lesson and a moral Salon 04/03/2021) With zombie ideas, it's not surprising that they keep shuffling back from the grave. (John Savage, The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017; Rick Perlstein and Edward Miller, The John Birch Society Never Left New Republic 03/08/2021)

As Perlstein and Miller explain, St. Reagan brought the various strands together in his political career:

Although it wouldn’t be fair to beat up only on Buckley. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, remembered today as the avatar of the Republicans’ lost respectability, who in 1971 described African United Nations delegates to a chortling Richard Nixon as “monkeys … uncomfortable wearing shoes.” He espoused conspiracy theories like the claim that Gerald Ford staged assassination attempts against himself to win sympathy votes in the 1976 presidential primaries, and that the Soviet Union had removed 20 million young people to the countryside to practice for reconstructing their society after launching an offensive nuclear war. The newsletter of Reagan’s political action committee advocated the quack cancer cure (and pet Bircher cause) laetrile, which “[m]ay be efficacious against cancer but which government in its wisdom wants to keep people from using.” (The reason was that it didn’t work, and frequently killed people.)

Then Reagan became president—and the only thing that changed was the people around him worked harder to keep his wackiness from the public.

They were frequently frustrated — for instance when Reagan claimed the nuclear freeze movement that drew a million protesters to Central Park in 1982 had been engineered in the Kremlin, or the time he told reporters that apartheid South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” There was also the moment when he quoted to a group of college students visiting the White House Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s “eloquent statement” of his plan to conquer America: that he would first take Eastern Europe, then “organize the hordes of Asia,” then “move into Latin America”; then “we will not have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. It will fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.”

Except that Lenin never said it. But Robert Welch claimed he did, in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the ur-text of his movement. [my emphasis]

As Mathis-Lilley points out, the anti-democracy sentiment is part of the package.

Timothy Snyder on the trajectory of Trumpism (2 of 2): The Big Lie and the strategic perspective of the Party of Trump

"Post-truth is pre-fascism," writes Timothy Snyder, "and Trump has been our post-truth president." (The American Abyss New York Times Magazine 01/09/2021)

More details are coming out about the specifics of the January 6 storming of the Capitol at the direct, immediate incitement of Donald Trump himself. PBS Frontline has a documentary called Trump's American Carnage that take that riot as a starting point.

Frontline also is posting long segments of some of the interviews they did for the program. This is one that focuses on the kinds of concerns on which Snyder focuses. It's with Olivia Troye, someone I don't recall having heard of before, who was a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to VP Mike Pence.

She was there in a professional capacity, not as a political adviser, and left Pence's staff in August 2020. This one was done after January 6 but before Biden's Inauguration. She talks quite a bit about the Capitol riot and Trump's encouragement and direct incitement.

She seems to have an impressively nuanced and realistic view of Pence himself. Toward the end (45:00 ff), she's asked about Pence's situation when he was in the Capitol and the lynch mob was coming for him. "I can't imagine what it must be like to have stood by someone unwaveringly, and been in this environment for four years, fully knowing how dangerous this man [Trump] can be. 'Cause we've seen this, repeatedly, and it leads to his own life [Pence's] being put directly in danger by this individual [Trump]. Right? You have the President basically setting up the Vice President of our country in a situation where he puts his [Pence's] life in danger.]."

And, speaking from her professional experience in counterterrorism, "And I have no doubt that the threat level on the Vice President [Pence] will remain high. 'Cause these people are not gonna forget." And at the end, she says, "You can't have unity if you don't have accountability." Olivia Troye is currently part of the Republican Accountability Project.

Snyder talks about how the Big Lie that Trump established around the blatantly false claim that Biden won the Presidential election through election fraud. The Big Lie is something historically associated in particular with the Hitler movement. Snyder describes that infamous Big Lie as:

... Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, [Hannah] Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” [my emphasis]

But this Big Lie isn't just a professional-wrestling gimmick that Donald Trump came up with. It's one that the Republican Party in general have been working on for four decades. It's just now graduated from the concept that the Democratic Party is illegitimate to the notion that democratic elections are illegitimate. And the rule-of-law system along with it.

Snyder gives us a sobering reminder of how far along Trump got with his actual plan. And the role that Trump's own lack of knowledge of politics and government and his own laziness played in its failure. On the storming of the Capitol, he writes, "It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around." In other words, "for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, [Trump] could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing."

But it did provide a real-world example of how close it could come. The two groups of Republicans that Snyder calls the Gamers and the Breakers have a template for a coup that they can broadly share. And did broadly share in 2020-1.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. [my emphasis]

Mark Sumner has an insightful Twitter thread on this process that has played out to this point in the Republican Party. He goes back to what Ronald Reagan called the 11th Commandment, that Republicans shouldn't criticize other Republicans, which as he puts it, "erected a wall on the Republican left, but placed not a single barrier to the right. It meant there was never any internal testing of ideas. There was no competition to challenge and refine claims. No effort to call out extreme views. ..." (01/30/2021)

The Twitter format forces painting in broad strokes. So of course we could point out that the Republican Party at times over those four decades have called out the more extreme views of characters like David Duke and Pat Buchanan. But Sumer describes the basic trend very well. David Duke may have been too bitter a pill for country club Republicans to swallow. But Rush Limbaugh wasn't. Nor Alex Jones.

