Is the GOP Disintegrating Before Our Eyes?
The current state of the Republican Party is akin to political party schisms of the past, which might signal a coming realignment.
Last month, the nation watched, with reactions ranging from uncomfortable amusement to fascinated horror, as far-right members of the GOP dethroned the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. It was an unprecedented move against a man who had himself only won the Speakership after a humiliating 15 rounds of public balloting back in January.
But the political massacre had only just begun.
Extremists proceeded to take down the No. 2 leader in the conference, Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was seen as too “old guard” and was unable to gain the trust and support of the radicals. The rebels cast their votes for other candidates in protest, and Scalise could not muster the votes he needed.
In response—and in reaction to actual death threats against them, their staff and their families—the “moderates” in the GOP launched a counterstrike. They, too, cast their votes for other candidates and ultimately succeeded in bringing down a far-right MAGA leader, Rep. Jim Jordan, whom an earlier Speaker, John Boehner, had once dubbed a “legislative terrorist.”
The No. 3 Republican, Tom Emmer (R-MN), fell next, another victim of the right wing’s quest to end the power of the party establishment. Exhausted—and unable to find any consensus candidate with any solid experience in leadership, fundraising, or negotiations— Republicans settled on an unknown who at least could look the part: Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA).
But it wasn’t long before “MAGA Mike” Johnson’s extremism came to light. It turns out he’s an election denialist who amplified Sidney Powell’s election conspiracies about Venezuelan software. But he was more than a casual supporter; he also organized Republicans in the House to file suit to overturn the 2020 election results. As a staunch anti-abortionist, Johnson co-sponsored three national abortion bans. And as a religious zealot, Johnson has advocated for criminalizing gay sexual intimacy.
Not exactly a guy to win over swing voters.
Above all, the new Speaker Johnson is a sworn ally of the former president, meaning the takeover of the House GOP conference by the far-right Trumpist wing is now complete. This seismic political realignment behind MAGA, after a year full of deadlock and dysfunction, are two big flashing red signs for the GOP. If history is any guide, as Thomas Balcerski notes in his insightful piece on this question, the signs point to the GOP’s days as a political party being numbered.
Political historians like Balcerski are now openly questioning whether the GOP is moribund. Indeed, history has something important to teach about what happens when a party reaches a point of no return over a highly divisive question. And we as a nation may find ourselves caught in the Republican Party’s death throes as it transforms into something unrecognizable within our political system.
Political realignment and dysfunction then: Slavery
The question of slavery provides two notable moments when it so divided members of a major party that a schism caused collapse. Those on one side of it declared themselves true, unwavering believers, while those on the other wondered what happened to their party and their once shared set of values.
Recall the Whig Party from our history books. They were once a formidable political power in the 18th and 19th centuries, standing for a strong federal government and later against the populism of Andrew Jackson. They counted among their ranks George Washington and John Hancock, and later statesmen such as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and even Abraham Lincoln.
But on the question of slavery, the Whigs were deeply divided, and they eventually fell into near-warring factions. When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, extending slavery into the Western Territories in 1854, it marked the Whigs’ breaking point. Many of the Southern Whigs joined up with the Democrats, and the Northern Whigs formed the new Republican Party. The old Whig Party rapidly disintegrated.
Just six years later, in 1860, the Democrats, to which many Southern Whigs had fled, also faced a reckoning of their own over slavery. Southern secessionist politicians were demanding states’ rights and protections for slavery. The favored Democratic presidential candidate, Stephen Douglas, received the majority of votes as the party’s nominee at the convention in Charleston, but the rules at the time required two-thirds of the delegates to support the nominee.
Douglas was a proponent of allowing territories to decide for themselves whether slavery would be legal. But a threat to slavery felt like a threat to Southern livelihood, so the Southern Democrats moved to block Douglas, spreading their votes out instead of rallying behind him. Sound familiar?
And this may also sound familiar: After a stunning 57 ballots, Douglas failed to secure sufficient support, and for the first time in its history, the Democratic Party failed to nominate a candidate at its convention.
Eventually, the party produced two candidates, Stephen Douglas and a Southerner, John Breckinridge. That division within the Democratic Party helped lead Abe Lincoln of the new Republican Party to victory in the presidential election of 1860.
Political realignment and dysfunction now: MAGA Authoritarianism
Today, an existential question now confounds and divides the once noble Republican Party. Many trace the roots of the problem to a fateful decision in the 1960s by Goldwater and Nixon to pursue a “Southern Strategy” to marry the party to Evangelical Christian voters and white supremacists in the South to improve its electoral chances.
As the United States grew more ethnically diverse over the decades, with minorities set to overtake white citizens in number by the year 2045, Republicans realized they could only hang onto power through anti-democratic means, from vote suppression to gerrymandering. Apparently, democracy was only a value to many of today’s Republicans when they could win elections; it became disposable when they could not.
