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John B. Judis: Why The Republicans Are Unlike Any Political Party America Has Ever Seen

[John B. Judis has been writing for The New Republic since 1984 and has been a senior editor since 1994.]

In 1960, the political scientist Clinton Rossiter began his classic text, Parties and Politics in America, with the following memorable words: “No America without democracy, no democracy without politics, no parties without compromise and moderation.” Rossiter saw U.S. parties as “creatures of compromise, coalitions of interest in which principle is muted and often even silenced.” For Rossiter and several generations of political scientists, this was the genius of America’s party system. It was what made it possible for the United States—in contrast to Europe or Latin America, where parties tended to be ideologically pure—to endure the wrenching change of war or depression without violence and revolution.

Today, the Democratic Party remains this kind of party. (For example, twelve Senate Democrats voted for George W. Bush’s tax cut in 2001, and, more recently, 27 House Democrats voted against Barack Obama’s financial-services reform bill.) But the Republican Party has become a very different creature. From 1995 to 2001, when the GOP controlled Congress and Democrats controlled the White House, the Republicans shut down the government, ambushed the president and his Cabinet with intrusive investigations into corruption—many of them mind-bogglingly trivial—and eventually tried to impeach President Bill Clinton on the most frivolous of grounds. In the last four years, faced with a Democratic majority in Congress and then with a Democrat in the White House, the Republicans have generally voted as a bloc and have used the filibuster—once reserved for rare situations—to require Senate Democrats to gain super-majorities for all sorts of legislation. The GOP’s strategy during these years disrupted the normal working of Congress and threatened not simply the president, but the power and prestige of the presidency.

In short, for the first time since the Civil War, the United States has a political party that is ideologically cohesive, disciplined, and determined to take power, even at the cost of disrupting the political system. What accounts for this remarkable transformation? And how likely it is that the Republican Party will continue to act this way during the next two years?

The story of the Republican Party’s evolution into the type of party that Rossiter feared—something out of a previous era in Europe or Latin America—has its roots in the 1930s. In four elections from 1930 through 1936, the GOP was decimated, losing 182 House seats and 40 Senate seats. What remained in Congress after 1936 were primarily “Old Guard” conservative Republicans from rural and small-town districts in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the Prairies. (They were supplemented by a smattering of Eastern establishment Republicans with names like Brewster and Lodge, and by the Western progressives who hadn’t yet bolted to the Democrats.) The “Old Guard” Republicans took their cues from small businesses back home in their districts and from business associations like the National Association of Manufacturers, which, by 1934, were up in arms against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. These Republicans could do little by themselves to halt New Deal legislation. But, by joining forces with conservative Democrats, primarily from the South, they were able to frustrate Roosevelt and his liberal majority.

The Republicans and the business groups charged that the New Deal—by expanding the power of government and backing unionization—was insidiously introducing communism or fascism to the United States. Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters, upstate New York Representative Hamilton Fish argued, “take all their principles and doctrines from Karl Marx just as the communists do.” Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg saw the New Deal as a “march toward a totalitarian state.” Along with the American Liberty League, the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, and other business groups, they claimed they were defending what Henry Fletcher, the chairman of the GOP, called “constitutional government.”...
Read entire article at The New Republic