So, he writes, "Josh Hawley opposing votes certified by PA’s GOP legislature is the future of the Republican Party." And Hawley is by no means the only one ready to keep operating on Trump's coup template: A Slap in The Face to Voters': GOP Bill Would Allow AZ Legislature to Overturn Election The Choice 01/30/2021.

Snyder also centers the white supremacy element in the current Republican drive against democracy. "In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible." And he says of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, "At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people."

Snyder uses the f-word (fascism) without jumping into the thornbush of academic definition. He writes of using the history of fascism to understand Trumpism, "One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it." Mussolini actually called his politics Fascism - it's where we get the word for that brand of politics - and Hitler modeled his takeover of power after Mussolini's. So we can observe similarities without having to quibble about the precise definition.

Snyder in this article uses the word "cult" only in the context of a "martyrdom cult" the authoritarian governing party in Poland currently uses. But understanding cults does shed light on how the current Trumpian Big Lie functions:

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. [my emphasis]

In the more narrow sociological-clinical sense of cult, like Jim Jones' People's Temple, or the UFO cult Heaven's Gate, or the Branch Davidians, that doesn't describe the complexity of the current authoritarianism in the Republican Party. But there is a cultish aspect in Trump following.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, calls the Trumpified Republican Party "a one-man cult." (Rep. Jayapal: GOP Isn't A Party Of Principle. It's A Cult MSNBC/The 11th Hour 01/30/2021)

Steven Hassan, an authority on cults and author of The Cult of Trump (2019), spoke earlier this month with Kati Couric on this subject, Former Cult Follower Describes How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following (a sloppy YouTube title!) 01/13/2021:

I'll end by going back once again to what Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Trump is no longer President. But the Republican Party is still a Trumpian party. And it is still on the trajectory that took it from 2012 to becoming the Party of Trump. In 2020, the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn't even bother to adopt a new party platform. They just issued a one-page resolution stating, "RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda." It really is the Party of Trump.

Donald Trump, Richard Nixon and the long radicalization of the Republican Party

One thing that often gets obscured in the entirely justified outrage over Trump's criminal conduct and contempt for Constitutional institutions is that Trump is very much carrying on the radicalization of the Republican Party that has decades-old roots.

There are several ways to break down the trends. Eisenhower's Administration in retrospect is a model of "moderate" Republicanism, although he gets more credit for a peaceful foreign policy than he deserves. His "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear policy was a genuinely high-risk position. And he actually threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

The Goldwater candidacy in 1964 was a major marker in the process. But it did not yet define the national party. The Nixon Administration was path-breaking in authoritarian usage of Presidential power. But his nuclear arms-control policies, his diplomatic bridge-building to China, and even his Vietnamization policy diverged from the positions that the Goldwater right and the John Birch Society types favored. Nixon used wage-and-price controls to limit inflation, and even proposed a limited form of national health insurance that was arguably more comprehensive than "Obamacare".

Jerry Ford established a major precedent for Presidential impunity for serious crimes by issuing a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon. He also elevated the careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who have the dubious distinction of being two of the most destructive characters in American politics.

The Presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a decisive turning point for the Republican Party, representing a convergence of neoliberal market fundamentalism, a general endorsement of hard right politics, and focused authoritarianism. The Iran-Contra affair was itself a real Constitutional crisis, which the Republicans took in stride and the Democrats didn't dispute as actively as they should have. Old Man Bush expanded Republican official impunity by pardoning Iran-Contra criminals. And Bush's own actual role in the possible (I would say likely) 1980 "October Surprise" dealings with Iran.

The fall of the Warsaw Pact and the decline in the fall of the USSR changed the international picture so dramatically that it makes it hard to describe the nature of the continuity and change during the Bush-Quayle Administration. They initiated a serious of closing military bases that would have seemed like a pacifist dream a few years before. But they also conducted the first Gulf War, which in retrospect was a fateful escalation toward what became the current Middle East situation. In general, the Bush family ties to the Saudi monarchy that Craig Unger ably described in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) have had serious negative consequences for US foreign policy and the well-being of ordinary people in the Middle East.

But since the 1994 midterms elections which marked the so-called Gingrich Revolution, the radicalization of the Republican Party has seemingly proceeded steadily. They keep getting more authoritarian, more crassly oligarchic and rightwing, more bitterly divisive, and generally more fanatical and sleazy. And this is definitely not a case of Both Sides Do It. Nothing remotely similar has happened on the Democratic side. In fact, one of the most important defining facts of American politics since 1994 has been the asymmetric polarization beteen the two political parties.

