There is, of course, always a danger of paranoia setting in at a time of intense polarization, when one political party controls all three branches of the federal government-all the more so when that party in charge looks less like the usual coalition of internally contending forces than a disciplined army. Such is certainly the case today, especially in Washington, where a virtually unanimous Republican Party-the House Republicans whipped into shape by Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Senate Republicans only slightly less unified, both houses well coordinated with the adamantine Bush White House, and the Rehnquist Court standing by as the final forum-makes the Democratic minority look like a chorus of scorched cats. But isn't this just the result of the Republicans' superior political skills-playing the rules of the game to the utmost, always keeping their eyes on their prizes?
The Republicans' occasional failures-notably, in the fights over a few high-profile federal judiciary appointments, including that of Miguel Estrada-suggest that democracy still works well enough, that Madisonian checks and balances are still checking and balancing. Those failures even suggest that grassroots opposition organizing can still have some impact in national politics. If only the Democrats would consistently get their act together (so the argument goes), if only they could take advantage of the fact that the public supports their positions on leading issues, if only they could field a candidate with forceful credentials on foreign policy and the military (hence, the instant initial boom for General Wesley Clark), then the political scene would look very different.
Some of this is plausible, some of this is true, but all of it misses that something truly worrisome is happening here-a clear and present danger to democracy, posed by the leadership of the Republican Party. In his latest book, The Great Unraveling, Krugman charges that the current Republican regime is not "conservative" or even normal within the customary boundaries of American politics: it is controlled by abnormal radicals, who will stop at nothing to impose their right-wing ideology on the country. The origins of that abnormality long predate the younger Bush presidency or even the struggle over Florida in 2000. Its successes have already done great damage to our institutions.
A more leisurely occasion would permit a longer historical look at the rise of this modern antidemocratic impulse, stretching back at least to the McCarthy era. [1]
I have tried to write a small piece of this history with respect to one aspect of modern antidemocratic politics-the invention and development of the pseudo-scandal-in "Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election?" The American Prospect, vol. 11, no. 21, September 24, 2000 - October 2, 2000. [back to top]
Let us go back just as far as the mid-1990s and the stalled Gingrich revolution. In 1994, amid the Republican recouping of Congress, speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich inspired his troops with instructions to demonize the Democrats in no uncertain terms. Democrats were "anti-flag," "anti-family," "decadent," "sick"-not adversaries, but hateful enemies. It would take Ann Coulter until 2003 to bring Gingrich's strategy to its logical conclusion by writing a best-selling screed that indicted all liberals as traitors and rehabilitated both the smears and the reputation of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy. But Newt was there first.Gingrich's slash-and-burn politics bespoke a larger crisis for the country-and for the Republican Party. After the landslide elections of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, it became an article of faith in some Republican circles that the White House would forever belong to the G.O.P.-and that it was only a matter of time before Congress would as well. Then, in 1992, something terrible happened: Bill Clinton defeated Bush. Some astonished Republicans blamed the reversal on the oddball candidacy of Ross Perot (although, in fact, polling at the time showed that Perot cost Clinton and Bush about the same). By that quirk alone, Republicans regarded Clinton, with his 42 percent of the popular vote, not just as unfortunate but as illegitimate. Add to that Clinton's background-a sixties antiwar student, at once Arkansas "white trash" and an Oxford-Yale elitist, a white Southerner who felt perfectly at home with black people, a husband with an ambitious, professional wife-and he loomed as a kind of anti-Christ of what Republican leader Representative Henry Hyde would years later call "this culture war we're involved in." Some Republicans went so far as to say that Clinton was not their president. And their attacks would get a lot worse.
THE 1994 mid-term elections were supposed to mark the great return to Republican partisan normalcy. The Clinton administration had bungled its health care initiative; the Gingrich forces took full advantage of Democratic divisions by firing up their troops (fueled by huge infusions of special interest money); and, in the aftermath of the Republican landslide, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the White House was "still relevant" to American politics. But then the Gingrich Revolution failed, chiefly because of Clinton's political adroitness. After major events such as the government shutdown and small displays of (as it happened, fabricated) pique over seating arrangements on Air Force One, Gingrich crashed and burned. And so, in 1996, did the Republican presidential campaign, as the hapless Bob Dole, who seemed to have no reason for running other than that it was his turn on the Republican go-round, went down to defeat-with no big Perot vote to blame anymore. The G.O.P. vision of normalcy suddenly vanished. Clinton had won again. Into the breach stepped a new crop of radicals, concentrated on Capitol Hill but with powerful allies in the media (including the new Fox News), on K Street, and in corporate suites and law offices all around the country. It was not a single vast conspiracy; it was a congeries of operatives, muckrakers, and ideologues with a common allegiance to the Republican Party-and to making sure that normalcy would be restored, forever and ever, amen, by any means necessary.