It was only a question of time before a populist authoritarian such as Donald Trump would seize control of the party and promise to Make America Great Again, but through strongman rule. “I alone can fix it,” Trump proclaimed, and his supporters cheered.
Trump won the election but not re-election, and for the first time in our nation’s history, an outgoing president refused to cede power peacefully. We know what transpired next: Trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election that he had lost, and to aid in this attempt, he spread the Big Lie about a stolen election, summoned a mob to Washington, and unleashed it on the Capitol.
As Trump seeks reelection in 2024, Republicans are divided. Those who still believe in democratic rule, such as former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have broken with the party but paid a high political price for it. Trump requires absolute fealty, which means kissing the ring of an indicted criminal defendant, one who has made no effort to hide what he plans in a second administration: retribution on his political enemies, a gutting of the entire civil workforce, and expanded powers of the presidency making him answerable to no laws and with no meaningful checks on his authority.
The GOP schism is building
Like the Whigs and the Democrats of the 19th Century, the modern Republicans now face a schism so stark and so deep that no politician can straddle it and expect to survive. You either stand with Trump and authoritarian rule, or you stand against Trump and on the side of democracy. That question becomes even more inescapable as it grows more likely that Trump will be convicted of federal crimes next year before the election.
We saw the divide first begin within the GOP after the vote in the House to impeach Trump. Republican members with deeper convictions about democracy, such as Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger, were ostracized by their colleagues. Cheney lost her leadership position and then was primaried out of her Congressional seat. Other GOP members who had voted to impeach Trump either decided not to run again or were defeated in primaries.
The recent deadlocks by the House GOP in electing a House Speaker—which astonishingly happened twice this year—eerily echo the division and deadlocks of the Whigs in 1854 and the Democrats of 1860. Back then, you either stood with your Southern party members on the questions of slavery, or you split from each other. We are now seeing that happening with the modern Republican Party: You either stand with Trump and MAGA, or you leave.
In the wake of the election of Speaker Mike Johnson, a true MAGA Trumpist and election denier, some of the last oppositional voices are departing the Republican Party. On Wednesday of this week, two outspoken House members, Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Kay Granger (R-TX), who had both received intimidating threats after they had cast votes against the radical MAGA candidate Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for Speaker, announced they would not be seeking reelection next year. Both lawmakers had voted to certify Joe Biden’s election in 2020.
Rep. Buck explained why was leaving office. “The Republican Party of today...is ignoring self-evident truths about the rule of law and limited government in exchange for self-serving lies," referring to the Big Lie about a stolen election. “I’m joining Kay [Granger] and probably some others in the near future,” Rep. Buck said.
The GOP voters may split as well
It’s not just Republican officials that could split the party asunder. The multiple indictments of Trump pose another test. In a recent poll, 45 percent of Republicans say they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted by a jury of a crime, compared to 35 percent who said they would. In what would otherwise be a close election, those kinds of numbers are political death should they hold up.
If a guilty verdict is handed down against Donald Trump in the spring or early summer, Republicans will again face an existential question: stand by the most extreme, anti-democratic candidate or walk away? If history is any guide, such a deep and divisive question will lead to further political realignment and paralyzing deadlock, leaving many voters no choice but to abandon the party’s top candidate.
But if history does repeat itself, we had best remember that a full-on civil war followed the collapse of the Whigs in 1854 and the Democrats in 1860. In 2024, we should not discount the potential for a deadlocked GOP convention, a contested general election in November, and another attempted insurrection.
The problem w/ the uneducated & programmed base is that they are now unreachable & thus, cannot be persuaded. They also have lots of weapons. On the wealthy, educated side of the party, there are many billionaires who detest multi-cultural democracy and seem willing to go to any links to prevent it from ever really flourishing in the USA. What to do about these demographics? The billionaires keep the uneducated MAGAs hooked up to the propaganda drip 24/7
The history of political parties in this country is always very instructive. Heather Cox Richardson has been a gift to all of us in laying bare many of the fine historical details. Underlying every single issue we have is the history of the relationship that Americans have with money. It is baked into the cake of our national identity.
We rebelled against England ostensibly over our "rights," but at the bottom lay who determined the economic playing field and taxes. The abomination of slavery was instituted purely to make money. It did. The theory of race in this country was subsequently created and promulgated to justify that. Manifest destiny was about taking land that did not belong to the United States of America, but that Americans coveted. The labor movement fought and shed blood against capitalists and corporations that wanted no limits on their acquisition of wealth. Even the modern issues of immigration and culture war have a great deal to do with economic opportunity. The Devil's bargain that wealthy Republicans made in order to try to return this country to 1886 was only for the sake of money. If this nation rejects democracy for authoritarianism, it will be because powerful people see money in it.
Truer words were never spoken than when "Deep Throat" said to Bob Woodward, "Follow the money."