But I always want to give Richard Nixon his due in this process. Henry Steele Commager (1902 – March 2, 1998) was a major liberal American historian in the 20th century. He was a classic "Cold War liberal" in the Truman years, very much a supporter of Truman's containment policy against the Soviet Union. During the 1960s, he became an activist critic of the Vietnam War and actually developed a sometimes radical critique of American politics based on his understanding of how Cold War foreign policy was undermining the liberal principles on which the US government and Constitution were based. In other words, an imminent critique founded on his focus on the democratic elements of classical liberal political theory.

A collection of essays published in 1975 under the title The Defeat of America features that perspective, in particular with relation to the Nixon Administration. Including the essay from which the title of the book is derived, which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books (10/05/1972 issue). He had this to say about how Nixon was undermining the system (text from the book):

Basic to an understanding of the usurpations, duplicities, and irresponsibilities of the Nixon era, then, is paranoia, which has a life of its own, and which still lingers on - even after the "end" of the [Vietnam] war and the rapprochement with China - polluting the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the country. Certainly there is little evidence that Mr. Nixon or his underlings think the new relationship with the Soviet Union and China justifies the mitigation of their own paranoia about "national security," or their conviction that any attack upon official policy is itself a potential threat to security. How else explain the vindictiveness of the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg and the readiness to subvert justice in that prosecution; how else explain the political skulduggery that persisted long after the 1972 election, the persistent use of the FBI and the CIA for political purposes, the readiness to employ provocative agents, the contumacious boast at the POW dinner that reliance on secrecy, even useless secrecy, would go on and on; how else explain the determination to bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age? ...

Is the crisis of the present so imperative that it requires an unconstitutional revolution - requires, that is, abandoning the separation of powers, discarding limitations on the executive authority, weakening legislative control of the purse, repealing the Bill of Rights, subverting the traditional rule of law, and covering with a fog of secrecy the operations of government? Clearly Mr. Nixon and a good many of his followers think that it is. Now we are back with the phobia about communism and paranoia about national security. [my emphasis]

It is noteworthy that Commager viewed the approach of Nixon to government and politics as an attempted "revolution". Or, as he puts it, "an unconstitutional revolution"; Commager would later describe Nixon's impeachment as a legal and constitutional revolution. But he viewed the Nixon version as being revolutionary in the sense of revolutionary dictatorship as in the Terror during the French Revolution, which both classical liberal and conservative political theory regard as a cautionary tale of arbitrary excess. And which Edmund Burke, a godfather of modern reactionary political thought, used as his prime bogeyman.

It was from reading Commager among others that I first became aware of the pragmatic criticism that a big problem for US foreign policy has been a failure to understand revolutionary processes, even losing sight of the revolutionary traditions in the US itself. That is still true today, for both parties. But the Republicans have long since become accustomed to thinking and talking in terms of revolution, or "unconstitutional revolution" in Commager's somewhat awkward phrase: the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party, today's armed protests by Trump cultists in favor of unrestricted spread of the COVID-19 virus, the lunatics of QAnon, even Alex Jones' advocacy of murdering and eating his neighbors. (On the latter, see: Oliver O'Connell, Alex Jones says he'd kill and cook his neighbours to feed his kids Independent 05/01/2020. Though I don't recall ever hearing that cannabalism was a feature of the French Terror.)

Meanwhile, on the "other side of the aisle," when Bernie Sanders talked about having a "revolution" involving broader voter participation and national health insurance of the type that is standard in European democracies, conservative Democrats professed to see vision of guillotine blades dropping. A good illustration of how asymetric partisan polarization works in American politics.

But going back to Tricky Dick, his administration established a practice of authoritarian illegality that took deep roots in the Republican Party. It also established a defensive mentality among Nixon's hardline fans that the law should be just another political tool in the partisan war. One used only by Republicans, of course. The rabid allegiance of Trump's cult followers is the most recent flowering of that attitude. It won't be the last. And it won't be eliminated by Democrats chasing a chimera of Bipartisan harmony with today's extremist Republican Party.

A more radical critic of the Nixon Administration, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose perspective was not restricted to the liberal political tradition, formulated this view of the situation at the time of Commager's observations quoted above (Countervrevolution and Revolt, 1972):

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution. [my emphasis in bold]

For anyone who is wondering, by "world-historical revolution" Marcuse had something more drastic in mind than simply national health insurance. Which, as I mentioned, was an entirely respectable idea in 1972, even among some senior Republicans, and not seen as remotely "revolutionary" in the then-mainstream of both parties.

Asymmetric polarization - the defining phenomenon of partisan politics in the US

"Democratic activists in 2002 were actually slightly more moderate than run-of-the-mill voters who identify with the Democratic Party. By contrast, Republican activists are not only far to the right of independents; They are also far to the right of ordinary voters within their own party. And they have been heading ever more sharply right since the 1980s." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) [my emphasis in bold]

"Consider the large cut in payroll taxes in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [during the Obama-Biden Administration]. To boost consumer spending most effectively, it was carefully designed to attract no notice ... Similarly, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has not become accepted within corporate circles, and few Americans appear to have grasped its favorable consequences for them. And while the ACA ["Obamacare"] is now producing modestly positive feedback effects, these were perilously slow in coming. Early on, ACA beneficiaries neither reliably perceived the benefits they received nor consistently voted or acted to protect the law ... Worse, the ACA catalyzed a political backlash that not only exacted considerable electoral costs but also left the program struggling to survive." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Policy Feedback in an Age of Policy Polarization," The Annals Sept 2019 [my emphasis in bold]

The defining characteristic of partisan politics in the US today is asymmetric polarization.

