I did not acquire my disrespect for Republican politicians and policies from my parents. (My mother was a liberal Democrat; my father, a moderate Republican.). I did not acquire it eight years later, when I first became interested in politics during the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential campaign. Before my parents left for an election night party at the country club, they instructed me to keep track of the results posted on the radio. Every so often, they called me for the latest news, and, just as often, I reported that Truman was leading. We were puzzled because Thomas Dewey, the New York governor, was widely predicted to win. Indeed, before all the votes had been counted, in anticipation of his victory, The Chicago Daily Tribune came out with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”—a famous gaffe. I knew nothing then about Republican politicians and their policies; it took only a few years for me to acquire my disrespect for them.
It arose in the early 1950s in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his reckless claims of communists in government agencies, the military, universities, and Hollywood; and his smears of individuals in and out of government. He was assisted by Roy Cohn, a lawyer who twenty years later became Donald Trump’s consigliere. Some regard Cohn “as a principal ideological architect of modern right-wing populist politics, built on institutional distrust, public grievance, and media combativeness” (AI). During four years of McCarthyism, almost a prologue to their similar conduct today, Republican senators, fearing attacks from McCarthy, did nothing to curtail him. The Army’s chief lawyer challenged his tactics and deplored his lack of decency; his testimony stirred the public and prompted the Senate to finally censure him. The Republican Party has changed for the worse in seventy years. Today, even when prompted by Democratic colleagues, Congressional Republicans have lacked both the convictions and, of course, the courage to censure or repudiate Trump.
The core of my disrespect for Republican politicians was not their rabid anti-communism, but their innate racism. Most Congressional Republicans never earned my respect. Democratic race-baiting senators like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms became Republicans in 1964 and 1970, respectively. The instigator of the worst in Republican conduct since 1994 was House Majority Leader Republican Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich, who set the standard for abrasive and abusive politics. Senate Majority Leader Republican Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell lowered the standard by vowing to resist from day one all legislation proposed by America’s first black president, by rigging the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees politically conservative and racist instead of judicially impartial in their orientation, and by ensuring the confirmation of cabinet secretaries qualified only by their loyalty to Trump, not competency.
The only Republican president in my lifetime whom I at all respected, racist though I suspect him to have been, was Dwight D. Eisenhower, especially for calling in the 101st Airborne Division (“Screaming Eagles”) to support integration in Little Rock in 1957. I respected no subsequent Republican presidents or presidential candidates. In accepting the GOP nomination in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater appealed to the Republican Party’s racism when he denounced the passage of the Civil Rights Act. (In the years thereafter, the Party eliminated from its ranks those northern and western liberal and moderate Republicans who had supported that law.) In 1968, former Vice President Richard Nixon used a “Southern [read: racist] strategy” to win the White House, which strategy changed racist Democrats to racist Republicans in Dixie. In 1980, California Governor Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the murder of three civil rights workers, and allowed racism and resentment to fester in the Republican Party thereafter. Presidents George Bush, father and son, did nothing to quell these corrosive, un-American tendencies. President Donald Trump—well, much of what he does, like attacks on voting rights, immigrants, and Latinos or Muslims and their countries, has a racist motive, and much of what he says uses racist language and tropes.
The modern Republican Party’s racism directly opposes the foundational principle of American democracy that “all men are created equal” and is embedded in its economic and political policies. Since Republicans believe that all men are unequal, they believe that that inequality justifies the unequal distribution and accumulation of economic goods and services. Thus, they emphasize property over people—an emphasis at odds with America’s foundational documents. An important editorial change to the drafts of the Declaration of Independence signifies radically different party priorities: from “life, liberty, and property” (Republican) to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Democratic). Moreover, the Preamble of the Constitution prioritizes “We the People” and the “general welfare”; neither it nor the body of the Constitution mentions businesses, companies, or corporations. It mentions commerce only twice, in regulating it with foreign nations or between states. So the Republican claim, famously stated by President Calvin Coolidge, that “the business of government is business” is a lie.
Traditional Republican policies—small government, minimal regulation, low taxes, states’ rights—are compatible with or promote the interests of property, not people. The goal of small government and minimal regulation is to diminish the power of democratic government to promote the general welfare, that is, the people’s interests compared to business interests. The goal of low taxes is to shrink government, minimize funding of a social safety net, and enable the accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy. Thus, Republicans favor regressive flat taxes and oppose progressive tax rates. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill gives large tax cuts to the rich and smaller tax cuts to the rest. The goal of states’ rights, a rationale of the Confederate rebellion, is to give relatively more power to businesses vis-a-vis state and federal governments.
Republican officials supporting erratic or self-serving policies and practices further erode my respect for them. With respect to small government, the Trump administration is doing two things at once: reducing its administrative size but increasing its powers under the theory of the unitary executive branch. This theory is a rationale for expanded and aggressive presidential power at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government and of state governments, the Constitution, the rule of law, civil rights, and democracy itself. They invoke the theory for the Trump administration but will revoke or oppose it for a succeeding Democratic one, just as Republican administrations expand the federal deficit to pass their budgets, then react to the enlarged national debt as a national crisis requiring a reduction of budgets under Democratic administrations. They support deregulation because it directly increases corporate profits by reducing business costs at the expense of adverse health, societal, and environmental effects. The Trump administration supports states’ rights only so far as they do not thwart its interests. Thus, it impedes local and state police investigations of murders in Minnesota by ICE officers and tries to intervene in state elections to help Republican candidates. The Trump administration has shown that traditional Republican policies are contingent commitments, not constitutive convictions, even if indefensible from a democratic perspective.
I confess that my attitude toward Republican politicians and their policies influences my attitude toward those who vote for Republicans. In addition to supporting unsatisfactory policies, Republican politicians tout good character, lofty moral standards, and family values—what are they, really?—but do so hypocritically. For instance, Republican politicians more often than Democratic politicians commit adultery or are complicit in sex trafficking and sexual abuse (Epstein). Their misogynistic view of women sees them as objects, property, to be used, not as people to be respected. Trump is notorious for pathological lying, foul and insulting language, sexual misconduct, cruel and malicious policies, revengeful legal actions, and corrupt financial dealings which exploit presidential power for personal gain. He manifests no decorum, decency, or dedication to public service, only the rapacious egocentricity of the malignant narcissist. Republican politicians are not outraged by such gross misconduct and do nothing about it. Republicans tolerate this misconduct as necessary to keep this deplorable president and their party in power.
Even if they are dissatisfied with Trump’s economic (tariffs) and military (Iran war) actions, and disturbed by his blatant bigotry, gross vulgarity, and overt sadism, tens of millions of Americans ignore his lack of character and tolerate his corruption and incompetence. They are again casting votes for this president who, by any reasonable, civilized standards, is a degenerate, despicable, even evil, human being, one who seeks to supplant democracy with his dictatorship without, of course, “the consent of the governed.” What are they for? And why? What are they against? And why? To adopt a phrase, they vote for him, they own him. If they resent people who look down on them for supporting a despotic cult leader, they should know that they have earned their contempt.
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