Thereafter began the radical and continuing Republican assault, not simply on Democrats and liberals but on the political system itself-using whatever political and constitutional tools are at hand and twisting them to ensure what Tom DeLay and his colleagues foresee as a millennium of one-party rule. The highlights (or lowlights) have included the following:
The Clinton Impeachment, 1998-1999: After spending millions of dollars and failing to come up with evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons, the partisan Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr sprung a perjury trap that gave him a pretext to investigate the president's sex life. After Starr and his office spent ten months in further investigation (at a cost to the taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars more), the public remained unmoved, and the Democrats actually picked up seats in the off-year elections. Yet House Republicans continued their impeachment drive anyway, hoping to remove the supposedly illegitimate Clinton from office with political pressure-and finally impeached him thanks to what Sidney Blumenthal, in his book The Clinton Wars, documents as a full-scale effort by the House leadership to intimidate wavering members. The Senate acquitted Clinton by a wide constitutional margin-but by impeaching a president on matters that fell well below the constitutional bar of "high crimes and misdemeanors," the Republican effort did as-yet untold damage to the U.S. Constitution.
Florida, 2000: With the 2000 presidential election turning on the tight race in Florida, the Republicans mobilized flying squads of official congressional aides (including some from De Lay's office) to intimidate voting officials. One G.O.P. squad conducted what Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal referred to gleefully as a "bourgeois riot" and shut down the recounting of votes in Miami-Dade County, a turning point in the drama. Amid the battle, it was revealed that Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, a Sarasota Republican, had systematically removed eligible black voters from the polling lists-a procedure called "scrubbing" that was plainly a ploy to suppress the Democratic vote. Subsequently, the Rehnquist Court, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, halted all vote recounting, overrode the Florida Supreme Court's rulings on its own state constitution, and, in a bitterly divided five to four decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively handed the Republicans the election. Although the decision was crafted in ways that precluded its use as a precedent, it marked the most outrageous political intervention by the Court since the Dred Scott decision in 1857.
The Iraq War and Disinformation, 2002-2003: In arguing the case for going to war against Iraq, the Bush administration made numerous false claims to the Congress, the American people, and the world about Saddam Hussein's imminent threat against the United States. There were strong reasons to justify a war on Hussein, especially if undertaken in cooperation with the United Nations and America's European allies. Instead, the Bush administration chose a go-it-(virtually)-alone strategy based on cooked intelligence reports. The damage to American democracy was severe. By forcing the Central Intelligence Agency to provide false and tendentious reports, the administration (especially Vice President Dick Cheney) undermined the essential independence required of executive agencies if they are to provide objective information to the White House. More important, the administration knowingly provided this false and tendentious intelligence information to Congress in order to obtain support for the resolution approving the American intervention. Such misinformation mongering was not unprecedented. (President James K. Polk was disingenuous about the events that triggered the war with Mexico, as was Lyndon Johnson about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin.) But never before has an administration attempted such a sustained and grandiose deception of Congress over taking the decision to go to war. Unless the White House is called to account, irreparable damage will have been done to the already weakened eleventh clause of Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, giving the Congress the sole power to declare war.
2002 Elections: In the most blatant efforts at voter suppression since the Jim Crow era, Republicans attempted to expand on their "scrubbing" efforts in Florida of two years earlier. Much of the suppression was aimed at black voters. In Florida's Miami-Dade county, site of the 2000 mob violence, a shadowy G.O.P. group backing Governor Jeb Bush tried to pack the polling places with hundreds of its own intimidating overseers. The effort was explicitly racial, and was blocked only at the last minute by a local judge. But no court could head off a telemarketing scheme (one of many that the Republicans mounted around the nation in 2002) that instructed Florida's disproportionately black Democratic voters to cast their absentee ballots after election day-at which point they would no longer be counted. Other voter suppression efforts turned up in New Hampshire, Maryland, Louisiana, Texas, and Michigan. In Washington, Majority Leader De Lay organized something he called STOMP, the Strategic Taskforce for the Organization and Mobilization of People. De Lay and his aides' possible involvement in voter suppression efforts in districts across the country went uninvestigated. [2]
See my essay, "Jim Crow, Republican Style: Voter Suppression in 2002," in Andrew Cuomo, ed., Crossroads: The Future of American Politics (Random House, 2003). [back to top]
In addition, Republican campaigns stooped to levels even lower than the oft-criticized "Willie Horton" ad campaign on behalf of George H.W. Bush in 1988, masterminded by Lee Atwater. The most outrageous campaign was run against Senator Max Cleland in Georgia. Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat in Vietnam, was portrayed as soft on national security, and placed in ads that also featured Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein-this despite the fact that Cleland was one of the original sponsors in the Senate of homeland security legislation, at a time when the Bush White House opposed it.
