Doug Ford has declared that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.
Ford’s political crystal ball may still be foggy, given that he endorsed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the last federal election. Not only were the Conservatives resoundingly defeated, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals secured an epochal majority. The great experiment to transform Canada into a neo-conservative state fuelled by populist dema-goguery is over.
Considerations of epochal shifts are also in order stateside as this presidential cycle unfolds. Trump’s rise to prominence suggests that Ford may be onto something.
CNN reports that Mitt Romney has instructed his closest advisers “to explore the possibility of stopping Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention.”
John McCain, Vietnam war veteran, long-time Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, seconded Romney’s sentiments. “At a time when our world has never been more complex or more in danger, as we watch the threatening actions of a neo-imperial Russia, an assertive China, an expansionist Iran, an insane North Korean ruler and ter-rorist movements that are metas-tasizing across the Middle East and Africa, I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party’s most respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander-in-chief and leader of the free world.”
Prominent South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham, speaking at the February 25 Washington Press Club Foundation Dinner, summed up the state of affairs that has allowed Trump’s ascent: “My party has gone batshit crazy.”
Since the rise to prominence of Michele Bachman’s Tea Party caucus in 2010, the Republican Party has opportunistically seized upon far-right lunacy to further the cause of partisan obstructionism.
On March 10, 2010, as Congress was preparing to vote on the Affordable Care Act, the Tea Party, led by Bachman, descended on Washington in an angry horde. On the steps of the Capitol, as Democratic members of Congress filed in for the health care reform vote, Tea Party demonstrators yelled the N-word at two African-American lawmakers, John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver. They spat on Cleaver. They yelled “Faggot” at Congressman Barney Franks.
The perversity of the Republicans’ determination to impede Congress continues even as the party grapples with its own self-destruction.
Senate Republicans have vowed to block any nominee President Obama puts forward to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Antonin Scalia’s death. “No hearing, no vote,” declared Graham, indifferent to the impact on democracy of obstructionism for its own sake.
Mainstream white America believes that egalitarianism is one of the nation’s founding values. The reality is that its slave-holding past is at the root of all the country’s problems.
Paul Ryan, the leading Republican in the House of Representatives, has recently resurrected that weathered phrase “the party of Lincoln” to describe the GOP, attempting to improve a negative image even further tarnished by the primaries.
But today’s Republicans bear no resemblance to Lincoln’s party. Like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln was a religious non-believer. “The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession,” he said. He also rejected the frontier-era glorification of the gun.
The “party of Lincoln” tag also fosters a false association between today’s Republicans and emancipation.
The party was indeed started by Lincoln and fellow anti-slavery abolitionists. However, the character of the party of Lincoln began to change in the aftermath of his assassination. His vice-president, Andrew Johnson, a white supremacist demagogue, began the unravelling of post-Civil War Reconstruction and gave aid and com-fort to those who wanted African Americans re-oppressed.
In the 1930s, when Republicans rejected and attempted to obstruct Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal social welfare and social justice programs in the Great Depression, a second wave of African Americans turned away from the party.
McCarthyism, the red-baiting witch hunt of the 1950s, was led by two Republicans, senators Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Richard Milhous Nixon of California.
By the 1960s, few in America harboured any illusions that the Republicans stood for values considered Lincolnian. And Nixon’s presidency left no doubts. He had mastered the art of playing the race card to further his political ambitions. In order to secure white votes, especially in the South, he worked to defeat the movement for black empowerment even as he hosted the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. at the White House. Black hopes, rights and lives were sacrificed on the altar of realpolitik.
As we watch the drama of American primary season unfold and wonder how a hate-spewing demagogue became the Republican front-runner, it’s wise to remember this history. The party of Lincoln turned its back on egalitarianism soon after Lincoln fell. So the rise of Trump should come as little surprise.
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