Posted by: David Offutt | April 22, 2024

Earth Day 2024

Solar panels on my roof (Photo: Brandon Gildemeister/Freedom Forever/drone)

It’s Earth Day, April 22, 2024, and fortunately for the last three years the United States has finally taken the threat of climate change seriously. Bill Clinton, with Vice-President Al Gore – a climate-change activist, tried to address the issue but was stymied by a Republican Congress during his last six years. Barack Obama actually made some progress in his sorely limited stimulus bill his first two years, but he, too, was ultimately stopped for the next six years for the same reason. Joe Biden in his first two years has made a huge difference, but it’ll take a while before everything will kick into action.

Even now, with the nation getting back on track, there is a deep frustration with The System. Why? The System has been blatantly unfair. The U.S. has experienced 40 years of procrastination. From 1981 through 2021, we’ve pretended to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid about our primary needs. We have not spent the money to deal with our absolute essentials in infrastructure, climate change, and manufacturing and jobs. The emphasis has been on making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else, resulting in our crumbling roads and bridges, worsening global warming, and widening income inequality. George W. Bush even bragged about his base being the “haves and have mores.” Donald Trump told his fellow plutocrats that his huge tax cut – his only legislative accomplishment – had just made them all wealthier.

My electrician and an Entergy lineman told me last year that I would eventually need to replace my outdated meter with an upgraded one, but since it would cost about $1,200, I was in no hurry to do it. (Photo: David Offutt)
Freedom Forever installed the white boxes above when they installed the solar panels. They later returned and upgraded my meter – the gray boxes above – which was now necessary. At no cost to me. (Photo: David Offutt)

The Biden-Harris administration has made climate change central to just about everything. If we don’t save the planet, then nothing else matters. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill will expand internet access to rural areas so that it won’t be necessary to drive several miles to hookup to the internet. Electric automobile charging stations will be expanded nationwide so that electric vehicles will be able to compete with and eventually replace fossil-fuel guzzlers that add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It will provide funds to build highways and bridges that will withstand the ever-increasing changes in our climate. A few Republicans did support this bill. Embarrassingly, not one of my Arkansas congressmen voted for it. Fortunately, not one of them – as far as I know – has tried to keep the money from being spent in Arkansas. You can imagine the number of jobs this bill will create.

The Inflation Reduction Act, while ineptly but accurately named, is primarily a climate-change bill. Sadly, again, my Arkansas congressmen joined all other Republicans in the House and Senate in opposing this vital bill. I think they all deserve dishonorable mention: Senators John Boozman and Tom Cotton; Representatives Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack, and mine -I apologize- Bruce Westerman. Think of all the jobs being created by the expansion of the solar and wind power industries and what they will do to replace the fossil fuels that are destroying the planet.

Solar panels on the front of my house (Photo: Brandon Gildemeister/Freedom Forever/drone)

As a retired schoolteacher, I never thought I could afford to do my part in saving the planet by installing solar panels on my roof. However, Chandler Follett, a young man representing Freedom Forever, came to my door and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Thanks to the subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, Freedom Forever installed my solar panels at no cost to me in return for monthly payments of $133.25 for 25 years – translated: for the rest of my life. In 2022, my average monthly bill to Entergy, my power provider in south Arkansas, was $170. In 2023, it was $190. And every year is getting hotter. Now, my lower monthly payments for electricity will go to Mosaic, the company that finances the solar panels and the installations by Forever Freedom, by way of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Solar panels on one side of my house (Photo: Brandon Gildemeister/Freedom Forever/drone)

Also, one of the many good things the Biden-Harris administration has done has been to put the Environmental Protection Administration back in business. Donald Trump set the environment back at least 12 years. He placed Scott Pruitt, a devout opponent of the EPA, in charge of running it. So, the agency became dormant in trying to protect the environment for 4 years and became reactionary in undoing virtually everything the Obama-Biden administration accomplished in the previous 8 years. Biden has had to undo Trump’s damage and introduce advanced protections at the same time.

