50th Anniversary of "The Speech" that Launched Reagan's Political Career

Next Monday marks the 50th anniversary of The Speech, "A Time for Choosing," a paid-for television spot for the Goldwater campaign, that launched Ronald Reagan's career as a national conservative leader.

All the bunkum is on display -- honest people yearning to be free from meddling, intrusive, redistributive government taxes and regulations -- and it is still on display today as Republicans, all Goldwaterites now, are poised for a great victory in two weeks.

The Republicans have not only been successful at controlling the agenda in Washington D.C., they now dominate state politics more than at any time since the early 1950s. As Thomas Edsall wrote recently in "The State-by-State Revival of the Right":

While politics in Washington remain gridlocked, the conservative revolution has been thriving outside the Capitol beltway.

Republicans in states across the Midwest and the South are determined to eviscerate liberal policies and to entrench the political power of the right.

Twenty-three state governments are now under the complete control – governor, house and state senate — of the Republican Party, more than at any time since Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952. Democrats control 14 states. The rest are divided.

Not only are Republicans today in charge of more states, they are exercising their power to gain partisan advantage far more aggressively than their Democratic counterparts.

The state-based revival of the right has the strong backing of conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS and the network of tax-exempt organizations tied to the Koch brothers. 

There are some common themes to the current Republican state-based agenda.
The most visible effort is the drive to gut public sector unions, a key source of votes and financial support for Democrats. Wisconsin, under Republican Governor Scott Walker, has led the charge on this front. With support from the Koch brothers, the state has severely restricted collective bargaining rights for public employees, ended mandatory union dues and limited wage hikes to the rate of inflation. 

Both supporters and opponents of Walker’s initiative realized that this was a key battleground – pathbreaking, in fact – hence the rallies, the recall and so on. 

Many Republican-controlled states have weakened or eliminated laws and regulations protecting the environment. In North Carolina the state legislature cut the budgets of regulators and prohibited local governments from enacting strict pro-environmental rules. The state chapter of the League of Conservation Voters has rated members of the legislature every year since 1999. Between 1999 and 2012, the group issued North Carolina a total of 48 scores of zero. In 2013 alone, 82 North Carolina Republicans got zeros. 

The anti-abortion movement has held sway in many of the 23 Republican-led states, successfully winning passage of legislation designed to force the closing of abortion clinics and to make access to related services as onerous as possible. The Guttmacher Institute publishes a description of state-level abortion laws. The measures adopted in conservative states generally include some or all of these restrictions: a woman must wait 24 hours and accept counseling designed to discourage abortion; a minor must obtain parental consent; public funding is restricted to abortions in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest; the woman must undergo ultrasound and the provider must show and describe the image to the woman. 

Perhaps the most controversial action taken by Republicans in states where they have power has been the approval of legislation designed to restrict minority and student voting through photo ID laws and limitations on early voting. In 2013, the North Carolina legislature enacted a major revision of state voting laws that Dan T. Carter, a prominent historian of the South, describes as the “nation’s most extensive effort at voter suppression.” Carter writes:

"Every change in North Carolina’s new election code was targeted at reducing potential Democratic voters regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. The state’s VIVA/Election Reform law, passed on a straight party line vote, now requires a government-issued photo ID card to vote, but rejects student IDs, public-employee IDs, or photo IDs issued by public assistance agencies. Other provisions end Sunday voting (African Americans have a tradition on voting after church) and straight-party ticket voting (fifty seven percent of straight ticket votes are by Democrats), shorten the early voting calendar, (Democratic voters are thirty percent more likely to vote early than Republicans), ban same-day registration during early voting, (a majority of same day registrants are Democrats)."

State level Republicans have taken a cue from tax bills passed at a national level during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to push through tax cuts with the lion’s share of benefits going to the top of the income distribution. Last year, for example, Mike Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, signed legislation that slashed rates across the board and eliminated the state estate tax.

Edsall sees "a day of demographic reckoning" coming for the GOP when all the old white people who represent the Republican base die off and are replaced by young blacks and Latinos. But by then our merely formal system of two-party representative democracy will be even more constricted. Universal suffrage will no longer exist as a conservative federal bench continues to whittle down the franchise; at which point, the parties might not even feel it necessary to nominate people of color and women as window dressing.

