In the 2008 presidential election the Grand Old Republican Party suffered their biggest loss in 44 years. Not since Barry Goldwater garnered only 38% of the voting public have fewer Americans voted for them. In less than three years, they've lost 51 seats in the House and another 15 in the Senate.
Perhaps worse for the Republicans, the party is now divided ideologically between moderates and the hard-core right. Would-be leaders are engaged in a battle to the end, with advocates of small government individualism forcing those who would compromise for collective benefit, out of the way. Having supported President Obama's stimulus plan, Senator Arlen Specter's twenty-nine years of Republican service to Pennsylvania was strategically sacrificed by a party base that would accept only hard-right values.
This is a struggle that has underpinned American politics since FDR's New Deal brought government to all of the people rather than just the wealthy: whether the individual or the people will be the political agenda. Lyndon Johnson painted Goldwater as a foe of social security and working people turned out in historic numbers to defeat him. Johnson's Great Society program was an affirmation of the ideas initiated by the New Deal. While Barry Goldwater's loss in 1964 was a landslide refutation of the idea that the New Deal worked against American individualism, efforts to derail it continued by the Republican party.
By1968, when Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election, the American melting pot had been on a rolling boil. The Civil Rights Movement led to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April of 1968 and subsequent race riots in many cities. Young Americans sympathetic to equal civil rights joined the fray, and as the Vietnam war unraveled, anti-war demonstrations further divided the nation. Americans watched in horror, fear and disgust as unarmed protesters against war and racism outside the Chicago Democratic national convention were violently attacked for all the world to see.
America was coming of age at that time. We could no longer look the other way from racial injustice, or fight bloody wars in the face of American public resistance, or see women as second-class citizens any longer. As a nation, we were continuing to take seriously the promise of the American Dream, of equal opportunity and justice for all.
Nixon won a second presidency in 1972 based on a law and order campaign that played on the fears of Americans that change was occurring too rapidly. Southern voters turned out in force to vote against a federal mandate declaring people of color to have legitimate equal rights to go to school, to work, or even to use the same drinking fountain as whites. War protestors were marginalized as un-American radicals. The sons and daughters of the middle class were demonized as "dirty hippies" and made into a new national minority group. In a nation without justice, there was no peace. With blood and fire in the streets, Nixon won 60.7% of the popular vote against the anti-war candidate, South Dakota Senator George McGovern.
Nixon's corruption surrounding the Watergate scandal, as well as a poor economy won Jimmy Carter the presidency in 1976. Burdened with a slow economy, high interest rates, and 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis, Carter was largely seen as inept when he faced Ronald Reagan in 1980. In that campaign, Reagan famously said, "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." Reagan won the office with a 50.7% popular vote.
But, it would be another statement from Reagan that puts the current struggle within the Republican party in clearer perspective: "The most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Reagan's strategists were able to turn FDR's government for the people around, to paint it as the enemy of the people. American discontent over a perceived inept president, a hard economy, and a difficult diplomatic resolution with Iran, were all parlayed into a strategy for people to blame their problems on the government. If the government's here to help, they told us, be terrified.
It was a message that resonated with many struggling Americans. They'd think, that "help" is coming right out of my pocket. Civil rights equal protection laws rubbed up directly against lifestyles, not everyone agreed with all of the new ways of looking at things. A job filled by a minority was an easy blame on government laws. It was the individual against an ominous Big Brother, that could be either a slow Lenny from Mice or Men or Charlton Heston's still warm fingers holding a rifle above his head. The message was the same: the individual uber alles.
Now, the hard-core Republicans are making a last stand for each of us as individuals, instead of any of us as a nation. They're stuck at the starting gate of adult cooperation, looking backwards. Instead of succeeding as a state from the union, they would have each voter succeed from the responsibility for the common good. "Leave us alone," is the new battle cry; "Get out of my life." This Republican party will leave the choice to you: either make it or don't. It's not your fault others are poor, uneducated, lack opportunity or food; but it's not anyone else's responsibility if you hit a hard spot either.
It's a Darwinian every man for himself; it's Objectivist to a fault; it will likely attract Libertarians now that all pretense of compassionate concern has been abandoned. But, it's also an anachronism as Americans move forward with the world toward more cooperative collective interests.