Has the Modern GOP Reached the Limits of Nixonism?

This is a topic which deserves a book not a blog post which someone should write sometime-maybe, one day it will be me. Norm Ornstein wrote a great book about the post Gingrich GOP.

http://www.amazon.com/Even-Worse-Than-Looks-Constitutional-ebook/dp/B00FK8Y274/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444433592&sr=8-1&keywords=norm+ornstein+worse+than+you+think

The tactics of today's wild eyed House GOP that can't even elect its own Speaker goes back to the rise of Newt's tactics-which he started in the late 70s.

It's quite fitting that Sean Hannity raised the possibility of him being the new Speaker and that he sounds like he's be all for it if asked.

Of course, Newt didn't leave Congress by choice but was drummed out. Here is a sign of dysfunction. Today's GOP looks for guidance in a man who himself was a total failure. Do you really want to bring in a mafia guy to clean up your business and make it clean?

Kind of like how Republicans look to Romney to for guidance on the 2016 Presidential race.

But when trying to put your finger on where it went wrong for today's GOP you have to dig deeper and go back further than even Newt.

You can argue that the modern GOP is Nixonian. Newt was just a particularly militant brand of Nixonian.

The real problem for the modern Republican party is that they are out of step with the political mainstream. Thy American people have long since accepted a consensus-the FDR New Deal consensus.

Even the GOP base hasn't rejected this as the one thing they would support is an increase in Social Security.

Ideally they'd like to make this just for White Christians like themselves but they are not anti New Deal. They are kind of National Socialist.

The Republican party was the dominant American party from the rise of Lincoln till FDR. At that point the Dems were in the wilderness for their own Original Sin-support for Dixiecrat slavery and then segregation.

However, ,the party begun to redeem itself with the New Deal and finally atoned with the Voting Rights Act.

The Democrats conquereed Washinton in 1932 with shockiing ferocity. In 1936 they even expanded their huge majorities.

The country couldn't have been more clear in its acceptance and support for New Deal liberalism. But the GOP was and is still opposed. For instance Jeb has explicitly called for the end of Medicare-then as he always does blamed the media for somehow taking him out of context.

The Dems continued to dominate. They went on to hold the White House for the next 20 years-even after the GOP Congress passed the FDR Amendment in 1948 codifying what had been tacitly accepted prior to FDR that a President can lead no more than two terms-a law which to this day I'm unsure of as to its wisdom or fairness.

If the people think it's undemocratic for a President to run for more than two terms they can vote against him for that reason. And FDR only ran longer due to the emergency nature of the Depression and then WWII.

But I digress.

You can understand that by 1948 the GOP was pretty desperate. Indeed, they had not gotten back into Congress until 1946-the famous do nothing Congress Truman successfully ran against.

Think about that when you buy that GOP Congressional dysfunction is something new. It's been their modus operandi since they first got back in 1946 after being in wilderness for 14 straight years. For 14 straight years the Democrats controlled the entire government.

So 1946 was great news for the Republican party. It showed they could still win a national election post New Deal.

And this was the GOP wave that swept in Richard Nixon.

So this was very good news for the Republican party. But there was an important caveat that still hasn't been resolved: their win was not in any way a repudiation of the New Deal. So this victory was not an affirmation of the GOP ideologically.

What informed their victory were a few things.

1. The 'fundamentals' clearly favored them. The Dems had been in power so long that the slogan 'Had enough?' kind of wrote itself. A statistician would hardly be shocked that the GOP took back Congress in 1946 regardless of any stances on the issues. But again the victory was nonideological.

2. Also it was out of Warren Harding's playbook: a return to normalcy. The Dems had gotten the nation through the Depression and WWII but now the country wanted to get back to normal, just like the nation saw sweeping out the Dems as getting back to normal in 1920.

3. Finally the Nixon Strategy that Nixon himself rode into power begun here. The main 'issue' the GOP ran on that year was Communism. It was red-baiting. It accused the FDR Administration and the Democratic party of being 'soft on Communism' and maybe even in bed with Stalinism. .

The Dems were 'soft on Communism.' This is not so much an issue as a personal attack but it was very effective.

So it was the beginning of McCarthyism. You know the background. FDR's alleged 'treason at Yalta' Henry Wallace, Communists in the State Department etc.

Nixon won his first run for office by smearing Hellen Gagahan Douglas as the 'Pink Lady.'

http://www.amazon.com/Tricky-Dick-Pink-Lady-Douglas-Sexual/dp/0679416218

The problem is that it was not a victory based on winning a policy debate. The GOP can never win the debate against the New Deal.

Ike would win in 1952-and Nixon would be his Veep-but everyone liked Ike and this had nothing to do with partisanship much less ideology. Maybe the GOP would be smart today to run Colin Powell but now they are so purist this could never happen.

Ike could have won the same landslide victories out of the Democratic party. It turned out that he was a partisan Republican though not a very ideological one. So again, there was no real blueprint for the party to be able to bottle.

Nixon, of course, went on to a close loss to JFK and always felt that his status as representing the incumbent Eisenhower Administration was a liability. He would always bemoan that he was stuck with a record to defend.

http://www.amazon.com/Richard-Nixons-Six-Crises--/dp/B000K7ZDGO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444436900&sr=1-1&keywords=nixon+six+crises

Political scientists today tell us that incumbency gives you a  big advantage but Nixon never believed that. His preferred position was to be on attack against his opponent's record that they had to defend.

 JFK had kind of turned it around on him a little by suggesting that Ike himself was somehow 'soft on Communism.'

During the Eisenhower years the GOP started attacking its own leaders in the Administration with McCarthy finally going to far and claiming that Ike and Dulles were conscious members of a Communist conspiracy.

The GOP ha therefore been forced to use Nixonian tactics to win national office to the present day.

Whitewater and the other fake scandals of the Clinton years were Nixonian tactics. It's quite fitting that the guy who spilled the beans on the real purpose of Benghazi's last name is McCarthy as these are again McCarthyite-ie, Nixonian-tactics of personal character assassination rather than anything like the rarefied policy debate many pundits pretend our national elections are.

Hillary is basically today's Pink Lady. It's their only hope in beating her though it's chances of success have been perhaps fatally undermined by today's McCarthy's candor.