The Republican Party has been radicalizing itself since 1980 when Ronald Reagan became the party's Presidential nominee and got elected President.

As with anything in politics, trends don't just drop on a certain date as a judgment from heaven. Like with the Judgment of Korah, as related in this 1865 painting by Gustave Doré:

"Death of Korah, Dathan and Abiram"

This derives from the story of judgment against Korah, Dathan and Abiram who rebelled against Moses' authority, as related in the Biblical Book of Numbers 16-17, a divine intervention that changed the situation radically in a moment. In our more mundane politics, there are memorable dates we associate with major events and decisions that represent major changes in direction: the American Revolution, the firing on Fort Sumter, the untimely end of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. The tendencies that led to those turning points were there long before and different decisions or accidents of luck could have moved events in a very different direction.

In the Republican Party, the far-right trend represented by the McCarthyist red-hunters, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater movement in 1964 were all clear predecessors of 1980. And Reagan himself was decisively influenced by all three. But after 1980, the remnants of the "liberal Republicans" who were still a visible presence in American political life in 1980 faded quickly away. And the party generally embraced what they happily called the Reagan Revolution. A key shift involved in that process which was largely completed by the 1990s is that former conservative Southern Democrats shifted to the Republican Party. (See: Earle Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, 2003; Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, 2002) To the extent that nostalgic memories among Democrats of liberal/progressive goals achieved through bipartisan cooperation with Republicans have a basis in historical fact, it is because left-right/liberal-conservative ideological trends in Congress cut across party lines prior to 1980 far more than they have since.

It's a sign of the shift in the Republican Party that with Reagan and thereafter, the increasingly reactionary party was happy to describe its own proposals in terms of "revolution". The Oxford University Press' "A Very Short Introduction" series has a volume on The Reagan Revolution (2009) by Gil Troy. A 1981 book by the then-popular journalistic duo Rowland Evans and Robert Novak The Reagan Revolution: An Inside Look at the Transformation of the U.S. Government celebrated the numbers of Republican radicals and revolutionaries who were being brought into Reagan's Administration.

Meanwhile, on this past Sunday during the Democratic debate, Status Quo Joe Biden was horrified and shocked, I tell you, shocked, that Bernie Sanders has occasionally in his life said things about China, Cuba, and the USSR that were something other than complete and total condemnation of them. That's only one of the sillier symptoms of the asymmetric polarization dominating the American political party scene. On the "other side of the aisle", Trump cheerfully embraces and praises dictators across the ideological spectrum.

Our American pundits are seriously addicted to insisting that Both Sides Do It, meaning that partisan excesses are equally distributed in each and every situation between Republicans and Democrats. But the reason that asymmetric polarization is asymmetric is that in the face of four decades of radicalization from Reagan's friendly-grin, ditsy version of Bircherism to today's Führer-worshipping adoration of Trump's orgy of massive corruption, lawlessness, and anti-science whack-a-doodle policy. While the Democratic Party has ... sought polite Bipartisan compromise with the fundamentalist cult on "the other side of the aisle". And tried as much as possible to frame their own policies - to the extent they can be distinguished at all from the Republicans' - in Republican terms. The Simpson-Bowles delusion, we might call it.

A key aspect of the Democrats' asymmetric attitude is the notion that "the fever will break" on the Republican side. As Joe Biden cheerfully explained to Chris Matthews just prior to the 2012 Presidential election:

Biden seemed optimistic that both parties would work together if Obama is re-elected, arguing the “fever will have broken” and lawmakers could focus more on passing legislation than politics.

“There are still some solid Republican conservatives who understand what principled compromise means and are not wrapped up in ideological purity,” said Biden insisting he knew a dozen Republican senators and up to three dozen House members that want to work with the Democrats.

After the election is over, Biden said members will say “’Hey man I no longer have an obligation to stick with the right of the party’... I really believe you’ll see movement. Real movement.” [my emphasis]

He was only echoing what the man at the top of the ticket, Barack Obama, had said earlier that year (Byron Tau, Obama: Republican 'fever' will break after the election Politico 06/01/2012):

I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again. [my emphasis]

This hope, which may have been real on Obama's and Biden's part, proved to be delusional. Just this miraculous breaking of the fever failed to take place after Obama's surprising election in 2008 after eight years of the rightwing-radical Cheney-Bush Administration. In 2009, Obama and Biden had Bowles and Simpson pushing for conservative Republican policies. The Republicans had the Tea Party pushing even more loudly for rightwing Republican policy. This is known as "asymmetric polarization".