Redistricting in Colorado and Texas, 2003: In both Colorado and Texas, Republican-dominated state legislatures, unsatisfied with the congressional redistricting approved in light of the 2000 Census, managed to bulldoze through second partisan redistricting plans far more favorable to the Republican Party. In Texas, Democratic lawmakers fled the state to avoid permitting a quorum when the bill came before special sessions called by G.O.P. governor Rick Perry-and Republican officials called on the new federal Department of Homeland Security for assistance in rounding up the dissenters. Majority Leader DeLay, from Sugarland, played a major role in plotting and executing the Texas redistricting. Normally, legislatures permit themselves to draw new district lines once a decade. The Colorado and Texas partisan assaults, by finding a loophole in state laws, defied that practice and have opened up the strong possibility of never-ending redistricting wars at the state level-provided, of course, that the Republicans do not simply establish one-party power in the states, which is their plain intention. "One bite of the redistricting apple has been the norm for a century, and only if the courts demand revisions do you go back to the drawing board," Thomas Mann of the centrist Brookings Institution said of the redistricting gambits. "If Colorado and Texas are allowed to stand, I don't see what's to stop the process from continuing every election throughout a decade. The idea of relatively permanent, stable districts could vanish."
Recall in California, 2003: The California recall was the result of a G.O.P. -manufactured perfect political storm. First, in 2001, electricity shortages caused by the efforts of giant energy companies to manipulate the market led to a brownout crisis in California. The chief malefactor was the Enron Corporation, whose CEO, Kenneth Lay, is a close friend and large political contributor to George W. Bush. Yet by carefully massaging the story, the Bush White House managed to deflect criticism and blame away from its political cronies and toward California's Democratic governor, Gray Davis. At the time, White House political guru Karl Rove was quoted as expressing his delight that Bush family friend Arnold Schwarzenegger might wind up winning the governor's mansion in Sacramento in 2002. But Schwarzenegger did not run. The right-wing novice Bill Simon (with backhand aid from the Davis forces) won the Republican primary, and the Democrat Davis was reelected.
REPUBLICANS IN California and Washington were nearly as outraged at Davis's victory as they had been at Bill Clinton's. So they cooked up a fresh political crisis. By California law, a two-thirds majority in the state legislature is required to pass a state budget. Although in the minority, Republican California legislators were thereby able to block any budget agreement. Governor Davis, a lackluster personality but competent governor, took the blame.
The stage was already set for Davis's overthrow. Seizing upon once democratic but now archaic recall laws, Republicans, led by the multimillionaire right-wing congressman Darrell Issa, funded a massive petition campaign to force Davis's removal from office. Issa originally hoped to become Davis's replacement, but that was not in the G.O.P. master plan. Once the requisite numbers of signatures were gained, Republican hopefuls-including Issa, Bill Riordan, and Peter Ueberroth -mysteriously dropped out of the race. The last big-name Republican standing was-yes-Karl Rove's favorite, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bothered only by a pesky Republican to his right, state legislator Tom McClintock.
Before the election, Davis took a combination of steps that reduced the state's deficit from $38 billion to about $9 billion-a figure in the same ballpark with the shortfalls of other major states, thanks to the depressed economy and the Bush tax cuts. Yet the Republicans, with the help of a credulous media, kept repeating the $38 billion figure right up to recall election day. Davis, a poor campaigner, was further hampered by a feud with his lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamente, who entered the lists of replacement gubernatorial candidates. Schwarzenegger, saying as little as possible about the issues, won handily, although with considerably less than a popular majority. The recall process-originally implemented to oust governors guilty of gross corruption in office-had become the vehicle for a right-wing hit job of the first magnitude.
THERE IS A desperate quality to these partisan attacks on and manipulations of democratic processes. Perhaps the Republicans, understanding that current demographic trends work heavily against them, are trying to shore up as much as they can politically before it is too late. [3]
On these trends, see John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner, 2002). [back to top]
Or, more likely, they are trying to alter the basic rules of politics to offset those trends. As things stand, the existing senatorial and Electoral College systems already give the Republicans an enormous artificial advantage in national politics, by inflating the power of small conservative states in the Deep South and the Mountain West. But seeing the demographic writing on the wall-especially in Texas and Florida, crucial states where trends favor the Democrats-the Republicans may simply have decided to change the rules some more in their favor, without having to go through the arduous process of obtaining new constitutional amendments. Whatever the motivation, the Republicans' partisan assault on democracy displays a will to power unlike any seen in our country since the fire-eater secessionist movement of the 1850s that led to the creation of the southern Confederacy. In 1856, the antidemocratic secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett bellowed that "a complete revolution" had turned the federal government into "a sheer despotism," which could only be overcome by denying the national will by any means necessary-including disunion. The current Republican Party has no need for secessionism (although its pandering to racist Confederate sensibilities in the South has long been one of its key political weapons). What it shares with the fire-eaters is an implacable will to dominate and a combination of cynicism and contempt for our democratic constitutional procedures. This is not hard-knuckled politics as usual. It is radical and abnormal. It has already degraded American democracy. And it portends a crisis in our politics as great as any since the era of Reconstruction.
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