THE REPUBLICAN PARTY SHOUD NOT BE SURPRISED AT THE RISE OF TRUMP

…Arizona GOP Senator Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide in 1964

 

Serious internal conflicts have been going on in the GOP for decades.

 

To understand the rise of Trump, all you need to do is take a look back in political history.  The Republican Party has for over 50 years had its on-going internal struggles.  That being between its long-time establishment wing and various groups of anti-establishment individuals seeking to change the status quo.

 

If you just take the time to review the party’s history, you will also find the reasons and explanations for the rise of Donald Trump.

 

First, you must look at why Trump has made such a political success.  Those that are supporting Trump are part of a sizable vocal group of disaffected voters, most of them white and working-class.  The Republican Party has for years benefited from this groups support, but the GOP has virtually returned nothing to them in return.

 

And this is not the first time for this kind of internal conflict within the GOP.

 

Back in 1974, similar debates were held between these two groups during the Watergate scandal.  And a decade before, when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, the party was also split on similar terms.

 

In the Goldwater election, Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater won the nomination in 1964 over the eastern elites, led by then Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.  But as they are concerned today, the split in the party then went down to a land-slide defeat in the general election.

 

But from that loss came Ronald Reagan, twice elected governor of California, but Reagan was initially hated by the party’s eastern leadership personnel.

 

As it was with Reagan, “Trumpism” is nothing new to the Republican party.

 

The support of Trump is nothing but a repeat of what was originally the same reason that in the beginning, Reagan was not popular with the party’s leaders.  Trump just represents that same group of long-festering individuals that are disgusted with the nation’s income inequality and many of those with cultural and racial dissatisfaction.  It’s a large group of those that feel like left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological right or left categories.

 

“The white working class left the Democratic Party in 1980 because it concluded that the party was committed to groups and objectives that were hostile to their economic interests,” said William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar and former White House domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration. “The Republican Party had promised to do better, but it never delivered.”

 

And Senator Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is seeking to deny Trump the 2016 nomination, put the threat in the appropriate terms when he said: “If Trump becomes the nominee, he will split the Republican Party and it will be the end of the modern conservative movement.”

 

James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia described Trump’s rise as, “Trumpism is a mood that has been at a near-boil for some time.” The reason it has hit with such force in this election is that “They now have a leader who can articulate it,” Ceaser said.

 

GOP critics see the appeal of Trump’s as the result of decades of efforts by the Republicans to discredit our government.  It is also the result of the party leadership’s passive acceptance of vulgar and racial opposition to President Obama.  Since Obama took office, they have sown these seeds in the political winds, and they are now reaping the results in the harvest of all that hate.

 

This issue has increased in importance to the point that no matter how much Trump threatens the existence of the modern-day Republican Party, a rejection by these voters of the GOP is because of the party elites having failed to listen to or respond to these voter’s plight.

 

Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been conducting extended conversations with people in her state since 2007. The expressions of anger and frustration heard at Trump rallies represent the kind of resentment she has heard for years.

 

As stated, the Democrats also have some of these same issues, but compared to the Democrats, it has become particularly acute for the Republicans because the party needs these same voters for a win in November.

 

The first time Reagan ran for the GOP nomination, he challenged the then-President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries.  When Ford prevailed and then lost to the Democrat, Jimmy Carter, Reagan and his anti-establishment conservatism laid claim to the leadership of the party and eventually to a two-term presidency.

 

But that was just the beginning for the next internal conflict.

 

After Reagan’s two terms, the election of George H.W. Bush in 1988 restored the Republican’s establishment wing to ultimate power.  But within two years, there was another internal revolt, this one led by then-representative Newt Gingrich, after the Senior Bush abandoned his pledge not to raise taxes as part of a controversial budget deal with the Democrats.

 

This rebellion helped Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992. Two years after that, the Gingrich-led forces took over the House in 1994 and Gingrich became House Speaker, so the balance was again taken away from the establishment GOP.

 

The point is that these rebellions have pitted different factions within the GOP against each other, and it is seldom the same groups each time.

 

Many of these battles pit familiar wings against one another: moderates vs. conservatives; the business wing vs. the evangelical wing; the mainstream wing vs. the populist wing. Many were assuming that this year’s Republican contest would be a rerun of contests between the establishment and a conservative insurgency, but Trump’s invasion has changed all of that.

 

Now there is an issue of the changing composition of the latest Republican coalition.

 

But the Republican leaders should not be surprised as they were the main agents causing the rise of Trump.  Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution wrote an opinion article in The Post recently in which he described Trump as a “Frankenstein monster” created by the GOP who now threatens to take over and possibly take down the party.

 

Newt Gingrich recently stated the following, “You have a party that mishandled the economic collapse, an elite leadership that failed to reform things, an attitude of arrogance to the very Tea Party people who wanted to change things,” he said. “The people in the imperial capital today cannot understand why those in the rest of the country are offended by sending money to the imperial capital.”

 

This is why so many in the GOP are so worried at this moment. There is nothing trivial about what is happening within the GOP, and the end result could be a real rending of the Republican party.

 

And this is also why I say, “No one in the Republican Party should be surprised at the rise of Donald Trump.”

 

Copyright G.Ater 2016