The fever became Trumpist fever by 2016. But in 2019, Biden was still predicting that if Trump were voted out in 2020, the Republicans were return to the golden days of Bipartisanship: "With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks [Republican politicians] know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing." (Kevin Drum, Who Cares If Joe Biden Really Believes in Bipartisanship? Mother Jones 06/10/2019)

Drum offered a generous reading of this:

I have no idea what Joe Biden “really” believes about working with Republicans. But I will say this: he’s a politician. There’s zero reason to think he truly believes what he’s saying here. There’s also zero reason to think he doesn’t believe it. The fact that he said it is simply a null input.

At the same time, Biden isn’t an idiot. Of course he knows what the modern Republican Party is like. But like Obama before him, he also knows that lots of people really like to hear paeans to bipartisanship. We political junkies may hate it, but ordinary people who don’t inhale cable news are suckers for the idea that we can all get along if we just give it a try - and there are way more of them than there are of us. Biden knows this, so that’s what he tells people. Whether he really believes it or not matters not a whit. [my emphasis in bold]

The evidence of the last few decades show rather than while TV pundits and Democratic moderate political activists/"political junkies" love this Bipartisan fantasizing, Republican politicians, activists, and large portions of the Republican voting base see it as a sucker play to undermine Democrats. It also works to the advantage of large wealthy donors, who are particularly happy to see Bipartisanship tilted heavily to Republican preferences on tax and regulation policies and on international trade treaties.

But Biden's 2019 comment and Kevin Drum's response point to an essential reason why asymmetric polarization works so well for the Republicans.is that the Democrats - both the Party establishment and many activists - really do seem to think if the Democrats are "moderate" and "pragmatic" enough, we could easily return to some imagined golden time when bipartisanship and dignified debate and reflection could dominate politics again.

But it's a mythical past. Even before the "Reagan Revolution", the Administration of Richard Nixon was anything but a time of moderate harmony. And no one under the age of 55 can be said to have any personal adult memory of a time when the Republican Party wasn't in the process of radicalization which has currently given us Donald Trump and will give us worse if they aren't defeated politically. As Charlie Pierce likes to say, 1980 was when the Republican Party ate the monkey brains. (A reference to prion-related neurodegenerative diseases like Creutzfeldt–Jakob.)

But to balance the symmetry between the two parties better, the Democrats don't need to adopt a Republican-style fanaticial, authoritarian approach to politics and governance, which conservative Democrats very falsely accuse Bernie Sanders of practicing. What they do need is a more realistic sense of what today's Republican Party is and how long it's being going in that direction. And that includes - and this is critical - that any new Democratic Administration takes seriously providing a professional, independent legal investigation and prosecutions against serious illegal acts committed by government officials from the previous Republican Administration. And any others on which the statute of limitations has not yet run. In my mind, basic humanity would require a thorough independent legal investigation and prosecution of anyone and everyone involved in the ICE practice of kidnapping refugee children from their parents.

Republikanische Gegen-Wissenschaft und asymmetrischen parteipolitische Polarisierung in den USA

Charles Seife schreibt über das Problem der politischen Zurückhaltung bei öffentlichen Informationsoperationen durch Gesundheits- und Wissenschaftsbehörden des Bundes in den USA in The Trump Administration’s Misinformation Machine Scientific American 08.03.2020. Er bezieht sich auf die ungewöhnlichen Maßnahmen, die die Trump-Administration ergriffen hat, um Bundesbehörden wie die Centers for Disease Control (CDC) davon abzuhalten, ohne vorherige Zustimmung politischer Beamter öffentlich über die COVID-19-Pandemie zu sprechen.

(Alle Übertragungen auf dem Englischen in diesem Beitrag sind meine.)

Die Bühne für Trumps Spiel, die Stimmen von Wissenschaftlern zu ersticken, wurde gesetzt, bevor er sogar einen Glanz in den Augen der GOP hatte. Seit Jahren beschweren sich Journalisten darüber, dass Presseoffiziere den Zugang zu Regierungswissenschaftlern blockieren, die etwas Wichtiges zu sagen haben, vor allem auch beim CDC. Auch andere Agenturen; Die FDA ging sogar so weit, eine interne Überwachungsoperation zu schaffen, um das zum Schweigen zu bringen, was sie als "verleumderisch" ansah - lesen Sie: peinliche - Informationen, die von einigen ihrer Wissenschaftler verbreitet wurden.

Wir haben jetzt ein neues Ballspiel betreten. Zuvor hatten wir halbherzige Versuche, Andersdenkende mundtot zu machen, bevor sie die Regierung in Verlegenheit bringen konnten; in normalen Zeiten war dies eher ein Ärgernis als eine große Bedrohung für die Demokratie. Doch jetzt müssen wir uns der Tatsache stellen, dass wir eine ernsthafte, erschreckende, umfassende Desinformationskampagne der Regierung – die bürokratische Unterdrückung der wissenschaftlichen Wahrheit zugunsten politisch akzeptabler Fiktion – in Aktion sehen. Und in einem Moment, in dem unsere Gesellschaft zuverlässige wissenschaftliche Informationen am meisten braucht, ist die gefährlichste Quelle von Fehlinformationen in den USA unser eigener Präsident geworden.

