How Democratic Triangulation Drove Republicans into Trumpian Lunacy
Centrist liberalism and the slide into a right-wing cult
Who is surprisingly responsible for the insanity of the Republicans over the last few decades, for the rightward push of American conservatives which has led them further and further from reason, reality, statesmanship, and from acting in good faith on the country’s behalf?
Not Donald Trump. Not Vladimir Putin. Not Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, or any other conservative icon.
No, the Democrats started this.
Democratic Triangulation and Centrism
Democrats have done this to the Republicans not by being socialistic or progressive, contrary to the dishonest rhetoric from the Republicans and from right-wing media. That is, the Democrats didn’t force the Republicans into exploring the frontiers of authoritarianism, insurrection, and demagoguery, by opting for a comparable move towards the far left.
On the contrary, as Chris Hedges explains, since at least the 1990s, the Democrats began purging the liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists from their party, turning Ralph Nader into a pariah, for example.
What the Democrats did was to move their party towards the center, by triangulating their policies and by compromising with Republicans while simultaneously eliminating their leftist wing, selling out their party’s blue-collar and progressive values for campaign contributions from the rich donor class. The party switched its operative constituencies from labor and the poor to the American aristocracy, that is, to the richest ten percent that includes the managers of the transnational corporations and the professional class of coastal elites.
In short, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and now the centrist Joe Biden spoke in liberal, “I Feel Your Pain,” “Change We Can Believe In” platitudes, while taking over traditional American conservative positions on economic and some social issues.
David Harvey argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism that neoliberalism rose in the 1970s after Lewis Powell’s 1971 confidential memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, calling for the business community to join the fight in defending the free enterprise system against the radical socialism of the civil rights movement. That supercharged the conservatives and led to the creation of various libertarian think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
Often portrayed as an ineffectual leftist because of his mishandling of the Iran hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter began to embrace the neoliberalism that seeped out of the activated business community. Carter deregulated trucking, banking, and the airline industries and appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed.
Volcker had convinced Nixon to end the Bretton Woods system, which turned the dollar into a fiat currency, opening the way for inflation, economic instability, and the financial manipulation and frauds that led to the 2008 global financial crisis. As chairman, Volcker dealt with the inflation in the 1970s by limiting the money supply and allowing the markets to determine how high the interest rates would rise; together with the energy crisis, Volcker’s anti-Keynesian fiscal policies produced the recession of 1980–1982.
Then came the tidal wave of neoliberalism, known as Reaganism, much of which flowed into Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton oversaw NAFTA and the resulting exportation of jobs and decline in wages, as well as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Defense of Marriage Act, and the tough-on-crime bill which made for mass incarceration. After Bush’s neoconservatism, there were Obama’s bailout of Wall Street in 2008 and his appeal to Mitt Romney’s health care plan, his crackdown on whistleblowers, and his escalated use of drone strikes.
Thus, with the absence of a progressive foil, Republicans had nowhere else to go but further and further to the right, to distinguish themselves from the rightward Democratic Party. The Republicans traditional apologies for grotesque economic inequality and dominance hierarchies were now in the Democrats’ purview, because the Democrats deliberately moved to the so-called center and to the Republicans’ old stance of favouring the management class over labour.
To distinguish themselves in the two-party system, the Republicans had to purify their conservativism, eliminating their moderates and firing themselves up for more unabashed tribalism, libertarianism (i.e. social Darwinism), xenophobia, authoritarianism, and disconnections from logic and empirical truth.
It’s no coincidence that Fox News began in 1996, after Clinton lost control of Congress in 1994 and while he was practicing his strategy of triangulation. Roger Aisles had been instrumental in the makeover of Richard Nixon, which enabled Nixon to win the presidency despite his awkwardness and paranoia. Rupert Murdoch tapped Aisles to lead Fox News to conduct similar operations in selling or obscuring the far reaches of insanity the Republicans would have to plumb, given the absence of an effective left wing of American political discourse. And just as Fox News proved incapable of covering miraculously for Nixon’s megalomania, the “fair and balanced” Republican doubletalk couldn’t hide the fiasco of George W. Bush’s Iraq war or the monstrousness of Trumpism.
