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Donald Trump was an America-rescuing reaction to the Republican Party’s craven weakness and the Democrat Party’s Marxist corruption.
My fascination with American politics and the two major political parties began in 1960. Over the past 65 years, I have watched a feckless Republican Party once mired in elitism and corporatism evolve into America’s potentially dominant political party, and the Democrat party’s descent into an incoherent and unabashedly anti-American Marxist/socialist cartel.
The 21st-century’s commanding political figure, Donald Trump, is the catalyst behind the Republican Party’s emergence and the Democrat Party’s collapse. It is now in the process of permanently losing its electoral base.
The Republican Party, thanks to its elitist/corporatist mindset, lost eight out of twelve presidential elections from 1932 to 1980 and controlled Congress for only four years out of 48. They won the presidency in 1952 and 1956 only because they ran a national celebrity war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, and in 1968 and 1972 because of widespread opposition against the Vietnam War and unrest on the streets of America’s cities.
The Republican hierarchy had long chosen to ignore not only the working class/blue-collar voters but also firmly believed that it was a necessity to compromise with the Democrats’ policy demands to stay relevant. The fallout of this strategy was that Republicans could win only when the Democrats were clearly responsible for societal chaos or dire economic uncertainty, or when Republicans nominated a well-known “celebrity” candidate such as Dwight Eisenhower.
This Republican approach meant that there was effectively only one real political party in America, namely, the Democrat Party, echoed by a purely reactive Republican Party. Even an avowed leftist, Gore Vidal, in discussing the relative merits of the Republican and Democrat parties, said: “But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
In 1980, after 48 years of de facto Democrat or “uniparty” dominance and with a nation mired in economic and societal malaise, Ronald Reagan was elected president. During his two terms, Reagan’s single-minded adherence to conservative principles and willingness to confront Democrats rather than continually seek compromise led to his overwhelming success in rescuing the nation.
Reagan effectively placed the Republican Party on the path to becoming America’s conservative party. The party hierarchy had to choose: follow in Reagan’s footsteps or revert to the pre-Reagan mindset.