Wissenschaft ist nicht Opinion-Seite Ideologie oder politische Polemik. Es ist ein Körper von Wissen und Praxis, es zu erwerben, der Teil der menschlichen Zivilisation für mindestens ein paar Jahrtausende gewesen ist. Der institutionelle Rahmen von akademischen Institutionen und Publikationen, Berufsverbänden, Forschungseinrichtungen, und Wissenschaftsjournalismus setzt Maßstäbe für das, was als gesund gilt und was nicht. Wie alle menschlichen Institutionen hat sie Probleme.

Aber menschliche Gesellschaften führen nicht auf abstrakte sophomorische Argumente darüber, ob wir ihnen „diese komischer Wissenschaftler“ vertrauen können.

Damit öffentliche Universitäten als legitime Universitäten fungieren können, müssen sie rechtlich und organisatorisch geschützt sein, damit ihre detaillierte Lehre als PR-Operationen für das behandelt wird, was derzeit Politiker an der Macht wollen. Dasselbe gilt für andere öffentliche Wissenschafts- und Gesundheitsorganisationen, weil sie öffentliche Institutionen sind, die den Bürger gegenüber verantwortlich sind, und nicht in erster Linie für gewählte Beamte oder eine politische Partei.

Und es gibt auch umfangreiche Gesetze, um Qualifikationen zu definieren und erforderliche Ausbildung für Menschen, um sich als verschiedene Arten von medizinischen Fachkräften darstellen zu können. Andernfalls wäre die Praxis der Medizin und die Herstellung von Medizinprodukten und Arzneimittel ein „freier-Markt“ Wettbewerb zwischen dem Wirksamen und dem Betrügerischen, zwischen dem Hilfreichen und dem Gefährlichen.

Seifes Kolumne deutet vor allem darauf hin, dass das Problem, das er identifiziert, in den USA der Trump-Administration vorausgeht und damit vermutlich auch für die Obama-Biden-Administration gilt. Man könnte sich wünschen, dass er in dieser Punktstelle etwas konkreter gewesen wäre. Er macht aber deutlich, dass die jetzige Regierung es auf die sprichwörtliche next level (nächst-höhere Ebene) gebracht hat: "eine ernste, erschreckende, umfassende Desinformationskampagne der Regierung".

Eine Sache, die leider selbst amerikanische Demokraten in ihrem momentanen kollektiven tiefen Seufzer der Zufriedenheit über die Überlegenheit von Status Quo Joe Biden und seinem Make America Boring Again-Programm zu vergessen scheinen, ist, dass das Problem der asymmetrischen Polarisierung zwischen Zwei große Parteien in den USA sind eine der aggressiven Republikanischen Radikalismus auf der einen Seite und gedämpften Widerstand und sogar die Zusammenarbeit der Demokraten auf der anderen Seite.

"Rückkehr" in den mythischen langweiligen Zustand, den Biden-Enthusiasten sich vorstellen, würde es erfordern, den Fanatismus der Republikanischen Partei zu brechen und die kollaborative Passivität der Demokraten zu beenden.

Die Bärenumarmung der Republikanischen Partei mit Aberglauben und wissenschaftsfeindlichem Extremismus begann nicht mit Trumps Präsidentschaft. Bereits 1980, als Sankt Reagan sich dafür einsetzte, Präsident Jimmy Carter zu besiegen, berichtete Philip Hilts in Creation vs. Evolution: Battle Resumes in Public Schools Washington Post 09/13/1980:

Im heißen Sommer 1925, als William Jennings Bryan die alte Religion im gefeierten Scopes-"Affenprozess" verteidigte, war die fundamentalistische Politik eine mächtige Kraft. Die "Kreationisten", die an die buchstäbliche Genauigkeit der Genesis glaubten, fegten die Lehre der Evolution aus Amerikas öffentlichen Schulen.

Jetzt, 55 Jahre später, hat sich Ronald Reagan erneut an das Thema geklammert, mit seiner jüngsten Unterstützung der modernen Fundamentalisten und ihrer wiederbelebten kreationistischen Bewegung. ...

Der Präsidentschaftskandidat der GOP, Ronald Reagan, brachte das Thema kürzlich auf einem Treffen evangelikaler Christen in Dallas auf das Niveau der Präsidentschaftspolitik, als er behauptete, "große Fehler" in der Evolutionstheorie zu sehen.

Wenn Evolution in den öffentlichen Schulen gelehrt wird, sagte er, dann sollte "die biblische Schöpfungsgeschichte" neben ihr gelehrt werden. "Das religiöse Amerika erwacht", sagte er. [meine Hervorhebung]

Aber St. Reagan begann nicht nur, während seiner Präsidentschaftskampagne 1980 die kreationistische Pseudowissenschaft zu fördern:

Die neue kreationistische Bewegung erhielt ihren ersten großen politischen Schub in Kalifornien während der Regierung von Gouverneur Ronald Reagan. 1969 stimmte ein vor allem religiöser staatlicher Bildungsrat mit sieben von zehn Mitgliedern, die von Reagan ernannt wurden, für die Annahme einer Aussage, dass Kreationismus eine gültige Alternative zur Evolutionstheorie sei.