Similarly, Rush Limbaugh became a syndicated conservative talk show host in 1988, a year after the FCC ended the Fairness Act, which freed radio hosts to ignore opposing viewpoints. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 further deregulated radio, enabling the monopolization of radio stations and national syndication. Conservative talk radio took advantage of that deregulation, taking on national prominence just when Bill Clinton’s youth and centrism were compelling the Republicans to adopt more extreme rhetoric and policies, to distinguish their brand and to recapture Reagan-like dominance.
Newt Gingrich took up that task, gleefully acting as a neo-McCarthyite figure in the Republican Party. Gingrich ended decades of civility and compromise in Congress, as well as forty years of Democratic control, by polarizing the discourse, turning American politics into verbal warfare. Gingrich’s scorched-earth strategy also fuelled his party’s sanctimonious personal attack on Clinton, which led to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 for the Lewinsky sex scandal.
Clinton was disgraced and the public came to associate him with his moral failings, which only distracted from the real threat he posed to Republicans, that being his continuing usurpation of conservative economic orthodoxy. The socially liberal form of that orthodoxy is now known confusingly as “neoliberalism,” to make “free-market” capitalism seem consistent with progressive values.
In contrast to Gingrich’s Puritanical crusade, the Democrats moderated themselves and eliminated their left-wing extremists, leaving only token members like Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” who have been shut out of Joe Biden’s cabinet.
Biden’s promotion of Pete Buttigieg to Transportation Secretary is instructive: Buttigieg’s homosexuality gives cover to the Democratic centrists and neoliberals, just as their hollow progressive slogans did, because Buttigieg signs on to the strategy of triangulation, of adopting the Republicans’ Darwinian economic policies. Biden’s cabinet is filled with women and minorities, none of whom has progressive principles or is inclined to level a radical critique of the broken US political system. Biden obscures his centrism also by hiring progressives to sub-cabinet positions, setting them up to be overruled by the centrist cabinet heads.
The result of this political cannibalism is now obvious: the working class and the poor lost their support from the Democrats who sold them out to trade deals that favoured the rich and that nurtured a nascent plutocracy in the US. So the disenfranchised masses became cynical and desperate, soothing themselves with opioids, declining to participate as voting citizens, or switching their allegiance to the Republicans while cheering on the latter to darker forms of political entertainment. That’s how the country ended up in the black hole of Trumpism and in what Biden calls an “uncivil war.”
Republican Self-Destruction and the Loss of Political Heroism
Of course, the Democrats couldn’t have done this alone. If a third of the country lacked the potential to act like trolls or know-nothing traitors, Democratic centrism couldn’t have pushed that third over the edge. The Republicans might have welcomed the Democratic compromises and the two parties could have focussed on practical ways of improving the life for the upper class, ignoring the rest of the country as dictated by their shared trickle-down economic policies.
Instead, the Republicans whipped up and tribalized their base to fight a phony culture war with the imaginary “socialists” who were just neoliberal centrists, and to make it seem like the Republican base hadn’t been disenfranchised. That base became enthralled to “President” Donald Trump because Trump was enough of an outsider to embarrass and to tear down the establishment that had ignored the average conservative voters, and to deliver on the savage implications of those voters’ Americanized “Christianity” and socially Darwinian “libertarianism.”
What, then, was supposed to have been the endgame of this triangulation? Did centrist Democrats imagine Republicans would welcome the collaboration, both parties would meet in the middle, and Republicans would be forced to purge their extremists as the Democrats had done? Only politicians that could have forgotten their country employs a two-party system could have afforded such a fantasy, and that would have been political malpractice.