Lisa Friedman, a climate-change reporter for The New York Times, on April 19 provided a nice summary of recent environment actions of the Biden-Harris administration:

“Over the past several weeks, the administration has announced strict new emissions limits for automobiles; raised the cost to drill and mine on public lands while making it easier to conserve those public lands; and issued a host of regulations to restrict toxic chemicals in the air and drinking water. Mr. Biden has also expanded the boundaries of several national monuments.”

Similarly to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt before him, Joe Biden is far from perfect, but, as they were, he has definitely been outstanding. Yes, he approved the Willow Project, an $8 billion oil drilling operation in Alaska, but he also prevented a 211-mile road through Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve: A mining company wanted access so as to mine for copper.

Yes, Biden is trying to ween us from fossil fuels, but under his leadership, the USA is the number-one producer of oil and the number-one exporter of liquefied natural gas. That does not mean we can’t also aspire to be number one in solar and wind energy to incrementally remove fossil fuels from polluting the atmosphere with climate-changing gases. It is important for voters to look at the big picture and not just one or two individual grievances.

There were three vehicles and several individuals from Freedom Forever involved in installing my solar panels. They were very professional and efficient, completing the job in about six hours on a gloomy and damp day. These were the last to leave. (Photo: David Offutt)

In a democracy, politics is the art of compromise. Those who oppose democracy today are considering fascism as an alternative and a return to what they believe were “the good old days.” Many are frustrated to learn that Biden is not perfect, so even though he has done and is doing so much good for the country, they are considering either not voting or voting for a third party candidate in protest. The future of our republic – and our planet – depends on the voters in November 2024.

A version of this essay was published on April 21, 2024, in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times.

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Posted by: David Offutt | April 10, 2024

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Bush/Cheney (Part 2 of 2)

Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush (2001-2009): This “co-presidency” effectively practiced the philosophy of Leo Strauss – the Big Lie, war, and religion – to get the people’s support and to control them. [Photo: Brookskraft LLC/Corbis/Getty Images]

In the Elections of 2016 and 2020 a majority of American voters rejected the candidacy of Donald Trump, although he eked out a few thousand votes in enough swing states to win the Electoral College vote in the first one. If he does it again in the Election of 2024, that will effectively end our 248-year experiment in democracy. For over a year now, I’ve been tracing the Republican Party’s descent since WWII into an anti-democracy and anti-constitution personality cult that promises a new plutocratic-theocratic authoritarian form of government requiring loyalty to one man.

The influence of Dick Cheney and his horde of neo-conservatives was instrumental in promoting the Bush-Cheney administration’s concept of the unitary chief executive unrestrained by checks and balances. However, the success of George W. Bush’s getting elected governor of Texas and president of the U.S. was largely the work of Karl Rove, whom Bush dubbed “The Architect.” He knew how to use religion to subvert the separation of church and state to the advantage of the Republican Party and his particular client.

The president with “The Architect” – Karl Rove in 2007 (Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP)

Whereas Kevin Phillips emphasized the “who hates who” approach to get white supremacists to vote for Ronald Reagan, Rove advocated using the “what are voters angry about” method to turn out the right-wing evangelicals for Bush. Evangelicals were angry about abortion and same-sex marriage. Getting those issues banned through amendments to the U.S. Constitution was highly unlikely, but there were other ways to get evangelicals out to vote.

Republican-controlled state legislatures could pass laws that would ban abortion if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned and give evangelicals credit for making it possible while most voters would never know what they had done until later. Also, Republican legislatures could place proposals to amend their state constitutions on their states’ ballots to ban same-sex marriage. Each of these methods should turn out the evangelical vote for Bush-Cheney in 2004. It worked. Since then, Donald Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have gotten rid of Roe v. Wade, and now the Trumpistas are targeting transgender youths. And their con-artist strongman is even selling Bibles now.

Rove had an ally in Dick Cheney, except that Cheney – with a gay daughter – objected to his anti-gay rights agenda. Whereas Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Reagan appealed to the dark sides of their prospective voters’ emotions, it was Vice-President Cheney who admitted it. After 9/11 woke up the administration to the threat of terrorism, he said that to defeat Osama bin Laden, the United States would have to turn to its dark side. Rove and Cheney both knew we had a historic dark side: genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, opposition to women’s rights/gay rights/worker’s rights, et al.