Der kalifornische Vorstand genehmigte zunächst die Lehre des Kreationismus Seite an Seite mit der Evolution. Dann, nach viel Druck von Kreationisten, beschloss das Board stattdessen, aktuelle Biologie-Lehrbücher zu überarbeiten, um anzuzeigen, dass Evolution nur eine Theorie ist und nicht überprüfbarer ist als die kreationistische Doktrin.

Seit der Überarbeitung der Biologiebücher für Kalifornien -- und diese kalifornischen Texte wurden im ganzen Land in ihrer überarbeiteten Form verwendet -- kämpfen Verleger, Lehrer und Biologen in praktisch jedem Bundesstaat gegen die Position der "gleichen Zeit für die Schöpfung". [meine Hervorhebungen]

Demokraten, die nostalgisch für den beruhigenden Balsam von Make America Boring Again sind, sollten sich vielleicht deutlicher an diese Tage erinnern. Reagans Biograph Lou Cannon schrieb 1991 in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime:

Reagan, der [im Wahlkampf 1980] locker lief, zeigte seine vertraute Neigung zu nicht überprüfbaren Anekdoten und die Bereitschaft zu sagen, was ihm in den Kopf kam. Was ihm in den Kopf kam, waren glückliche Gedanken über Kreationismus und Taiwan und Verwirrung über die Ursprünge des Ku-Klux-Klans. Anfang September waren die gaffes des Kandidaten so zahlreich geworden, dass die Reporter auf dem Reagan-Flugzeug schwer unter Druck standen, sie im Auge zu behalten, und die demokratischen Strategen waren optimistisch, dass der Wahlkampf in ein Referendum über Reagan und nicht in ein Referendum über Präsident Carter verwandelt werden würde.  [meine Hervorhebungen]

Ja, die Demokraten hofften, dass das Fieber (unter die Republikaner) schon 1980 brechen würde!

Cannon schrieb weiter:

Auf einer Pressekonferenz in Dallas versuchte Reagan, einen Fragender aus einer religiösen Publikation zu erfreuen und stimmte zu, dass Kreationismus als alternative Theorie zum Darwinismus in den öffentlichen Schulen gelehrt werden sollte. Bei anderen Gelegenheiten nahm er positive Hinweise auf Taiwan, während sein Laufkollege George Bush auf einer Mission in der Volksrepublik China war. Die Bemerkung, die die größte Klappe verursachte, ereignete sich am Tag der Arbeit, als Jimmy Carter seine Herbstkampagne offiziell mit einer Rede in Tuscumbia, Alabama, einem Zentrum der Ku-Klux-Klan-Aktivität, eröffnete. Als Reagan an diesem Abend in Detroit sprach, sagte er: "Jetzt bin ich glücklich, hier zu sein, während er seine Kampagne dort unten in der Stadt eröffnet, die das Hauptorgan des Ku-Klux-Klans hervorgebracht hat und ist." Die Menge gab Gas. Reagan wusste sofort, dass er falsch gesprochen hatte. "Ich habe es gesprengt", sagte er hinterher zu seinen Helfern. "Ich hätte nie sagen sollen, was ich gesagt habe."

In ähnlichen Situationen würde Trump heute nur sagen: "Fake News! Was ich sagte, war perfekt, genau wie der Telefon-Anruf perfekt war. Ich habe diese Situation perfekt gehandhabt!" Aber Spinnerei und anti-Wissenschaftsfanatismus, der vom organisierten christlichen Rechten Fundamentalismus unterstützt wird, sind definitiv nicht neu für die Republikanische Partei und sind nicht erst in 2016 vom Himmel gefallen.

Republican antiscience and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

Charles Seife writes about the problem of political restraint on public information operations by federal health and science agencies in the US in The Trump Administration’s Misinformation Machine Scientific American 03/08/2020. He's referring to the unusual measures that the Trump Administration has taken to restrain federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from speaking publicly about the COVID-19 pandemic without prior approval from political officials.

The stage for Trump's play to stifle the voices of scientists was set before he was even a gleam in the GOP’s eye. For years, journalists have been complaining about press officers' blocking access to government scientists who have something important to say, even - especially - at the CDC. Other agencies, too; the FDA even went so far as to create an internal surveillance operation to silence what it deemed "defamatory" - read: embarrassing - information circulated by some of its scientists.

We've now entered a new ballgame. Before, we had desultory attempts to shut dissenters up before they could embarrass the administration; in more normal times, this was an annoyance rather than a major threat to democracy. However, now we must face the fact that we're seeing a serious, terrifying, full-scale government misinformation campaign — the bureaucratic suppression of scientific truth in favor of politically acceptable fiction—in action. And at a moment when our society needs reliable scientific information the most, the most dangerous source of misinformation in the U.S. has become our own president.

