Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? by Thomas Patterson

Author:Thomas Patterson [Patterson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Reagan and Bush tax cuts had majority support – two-to-one for the Reagan cut and nearly three-to-two for Bush’s.[344] The 2017 tax cut was opposed by a one-sided majority of two-to-one.[345] Even among Republicans, the disapproval rate was much higher than for the earlier tax cuts.[346]

Republican opposition was concentrated among working-class whites who felt their interests were being sacrificed for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy. It was not the first time that they had felt betrayed. They had opposed the bank bailout engineered by “establishment Republicans” in the closing months of the Bush administration, which had led many of them to back the Tea Party movement. When establishment Republicans pushed back against the Tea Party’s growing power, right-wing media lashed out. Talk show host Michael Savage said he was “sickened” by establishment Republicans, whom he labeled the party’s “eunuchs.” “Now you understand how the Tea Party arose,” he told his listeners.[347]

Free trade agreements were also part of the Tea Party’s dispute with the Republican establishment. Although the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted in the first year of Clinton’s presidency, it had been negotiated by George H.W. Bush. And it was another Republican president, George W. Bush, who had negotiated the next major free trade arrangements – bilateral pacts with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. A 2010 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Republican opposition to free trade agreements was concentrated among Tea Party supporters who believed the pacts destroy American jobs.[348]

The Tea Party movement should have alerted marketplace Republicans that their grip on the party was slipping but, then again, perhaps nothing could have prepared them for Donald Trump. They didn’t see him coming and, when he started to catch on, they didn’t think that he could win the GOP nomination. They misjudged their party’s base. Exit polls indicated that more than half of Republican primary voters in 2016 felt “betrayed” by their party’s leaders.[349] They voted heavily for Trump.[350]

The split in Republican ranks carried into the early months of the Trump administration when one Trump initiative after the next failed to make it through the Republican-controlled Congress. Steve Bannon, who had been head of Breitbart News and was then serving as a presidential advisor, said that removing “establishment Republicans” from Congress was a higher priority than ridding it of Democrats. “We are declaring war on the Republican establishment,” Bannon said. “Nobody is safe. We’re coming after all of them.”[351] Right-wing attacks on their own party’s lawmakers produced a poll finding never before seen, one that might have led analysts to think the poll was a fake. But it was conducted by a reputable polling organization, the Pew Research Center. It found that Republicans had less trust in Congress than Democrats, even though their party had control of Congress. It was the first time ever that members of the majority party had expressed less trust in Congress than had members of the minority party.[352]

Ironically, it was Trump who dampened the growing split between the party’s working-class and business factions.

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