When Jackie Robinson Almost Fought a Cracker in the Cow Palace: a Story of the GOP's Southern Realignment

Michael Beschloss is the type of American public intellectual who can appear on network television, which is to say that he colors within the lines of official, accepted opinion. Nonetheless, I own many of his books; for instance, his volumes devoted to LBJ's self-taped White House conversations.

Today, tucked in the back of the sports page, Beschloss has a story, "Jackie Robinson and Nixon: Life and Death of a Political Friendship," that provides an excellent thumbnail sketch of the electoral realignment caused by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Grand Old Party's nomination of Barry Goldwater in the Cow Palace the same year.

Let me pick up Beschloss's narrative right there:

Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who opposed the 1964 [civil rights] legislation as unconstitutional. When Rockefeller denounced political extremism at the party’s San Francisco convention, Robinson, a “special delegate,” shouted, “C’mon, Rocky!” As Robinson recalled, an Alabama delegate “turned on me menacingly” before “his wife grabbed his arm and turned him back." 

Spoiling for a fight, Jackie cried, “Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose!” [How sweet! Oh, to have been there!] He later wrote with uncharacteristic overstatement that on leaving San Francisco, “I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” 

That fall, Robinson joined the 94 percent of the African-American electorate that backed President Johnson. (Since then, the percentage of the black vote for Democratic presidential nominees has never dipped below the low 80s.) In 1968, furious over Nixon’s courtship of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had once led the segregationist “Dixiecrats,” Jackie backed the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. 

Jackie Robinson died of a heart attack at age 53, two weeks before the 1972 election. Although President Nixon’s civil rights record was considerably stronger (especially on public schools desegregation) than many understood, he was eager that year to carry the five Southern states that had supported George Wallace’s third-party candidacy in 1968; Nixon felt he had little chance to regain much of the African-American vote. 

That March, Robinson, ailing and tired, complained to President Nixon by letter that he was “polarizing this country.” No longer the political optimist of his earlier years, he poignantly wrote his onetime friend, “I want so much to be a part of and to love this country as I once did.”

If you want to know about the politics of the U.S. homeland, all you need to know is the Civil War. We've been fighting it for the last 150 years. We've been fighting the slavers, the money-power non-stop for 150 years. Goldwater begins the realignment of the modern Republican Party with the Old South; Nixon consummates it with his Southern Strategy, co-opting George Wallace's American Independent Party.

Presently, the GOP is a party that can't win a coutrywide election but is able to dominate Congress with its majority in the House and by filibustering everything in the Senate. The Democrats are sacks of piss and shit, infants sucking on the corporate tit, surviving only by wailing about Tea Party bogeymen.

The Beschloss piece is part of The Upshot, a new series of Gray Lady think pieces that owe more to the kind of writing found online than traditional journalism. So far they have been quite good.

Born in the Golden State Suburbs

The present day hard-shell Republican Party began its rise in the California suburbs of the 1960's. Goldwater's landslide loss to LBJ in 1964 is usually where people start. And there's some merit to that. Goldwater carried five states from the Deep South, almost the same five that third-party candidate George Wallace carried four years later (Goldwater won South Carolina; Wallace, Arkansas). This prompted Nixon to launch his Southern Strategy, which rapidly accelerated the conversion of the Republican Party.

But the first big win for the new, hard-shell type of Republican was when Ronald Reagan demolished incumbent Pat Brown in the California gubernatorial election of 1966. Then in 1978 there was Howard Jarvis' anti-tax uprising enshrined in California's Proposition 13. Reagan's ascension to the presidency two years later shocked many but it shouldn't have. The handwriting was on the wall for all to see.

Paul Krugman's column today, "Lessons From a Comeback," floats an argument that has merit. Since California is a bellwether of conservative Republicanism shouldn't we be paying attention to what's happening in the Golden State? And what's happening there is that the GOP has dwindled to such a small number that they can no longer block, even with supermajority rules, any and all legislation. As Krugman says,

California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making. 

And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right. 

And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too. 

So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.

Nationally the radical right's control of the House of Representatives appears to be on more solid footing -- because of the gerrymander and Citizens United. The House gives them all the structure they need to block and stymie for the foreseeable future; that, and they also control the Supreme Court. So anything progressive that squeaks through the legislature will be overturned by the judiciary.

Let's see how the GOP manages immigration reform. After the 2012 presidential election Republicans know they cannot win another national contest polling as low they do with Latinos. If they botch immigration, they'll likely be blocked from controlling the executive for a long time. But, really, why should hard-shell conservatives care? They're getting almost all of what they want with the current set up.