The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed #1

It might already be happening. Trump, whose plummeting poll numbers seem inversely linked to the the spread of the coronavirus, is getting plastered in swing states, tomahawking any chance of Republicans maintaining control of the U.S. Senate. Dire indeed this is for the GOP because it has allowed itself to become a cult of personality. If Trump can't brake his descent, he's going to take the Republican Party with him.

You wouldn't think that the removal of John C. Calhoun's statue yesterday in Charleston has more to do with today's Republican Party than it does with the rival Democrats, with whom Calhoun, as Andrew Jackson's first vice president, was affiliated. Read Joseph Lowndes' From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (2008) and you understand why this is the case.

Segregationists after World War Two started their migration out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party because the national Democratic Party favored integration and civil rights.

It took several decades to complete this migration but the die was essentially cast with the Brown decision in 1954. 

Before their was #Resistance to Trump there was the Resistance to federally mandated integration. A key doctrine of the segregationist Resistance was interposition, basically a reboot of nullification, the idea that a state can void a federal law it finds objectionable. The greatest champion of nullification was John C. Calhoun.

From the battles over integration in the South, Lowndes tracks the movement of white supremacists into the mainstream Republican Party via the '64 Goldwater campaign, George Wallace's '68 presidential run culminating in Nixon's "Southern strategy" landslide victory of 1972, and finally the Sweet Beulah Land of the Reagan 1980s.

Make no mistake the GOP is a White Man's Party through and through and has been for 40 years. The fact that statues of great white slave owners are coming down not exclusively at the instigation of the mob but at the behest of local grandees and with almost no sign of push back is a very bad sign for the Republican Party and a very good sign for the rest of us.