Science is not op-ed ideology or political polemics. It is a body of knowledge and practice of acquiring it that has been part of human civilization for at least a couple of millennia. The institutional framework of academics institutions and publications, professional associations, research institutions, science journalism sets standards for what is considered sound and what is not. Like all human institutions, thewy have problems.

But human societies don't run on abstract sophomoric arguments about whether we can trust them thar scientists.

For public universities to function as legitimate universities, they have to have legal and organizational protections from having their detailed teaching being treated as PR operations for whatever politicians are in power at the moment. The same thing is true for other public science and health organizations because they are public institutions with a responsibility to the public, not in the first instance to elected officials or a political party.

And there are also extensive laws to define qualifications and required training for people to be able to represent themselves as various kinds of medical professionals. Otherwise, the practice of medicine and the production of medical devices and products would be a free-market competition between the effective and the fraudulent, between the helpful and the dangerous.

Seife's piece notably indicates that the problem he identifies precedes the Trump Administration and so presumably applies to the Obama-Biden Administration, as well. One might wish he had been a bit more specific on the point. But he does make it clear that the current Administration has taken it to the proverbial next level: "a serious, terrifying, full-scale government misinformation campaign".

One thing that unfortunately even Democrats seem to be forgetting in their momentary collective deep sigh of contentment over the ascendency of Status Quo Joe Biden and his Make America Boring Again program is that the problem of asymmetric polarization between the two major parties in the US is one of aggressive Republican radicalism on the one hand and muted resistance and even collaboration by the Democrats on the other.

"Returning" to the mythical boring state that Biden enthusiasts envision would require breaking the fanaticism of the Republican Party and ending the collaborative passivity of the Democrats.

The Republican Party's bear hug of superstition and anti-science extremism did not begin with Trump's Presidency. Way back in 1980, when St. Reagan was campaigning to defeat President Jimmy Carter, Philip Hilts reported in Creation vs. Evolution: Battle Resumes in Public Schools Washington Post 09/13/1980:

In the hot summer of 1925, when William Jennings Bryan defended the old-time religion in the celebrated Scopes "monkey trial," fundamentalist politics was a powerful force. The "creationists" who believed in the literal accuracy of Genesis swept the teaching of evolution out of America's public schools.

Now, 55 years later Ronald Reagan has latched onto the issue again, with his recent endorsement of the modern fundamentalists and their revived creationist movement. ...

GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan raised the issue to the level of presidential politics recently at a meeting of evangelical Christians in Dallas when he claimed to see "great flaws" in the theory of evolution.

If evolution is taught in the public schools, he said, then "the biblical story of creation" should be taught alongside it. "Religious America is awakening," he said. [my emphasis]

But St. Reagan didn't just start promoting creationist pseudoscience during his 1980 Presidential campaign:

The new creationist movement got its first big political boost in California during the administration of Gov. Ronald Reagan. In 1969, a notably religious state board of education, with seven of 10 members appointed by Reagan, voted to accept a statement that creationism is a valid alternative to the theory of evolution.

The California board first approved the teaching of creationism side-by-side with evolution. Then, after much pressure from creationist scientists, the board decided instead to revise current biology textbooks to indicate that evolution is only a theory, and is no more verifiable than creationist doctrine.

Since the revision of biology books for California -- and those California texts were used all over the country in their revised form -- publishers, teachers and biologists have been battling the "equal time for creation" position in virtually every state. [my emphasis]

Democrats nostalgic for the soothing balm of Make America Boring Again might want to recall those days more clearly. Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon wrote in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991):

Reagan, running loose [in the 1980 general election campaign], displayed his familiar propensity for unverifiable anecdotes and a willingness to say whatever came into his head. What came into his head were happy thoughts about creationism and Taiwan and confusion about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan. By early September the candidate's gaffes had become so numerous that reporters on the Reagan plane were hard-pressed to keep track of them, and Democratic strategists were optimistic that the election campaign would be turned into a referendum on Reagan rather than on -President Carter.

Yes, the Democrats were hoping the fever would break already in 1980!

Cannon elaborates:

At a news conference in Dallas, Reagan tried to please a questioner from a religious publication and agreed that creationism should be taught as an alternative theory to Darwinism in the public schools. On other occasions he made positive references to Taiwan while his running mate George Bush was on a fence-mending mission to the People's Republic of China. The remark that caused the biggest flap occurred on Labor Day, when Jimmy Carter formally opened his fall campaign with a speech in Tuscumbia, Alabama, a center of Ku Klux Klan activity. When Reagan spoke in Detroit that evening, he said, "Now I'm happy to be here while he is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan." The crowd gasped. Reagan knew immediately that he had misspoken. "I blew it," he told his aides afterward. "I should never have said what I said."

In similar situations today, Trump would just say, "Fake news! What I said was perfect, just like the phone call was perfect. I handled that situation perfectly." But crackpot anti-science fanaticism backed by organized Christian Right fundamentalism is definitely not new for the Republican Party and did not drop from the skies in 2016.