In response to the Great Recession, President Obama pushed through congress an $861 billion stimulus bill. Republicans in congress unanimously opposed the stimulus bill, and a broader conservative opposition to government spending gave rise in the following months to the Tea Party movement. In response to the covid-19 pandemic, President Trump and Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, got congress to approve a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill. The Senators most outspoken against the Obama stimulus — McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander, Chuck Grassley — all supported the much larger Trump stimulus. We’ve heard nothing about Trump’s $2.2 trillion spending from the Tea Party who insisted that Obama’s $861 billion was outrageously irresponsible spending that the government could not afford.
This Republican hypocrisy has nothing to do with being fiscally responsible. It’s just one of many examples which demonstrate that, since the election of Barack Obama, the primary dynamic driving our politics is the Republican belief that the Democratic Party is inherently illegitimate and has no right to govern.
It wasn’t government spending on the 2009 stimulus that the Tea Party opposed, it was government spending by a party with no legitimacy. The same people who opposed the 2009 stimulus supported the much larger 2020 stimulus because Trump is in the White House.
Polarization in this country has accelerated over the last thirty years. The Republican Party has become more ideologically, religiously, and ethnically homogeneous. It’s more white, older, more rural, more Christian, more conservative. The Democrats represent a constituency which is ideologically, religiously, and ethnically much more diverse. Their party is more urban, younger, more secular, more progressive. Republicans have doubled down on being a more homogeneous group, have become almost cult-like, and are increasingly resistant to compromise or moderation. At the same time, Democrats have become more diversified and more democratic.
The Trump administration eschews the Republican orthodoxy of free trade, small government, and small deficits. But no Republican objects. The Tea Party does not rise up. Republicans remain loyal to Trump because he insults and demeans Democrats as illegitimate, and fights them on immigration, abortion, health insurance, and social welfare.
Trump and his supporters want an America that is very different from the America Democrats and progressives want. Republicans view Democratic voters not just as rivals but as an existential threat whose claims to American identity and therefore political power are intrinsically invalid. This view justifies Republican efforts to deny the vote to Democratic voters, and is seen in recent statements by Trump and McConnell that during the coronavirus pandemic the Republican-controlled federal government should not bailout blue states with (illegitimate) Democratic state governments. A sense of being under siege allowed Trump to seize control of the Republican Party, to govern as though his voters are the only ones with legitimate claims to American citizenship, and to command absolute, unquestioning loyalty even as his ignorance, immorality, and vanity grow lethal.
Anyone running for the presidency who tells you he/she is going to bring the country together and compromise with the other party is a dangerous fool. America’s only path forward is a ruthless fight for raw political power in which the Republicans are already engaged. Don’t be so stupid as to bring a Biden to a gun fight with these people.
