The party of discontent

[Celerity]

The US Republican Party has made an accommodation to Donald Trump its leaders may come to regret.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-party-of-discontent

‘Now is the winter of our discontent,’ declared England’s Richard III in Shakespeare’s famous play. Democrats understand his frustration. In January ‘impeachment managers’ from the United States House of Representatives presented the case to the Senate for removing Donald Trump from the presidency, as the constitution requires. The evidence that Trump had committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, the latter an archaic term for ‘misbehaviour’, seemed overwhelming.

Trump had attempted to oblige the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to assist his re-election campaign by defaming his most competitive Democratic rival, Joe Biden. To do this, he withheld military aid desperately needed by his Ukrainian counterpart—aid he was required by law to deliver. He forbade all members of the State Department and other executive agencies to assist Congress, a co-equal branch of government, in its inquiries into the affair. Many diplomats chose to co-operate with Congress despite the president’s threats; the evidence appeared damning. And yet it wasn’t. Senate Republicans, holding a majority in that body, voted to reject the charges.

‘Four more years’

The day before the Senate vote, Trump gave his ‘State of the Union’ address. This is an annual report required by the constitution but is frequently used to tout the president’s plans and achievements. Trump used the occasion to announce the themes of his re-election campaign and was greeted by thunderous cheers of ‘Four more years!’ by Republicans in the chamber. Trump’s presidency however offers little in which traditional Republicans might find solace. The party is normally identified with small government, liberalised trade and fiscal responsibility. Trump has undermined all those tenets: government has expanded in illiberal directions, he has disrupted previous free-trade agreements and he has added trillions of dollars to the public debt. And yet Republicans fall in line smiling. Why is this? Pundits frequently point out that, while elected officials may be uneasy, the average Republican voter adores Trump: over 90 per cent of declared Republicans claim to have a favourable view of the president. Yet this analysis glosses over important fault-lines in the Grand Old Party, which is in fact divided.

Essentially rural

The electoral base of the Republican Party is essentially rural. This has not always been the case. When founded in the mid 19th century, out of the cinders of the old Whigs, it was America’s urban party. It represented northern abolitionists opposed to slavery for moral reasons, but also northern industry and the urban working class, many of whose members had recently arrived from Europe. The Democrats, on the other hand, descended from the Democratic Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson, mainly articulated the interests of agriculture, its voters strongest in the south. The Civil War greatly weakened the Democrats, and the Republicans dominated national politics afterwards, with the notable interregnum of Woodrow Wilson, who was economically progressive but deeply racist. The Democrats only returned to power, and hegemony, with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt managed to peel labour from the Republican orbit and cobble together an electoral coalition by adding north-eastern labour to the southern rural party. This coalition ruled the US for most of the three and half decades that followed.


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