Republicans dropped Nixon yet support Trump, but why?
By: Michael Barnard
Tags: Impeachment, Richard Nixon, Politics, Donald Trump, United States

Podcast version of this article

We are at an odd cusp of time. A sitting President has been charged under the articles of impeachment of a crime of high severity, using his office to advance his political goals with a foreign country against a political rival. This is far more serious than dissembling about a sexual act and the evidence is damning, yet Republicans and Republican politicians continue to support Donald Trump.

Looking back to the summer of 1974, five decades ago, we saw that the Republicans, when presented with the evidence of Nixon’s crimes, acted with integrity and alacrity. And assessments of the relative severity of the crimes make it clear that Trump’s transgressions are much more serious than Nixon’s as well.

One party, the Democratic Party, is acting in good faith according to the articles of the US Constitution, and in the interest of the USA, its people and good governance, something necessary for the long-term survival of the country. One party, the Republican Party, is almost universally supporting a President convicted of crimes far worse than the ones that they stood against less than 50 years ago, and absurdly removed from those that they considered Bill Clinton guilty of.

What has led the Republican Party to this sorry state?

Arguably, the dissolution of the GOP started with the President that they impeached. Nixon inherited a decent party which he started on the path which led to today’s shambling, often evil mess. But the party hadn’t died the death of a thousand cuts in his day.

What was the first cut? The Southern Strategy. Nixon leaned into that intentionally racist sweeping up of Dixiecrat voters who were incensed by black people being given equal rights.

That also scooped a lot of white evangelicals, which led to the Moral Majority era of the 1980s, when the formal alignment of the Republicans with Young Earth Creationists, anti-abortionists and anti-evolutionists was cemented.

There are times when describing something as a slippery slope is a logical fallacy. There are other times when there’s an obvious and steep grade coated with ice and someone pushing something down it. The Republicans were on a slippery slope and intentionally heading down it. Those two strong wedges of irrational and often hateful thought led to more of the same.

That made Republican voters highly susceptible to Murdoch’s Fox News, a conservative entertainment and propaganda outlet modeled after CNN to give it the appearance of being informative. Its primary talking heads reflect the ignorance of their viewers and layer on regular demonization of the other, whether the other is blacks, immigrants, Hillary Clinton or Democrats. Divergence from reality among Republican voters and Republican politicians was rewarded in the short term with re-election, a Pyrrhic victory as is becoming clear.

About 20 years ago, they decided that the next irrational wedge that they could lock into voting for them were the climate change deniers, so in addition to all of the other irrationality and hatred, they leaned into denying even more reality. They were rewarded with the vast majority of fossil fuel political funding, another Pyrrhic defeat as the planet heats untenably and the industry faces its inevitable decline.

Now we see Republican politicians pandering to anti-vaxxers, and anti-vaccination on the rise among conservative voters. A non-empirical, life-ending, health-harming conspiracy theory that used to be evenly spread across the political divide is now clearly more prevalent on the right. Trump has tweeted anti-vaxx views. Five 2018 GOP gubernatorial candidates were openly anti-vaxx, and two were elected. Oregon state legislature Republican representatives brought forward anti-vaxx legislation written by an anti-vaxx organization, a few months before they left the state en masse to prevent a vote on climate action. Studies and research show vaccination avoidance much more strongly among Republican voters than Democratic voters as children die of diseases long dismissed from awareness.

52% of Flat Earthers in YouGov polling identify as deeply religious, which in the USA mostly means Young Earth Creationists, evangelicals and Republican voters.

This is the party that Trump hijacked. One that Nixon started on the decades long path to being the party of irrational wedges and received opinions. Now Republican politicians are stuck between voters that they’ve been complicit in making more ignorant and polarized, and trying to govern a great country. Trump exploited that. He loves the poorly educated, and says so brazenly. He exploited them his entire career. From WWE to his reality show to the unending row of people he entered into contracts with to the students at Trump U, he’s conned the gullible out of their money for decades.

And now Republican politicians that centrists and those on the left could disagree with but admire no longer exist. The Republican Party, which used to be a reasonable center-right alternative to the center-left Democratic Party, is an unreasonable day drinking racist uncle who used to fix tractors and so is an intransigent expert on everything.

If they break with Trump, they lose the next election. If they stick with Trump, they lose yet another pound of their self-respect, if any still exists. They are tidally locked to being politicians, for their own reasons, likely the lack of sufficient lobbying jobs for them to make a graceful exit. And the base that they are locked to is dwindling, not increasing. Flight is to urban liberal areas from rural conservative areas, and people become liberal in cities through exposure to diversity and knowledge. Conservative Boomers are dying. Religion is in decline. Millennials are not returning to the churches that they often never entered in the first place. The NRA is dissolving from venal profit-taking by its executives, ties to Moscow and the dwindling number of fire arm owners.

Nixon was contained by a party which still had integrity despite his early efforts, but his efforts led, through many other culpable leaders, to Trump having no opposition from within the shell of the party he burrowed into like a vulture on a rotting corpse.

Those of us outside of the USA hope that the country will return to its senses, that actual conservatives will take back their party or form a new one from its ashes, that conservatives will return to the table with more conservative solutions and leadership for 21st Century and global problems. But we aren’t holding our breath. 50 years of accelerating down an icy slope is not halted and reversed swiftly.