Stanley B. Greenberg - RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans

THIS BOOK TELLS AN AMAZING STORY, and if you hadnt seen what happened to America over the last four years, you wouldnt believe it. It even has a happy ending, and thats none too soon for all of us whove had enough fighting, enough division, enough politics. This time the end of politics portends a country united and finally liberated from gridlock to address the nations most serious problems.

It ends with the death of the Republican Party as weve known it, while the survivors work to re-create the party of Lincoln relevant for our times. It ends with a Democratic Party liberated from the nations suffocating polarization to use government to advance the public good, as the country used to expect.

You see, our country is hurtling toward a New America that is ever more racially and culturally diverse, younger, millennial, more secular, and unmarried, with fewer traditional families and male breadwinners, more immigrant and foreign born who are more concentrated in the growing metropolitan areas, which are magnets for investment and people. The New America encompasses a vast array of family types and working families in which both the men and women face growing challenges. The New America is ever more racially blended and multinational, more secular and religiously pluralistic. The New America embraces the countrys immigrant and foreign character. It now includes the college-educated and suburban women who want respect and equality in a multicultural America.

America was shaped by major social movements, civic unrest, political battles, and government action at historic junctures, and by the choices the two national political parties took that created a more modern America. Each moved America away from traditional strictures on blacks, women, and immigrants. Each juncture made America freer, more equal, and more democratic. Those choices put the Democratic Party on a trajectory that aligned Democrats with the countrys emerging civic norms and alienated the Republican Party from the country and itself.

America was changed profoundly by the battle to pass the civil rights laws that ended racial segregation and ensured blacks had the right to vote. Bipartisan immigration laws reopened the country to nonAnglo Saxon immigration in 1965 and greatly expanded it in the late 1980s. The Supreme Court put women on a path to greater independence and equality when it declared in 1965 that women have a right to privacy and birth control and in 1973, when it made abortion legal.

And these different choices came to fruition with the election and reelection of Barack Obama, the first African-American president whose activist government produced a Tea Party movement and revolt that accelerated the polarization of the country and made attitudes about race and immigration matter as never before. The Tea Party and Donald Trump battled to stop history and stop government.

At each juncture, the Democrats were deeply divided, sometimes more than the Republicans. That was true on matters of civil rights, immigration, and abortion. Nonetheless, after these defining social issues were settled in law or by the U.S. Supreme Court, national Democratic leaders embraced and defended the social changes and new freedoms that aligned the party with a modernizing America and its values. After more than five decades of such choices, the Democratic Party is associated with equal rights, equality, gender equality, tolerance, openness to diversity, and more.

The Republicans electoral base was in the South and later in the Appalachian Valley and rural states across the country, so at each juncture, they escalated their battle against these national changes. The partys national leaders ignored their own deep divisions and worked inventively to show they were champions of white people during the battle over civil rights and affirmative action. Its leaders scorned the sexual revolution and champion to this day a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal. They were opposed to women breaking free of the patriarchal family and winning equality. They mobilized against illegal immigration in the states and nationally, fueled by Patrick Buchanans three campaigns for president.

Newt Gingrich led a revolution in the early 1990s that put the GOP into a total war footing against a Democratic Party determined to expand the liberal welfare state and marginalize conservatism, but those forces defeated him.

The Tea Party led the GOPs life-and-death battle against President Obama and his Affordable Care Act, fueled by Tea Party protests that elevated white racial resentment and hostility to immigrants. Defeating and delegitimating President Obama was the last chance to stop the New America from winning.

Obamas 2008 election, the Wall Street bailout, and the searing battle to pass Obamacare produced the Tea Party revolt and the Tea Party wave election of 2010, the most consequential election of our lifetime. It gave the Tea Partyfueled Republican Party effective control of the U.S. House and Senate, two thirds of the governorships, and more than 60 percent of the state legislator chambers, which rushed to radically redraw the legislative and congressional maps to ensure big GOP majorities for a decade.

The Tea Partyled GOP pushed the country into fiscal austerity and to deconstruct governmentto stop Democrats from using government for positive ends or paying off its growing coalition with new entitlements. Limiting the right to vote and allowing unlimited, secret campaign spending, both sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court, hardly needed to be justified.

The Tea Partywave election put the country into a decade of suffocating polarization and gridlock, led by Donald Trump since 2016.

Trump got vital help from the Russians and the FBI, but he is president because he seized the leadership of the Republican counterrevolution and waged an all-out, take-no-prisoners war against New America and the Democrats, which won him the undying loyalty of his Tea Party and Evangelical base. He sent racist, misogynist, and nationalist signals that branded the GOP an anti-immigrant, white, and patriarchal party.

Donald Trump auditioned for the job as a birther. Comfortable with the most off-putting of attacks, he denied the citizenship and legitimacy of the first African-American president. President Obama was everything conservative voters hated. Figuratively and symbolically, he represented Americas multiculturalism and its political triumph.

Trump got the job of leading the GOP because he hated Obama and Clinton so viscerally, and he promised to repeal Obamacare and build a wall against Mexican immigrants. He was so determined to wipe out Obamas legacy that maybe conservatives finally had a leader who would push back against the modernizing trends that were making the country more racially diverse, immigrant, millennial, secular, metropolitan, and unmarried, where working women stood over the faltering male breadwinners and their faltering traditional families.