How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party
The failure of the administration of George W. Bush — and the accompanying crisis of the Republican Party — has caused a political meltdown of historic proportions. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Bush enjoyed the greatest popularity ever recorded for a modern American president. Republicans on Capitol Hill, under the iron rule of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, fattened their coffers through a fearsome operation overseen by corporate lobbyists and GOP henchmen that functioned more like an empire than an old-fashioned political machine. “Republican hegemony,” the prominent conservative commentator Fred Barnes rejoiced in 2004, “is now expected to last for years, maybe decades.”
Now, only four years later, Bush is leaving office with the longest sustained period of public disapproval ever recorded. No president, at least in modern times — and certainly no two-term president — has risen so high only to fall so low. Indeed, Bush’s standings in the polls describe one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the American presidency- second only, perhaps, to that of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign from office. And in Congress, the indictment and downfall of DeLay and a host of associated scandals involving, among others, the Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, have badly damaged the party’s image. The supremacy of the GOP, once envisioned by party operatives as a “permanent majority,” may be gone for a very long time to come.
At first glance, the collapse of the Republican Party seems rapid and unexpected. When viewed within the larger context of American history, however, the party’s breakdown looks familiar, even predictable. As in earlier party crackups — 1854,1932,1968 — the demise has involved not a single, sudden explosion but a gradual unraveling followed by a sharp and rapid deterioration amid major national calamities. If Bush and the Republican majority in Congress accelerated the demise of Ronald Reagan’s political era with their assault on traditional American values and institutions — including the rule of law itself — it is a decline that began two decades ago.
A few examples serve to place recent events in historical perspective. In 1848, the Whig Party, which had emerged more than a decade earlier to oppose the Democrats of Andrew Jackson, captured the presidency for the second time in its history and consolidated what looked like a formidable, nationwide political base. Yet differences over slavery and territorial expansion had always hampered party unity, and in 1854, amid the sectional warfare caused by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Whigs ceased to be a national force, replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party as the nation lurched toward the Civil War.
Three generations later, in 1928, the Republicans, although the dominant party, were battered by scandals and old battles between conservative party regulars and self-styled progressives. GOP power brokers wisely chose as their presidential nominee Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whose engineering projects and disaster- relief efforts had earned admiration across party lines. Hoover crushed his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, in what looked like the culmination of the party’s growth since the Civil War. Four years later, though, following the stock-market crash of October 192.9 and the onset of the Great Depression, the Republicans went to pieces — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after burying Hoover in a landslide, inaugurated the New Deal.
In 1964, the Texas liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson wiped out the right-wing hero Barry Goldwater and ushered in a true working majority of Democratic reformers in Congress. Political commentators hailed a second birth of New Deal liberalism, and some experts even wondered if the Republicans would soon go the way of the Whigs. Yet the Democrats had long been battling among themselves over civil rights issues, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 triggered the defection of the once solidly Democratic South. A mere four years after Johnson’s outsize triumph, Democratic infighting over his escalation of the war in Vietnam, as well as over racial turmoil in the nation’s cities, paved the way for Richard Nixon’s election. The breakdown of the Democrats, coupled with Nixon’s downfall in 1974 in the Watergate scandal, blew the ideological center out of American politics and cleared the way for the conservative age of Ronald Reagan — the age only now beginning to come to an end.
How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party, Page 1 of 7