An Iraqi artist contrasts the Statue of Liberty and the treatment of those held in Abu Ghraib. (Photo: Middle East Eye/AFP)

As a result, the nice-sounding bipartisan PATRIOT Act was passed, resulting in the government being able to spy on innocent Americans. Also, dark sites were created in compliant nations where we could send captives to be “interrogated” and tortured – one of the CIA’s secret prisons in Lithuania was recently in the news. And don’t forget the embarrassments of the Abu Ghraib prison and of our Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba. There are still inmates at Guantanamo who cannot be brought to trial because of their having been tortured. The Bush-Cheney administration had no Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to remind them – as he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis – “We have to remember who we are.”

As the unnecessary and incompetently run Iraq War dragged on, the Democrats regained control of Congress in the Elections of 2006. The big question was this: Would Congress finally impeach President Bush for the 950 lies he used to get us to invade Iraq and for his authorization of the use of torture to implement his War on Terror, which included his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whereas Republicans will jump on any opportunity to use its impeachment power against Democrats, Democrats have historically been reluctant to do so against Republicans. For one thing, the Republican’s zeal to trivialize the impeachment provision so as to impeach Bill Clinton had made impeachment seem less important. It was just a game to play to have fun.

Also, since the Clinton impeachment was a strictly partisan, knee-jerk reaction to the Democrats’ serious, bipartisan investigations into Nixon’s Watergate shenanigans and to Reagan’s Iran-Contra activities, the Democrats did not want to be seen as petty as the Republicans. On the other hand, as serious as the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration were, the administration had bipartisan support after 9/11, so the Democrats were partially responsible for allowing their unconstitutional transgressions. They knew what kind of people Cheney and his neo-cons were, but they went along under the spirit of patriotism.

Bush and Cheney (2006): While they helped lay the foundation for the current Trumpista Party (or the MAGA Republican Party), neither want anything to do with it. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

Under Donald Trump, the Republican Congress pretended to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid to all his transgressions for two years: his violations of the emoluments clause, his interference with the FBI, et al. As long as he appointed extreme reactionary Federalist Society judges to the federal courts, attempted to end Obamacare, and cut taxes on the well-to-do, he could do anything he wanted that benefited him personally.

During Trump’s second two years, the Democratic Congress tried to hold him accountable for two impeachable offenses: Trying to extort military aid to the President of Ukraine in return for helping him in the 2020 election and inciting an insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States. Only the 2012 Republican nominee for president, Sen. Mitt Romney, voted guilty both times – and he’s retiring this year. Those few in the House who voted to impeach on the second egregious offense have been defeated for re-election, like Liz Cheney, or have retired or are retiring, like Adam Kinzinger. Soon, Republican defenders of the Constitution, like those who existed during the Watergate Era, will no longer exist.

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Posted by: David Offutt | February 26, 2024

The Decline and Pending Downfall our American Republic: Bush/Cheney (Part 1)

Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore during a presidential debate in 2000 (Photo by David Offutt at the National Presidential Wax Museum in the Black Hills, North Dakota, 7/2/2013)

On President’s Day, January 19, we honored the birthday of George Washington, the commander of our Continental Army, the president of our constitutional convention, and the first president of the United States. The outcome of the November 2024 election will determine whether we continue our unique experiment with a constitutional democratic-republic or reject it in favor of a fascistic dictatorship.

I began writing monthly essays to my local newspaper, the El Dorado News-Times, in August 2004. I was appalled by the lack of historical perspective that I was reading, seeing, and hearing in the news media at the time. Our constitutional system was under attack and very few reporters, writers, and commentators seemed to be aware of it. The G.O.P. was then – and even more so now – an anti-democracy and pro-authoritarian party. The threat to our constitutional system was “a clear and present danger.”

The Enthroned George Washington by Horatio Greenough: Depicted as Zeus, symbolically General Washington at the end of the revolution places his sword in its sheath and restores power to the people. (Photo: David Offutt in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History on the Washington Mall, 7/7/2012)

President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney came to power in probably the worst way ever. In Bush v. Gore, the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court voted to stop the vote recount in Florida so that Bush would be sure to win that state’s popular votes and therefore win the overall vote in the Electoral College – even though Gore won the overall popular vote and probably that of Florida, too.

