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From the first moments of the impeachment hearing, my blood started boiling. Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) couldn’t get through his opening statement without Republicans leaping in to interrupt, ask distracting questions and raise objections they knew were unnecessary. Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) asserted that Schiff knew the identity of the whistleblower, to which Schiff said, “As the gentleman knows, that’s a false statement.”
But Jordan and the rest of the GOP are not here to argue in good faith or to inject truth. They’re not being honest. They know Trump is guilty. They know they are lying. They know their arguments are trash. It’s popular to say DC is dysfunctional or our political system is broken, but these ideas are untrue.
The truth is one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. The way the GOP conducts itself today is rooted in anger, personal destruction, dishonesty and a sense that good government doesn’t really matter. We have one party that is consistently putting party ahead of country, and it’s damaging our political system. We don’t have a political problem — we have a GOP problem. And I think I know what the core of it is. Hint: it’s not Trump. No, the seeds of the rot of the GOP predates Trump.
Lawrence O’Donnell was recently on my podcast, Touré Show, and he said it’s a trick question to ask a politician what they would not do to get re-elected because they would do anything. There is no principle above getting re-elected. But that forces GOP elected officials to lie, gaslight and perform mental gymnastics in the service of defending birtherism or denying climate change or pretending objective media is fake or defending an indefensible President. He has led the party off in a wild direction, yet he is but a symptom of the problem. The patient was already sick before the Trump germ emerged.
What made them sick? I see two major trends. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which cemented a fundamental re-alignment of the parties. Before that, in the 1960 election, six Southern states went Democratic. After that, in 1968, no Southern state went Democratic, and some states that went Democratic in 1960 went for the segregationist George Wallace. Ever since then the South has dominated the Republican party as a solid conservative bloc. The overwhelmingly white voters of the GOP South are standing on land that was once filled with slaveowners and slaves.
According to recent studies, the higher the concentration of slaves in a given area in 1860, the higher the likelihood that people who live there in recent decades will vote Republican. There is a deep sense of racial resentment in many of these folks and the GOP has long been feeding their sense of fighting to return to the sense of superiority that their forefathers took for granted. These groups loyally supported George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as they employed a Southern Strategy that privileged white privilege.
In the 1980s, this went into overdrive. Media laws changed, meaning a station no longer had to give equal time to both sides of a political idea. This led to the rise of right-wing radio and amplification of the racial resentment that had been rising in the party. Now, a series of blowhards began shoving the GOP farther and farther to the right, turning voters angrier and angrier about race, immigration, crime and drugs. They were told Blacks weren’t hard-working, immigrants were stealing their jobs and both of them were line cutters, in that they wanted to cut the line and get more than they deserved. This led to thought leaders like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and, eventually, Trump, who seems like a right wing radio host taking over the whole thing.
As long as the GOP voters love him — and he continues to have an approval rating among Republicans in the high 80s — then GOP elected officials will continue to stand up for him no matter how insane he sounds, because the voters they need continue to support him. There is no higher principle than getting re-elected.
What will break the fever? Right now, I can’t imagine it.
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Touré, TV host, podcaster and author, co-hosts a new unapologetically progressive new podcast, “democracy-ish”, with and Danielle Moodie-Mills, a political columnist at Zora Magazine at Medium and the host of #WokeAF. The full episodes are available for download on any podcast platform, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.