No, there would be no point in having two parties if both came to agree on the essentials of “neoliberalism.” The only place the Republicans could go was further to the right, further into self-destructive hypermasculinity, religious fundamentalism, egoistic libertarianism, white supremacy, and populist demagoguery.
Thus, the foreseeable result of Democratic triangulation is the self-destruction of the Republican Party. By failing to heroically defend their progressive or “socialist” principles, Democrats drove Republicans into Trumpian supervillainy, into unveiling the conservatives’ theocratic and neofeudal prejudices that had been inhuman all along but had at least been protected by modern humanistic, progressive rhetoric.
There’s never been any such thing as a viable conservative alternative philosophy to liberal humanism. Modern conservative casuistry began with Edmund Burke’s moderate but still elitist compromises with Enlightenment liberalism, which is to say that conservativism has been in a box since the birth of modernity, that is, since the end of monarchy, feudalism, and Christian theocracy in the West.
Those revolutions of modernity spelled the death of authentic conservatism, since the latter was only ever so much propaganda for the default social order that prevailed for thousands of years all around the world and that took its inspiration from the evolutionary dominance hierarchy that’s been so successful in distributing power amorally in most social animal species.
Still, assuming liberals were to push the envelope with socialist, egalitarian, or radical progressive policies, modern conservatives could at least pretend they have a humanitarian, civilized alternative to liberal humanism and to the Promethean trust in liberated reason. For example, conservatives could rhetorically resist the pull of full-blown progressivism, by pretending their economic and social values have something to do with Christianity.
Yet eventually the Democrats abandoned their grass-roots constituencies and their liberal and progressive principles, opting for underhanded collaboration with Republicans who had lost all sense of statesmanship. American politics was increasingly dominated by toxic Republican resentments and intransigence, with only Democratic corporatist centrism to cope with the cancer they helped create. There, plainly, in Nixon, Gingrich, Aisles, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, and Mitch McConnell was the emerging supervillainy that would metastasize as Trump’s pseudo-presidency — but where was the hero to restore the country’s humanity?
Democrats had abandoned their post, which is why, despite the availability of computers and the internet for easier voting, US voter turnout remained low even after the 1980s. Half the country simply doesn’t vote for president and less than half vote in midterm elections. (Even in the 2020 election to rid the country of an obvious cancer, the voter turnout rate rose only to 67 percent.) This is largely because roughly half the country has lost faith in its system, since these people observe that neither of the major parties has come to represent them with more than rhetoric.
Democrats represent their corporate donors and the coastal elites, while Republicans champion the interests of the plutocrats and — thanks to Trump — the wild rural trolls. The rational, moral, nontribal, civil Everyman is bereft of political representation in the American two-party system. Like much else in the US, including its prisons, media outlets, and health care system, the political parties have become businesses with mainly profit motives, and half the country is too poor to be of real interest to the privatized two-party system.
Perhaps some of the Republican backlash against reason and reality is due to the conservatives’ suspicion that they’ve been outfoxed, that the Democrats put them on a path to self-destruction. There’s talk now of Trump at least threatening to form a third party to avenge his narcissistic ego, to split the conservative vote by way of punishing Republicans for not destroying American democracy in his name and awarding him the 2020 election he lost.
That would be the fruit of Democratic triangulation and centrism, but this self-destruction of Republicans would hardly be a victory for progressivism. It’s not as though the Democrats would be poised to act as the only party left standing, to monopolize the voters’ interests.
After all, the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 would sooner commit suicide or move to Saudi Arabia or to Putin’s Russia than to vote Democratic, because they’ve been radicalized by the dynamic of Democratic centrism. Perhaps the Democrats would have to face off against Republicans 2.0, against much more extreme and dangerous apologists for the conservative fraud. A second civil war wouldn’t be off the table.
Remember, then, that while Republicans are certainly responsible for their descent into troglodytic neo-fascism, the Democrats can be blamed for their flight from heroism, for becoming Republican Lite and for driving Republicans into brewing moonshine.
