IMPOSTORS: HOW REPUBLICANS QUIT GOVERNING AND SEIZED AMERICAN POLITICS
By Steve Benen
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, gearing up for that year’s presidential election, the Republican Party took the remarkable step of not issuing any kind of party platform, choosing just to recycle what they ran on in 2016. This became known as the “whatever Trump says” platform.
Give Steve Benen high marks for prophecy then, as the convention took place after he had finished writing Impostors, which concludes with a chapter criticizing the GOP for now being a post-policy (and hence post-platform) political party.
Clearly then what happened at the Convention wasn’t any kind of a break with the direction things had been going for some time. Trump was an accelerator but didn’t change a trajectory that Benen sees Republicans as having been on for some time. About the only change is in the shamelessness of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party. If hypocrisy is the price vice pays to virtue then in the twenty-first century the cost had become too high. When it came to governing responsibly, the words “not even interested,” “didn’t even care,” and “not even trying” become almost a mantra in Benen’s book. “On climate policy,” for example, the GOP made it “clear that it is unwilling to even pretend to be a governing party.” Uninterested in data or facts or really much of anything, they are without positions that can even be debated. They govern, in so far as they govern at all, in profoundly bad faith.
But perhaps this isn’t being quite fair, or not cynical enough. If one takes as a starting point the view that sees the GOP as being a wrecking crew, looting the till, determined only to dismantle the state and sell off whatever’s left for scraps, then that counts as a sort of anti-policy. This was what being the Party of No meant. President Obama had enacted what were generally successful policies with regard to Iran (the nuclear deal), border security, and health care. Trump, who hated Obama much as he tended to hate everyone and everything, set about tearing all of this down, but with no apparent intention of “even trying” to replace it with anything. There’d be no “beautiful” new Republican health care plan, no new deal with Iran, and no wall on the Mexican border.
It’s telling that under Trump the party had two overarching goals: tax cuts and deregulation (dismantling the state) and stacking the judiciary (not in order to enact any kind of policy agenda but to stay in power). Once these had been achieved, however, “the governing cupboard was bare.” Even conservative commentators expressed surprise at how little there really was on the agenda. “It would be a mistake to assume Republicans are incapable of effective policy making,” Benen concludes. But aside from rigging elections through voting rights legislation and gerrymandering (the point of the judicial appointments) they’re not much interested in anything else.
Impostors is a damning indictment of the contemporary Republican record. Whatever one thinks of the Democratic policies adopted during the Obama years, they were at least substantive and serious enough to be engaged with. One could judge them on their merits, and tweak them where needed. A post-policy party is a different beast. “Ours is an ailing political system that needs more than one governing party to recover,” Benen concludes. I think it more likely that this is how it all ends.
Notes:
Review first published online December 6, 2021.