The court’s ruling was clearly political and intended to advance the interests of their Republican Party. They realized how bad the ruling was and how bad it made the court look. In its ruling, the court made it clear that this ruling should never be used as a precedent for any future case. Nevertheless, Justice Antonin Scalia said that he was proud to have been able to do it. In later years, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regretted being among the five who had politicized the court.

Several of Bush’s legal team who helped prepare for Bush v. Gore would eventually serve on the current Supreme Court. Bush appointed John Roberts to be the chief justice. President Donald Trump, who also lost the popular vote, appointed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to be associate justices – publicly to overturn Roe v. Wade but also privately Vin case he ever needed sympathetic votes on the court. Regardless, Mr. Trump has made it clear that he will only accept an election result if, and only if, he wins.

Dick Cheney was effectively a co-president. He was known to have a bad heart, and there was a running gag that if anything happened to Cheney then Bush would become president. Cheney was fanatical in his effort to restore and expand presidential power. He believed that congressional checks on presidential powers that resulted from Nixon’s Watergate and Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandals were unconstitutional. He advocated a “unitary chief executive” who would be unrestrained by the checks and balances of the Congress or the courts. He believed in rule by men – not by laws. This was similar to Nixon, who believed that if the president authorized something, then it was legal. Trump, of course, agreed but recently expanded that concept to the president being immune from prosecution from any crime he commits in office. Essentially believing the presidency should be replaced by a monarchy or tyranny.

Leo Strauss: His theories on how leaders can manipulate and control the masses have been very influential in the Republican Party and dominated the thinking during the Bush/Cheney Era. (Photo: thepublicdiscourse.com)

Also influential during the Bush-Cheney Era was the philosophy of Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago. He suggested that three essentials were necessary to control the populace for authoritarians to achieve and maintain power: War, the Big Lie, and Religion. The initial War was provided by Osama bin Laden’s attack on 9/11 that led to our invasion of Afghanistan where the villain was allowed to hide and operate. The Big Lie was provided by the 950-documented lies by the administration to dupe the Congress, news media, and American people into supporting an invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. Religion was used in this case against Muslims, who were falsely blamed as a group for 9/11 – in spite of Bush’s commendable opposition to do so.

(Later, Trump, realizing the Republican Party was ripe for his taking, continued the neglected war in Afghanistan but basically avoided adding any new wars to our agenda. However, he deliberately weakened America’s reputation and credibility by his hostility to NATO, his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, and his insurrection on January 6, 2021. He has even supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Being a pathological liar, his daily lies over four years far surpassed all the lies combined by his predecessors – even including Bush/Cheney – capped by his election denial in 2020. However, his supporters found his steady stream of lies to be very entertaining and inspiring. Recognizing the anti-Islamic sentiment of his base, he attempted – but failed – to ban all Muslims from entry into the USA.)

Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush (2004): Cheney was the most powerful VP in American history and feared by most of the executive agencies and departments. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

Religion played an even greater part of the electoral success of Bush/Cheney, and there was also a tremendous effort to politicize the Department of Justice and to authorize the use of torture. And we cannot ignore the contributions of Karl Rove, the Architect. All of these played a role in the Republican Party’s turn to the “dark side” and descent into a Trumpista cult. Next time.

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Posted by: David Offutt | January 29, 2024

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Newt Gingrich (Part 3)

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton (1995): Obsessed with spending cuts, Gingrich’s new Republican majority conflicted with Clinton over issues like education, environment, & public health. The G.O.P. wanted to increase seniors’ payments for Medicare Part B, but Clinton wanted to lower them. Gingrich shut down the government for 28 days, the longest shutdown prior to the Trump shutdown (35 days). (Photo: Reuters)

On January 15 we honored the birthday of Martin Luther King whose leadership led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since his death, the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 ultimately led the Supreme Court to recognize the right of same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 finally recognized a woman’s right to control her own body and therefore her own future in society. The ideal of equal rights has defined the United States since its conception in 1776, but the struggle for every American citizen to gain those rights has been a long, tough slog. Sadly, the Trumpistas (MAGA Republicans) in their Orwellian belief that some people are more equal than others are organizing on the national, state, and local levels to undo many of those hard-fought-for democratic human-rights gains.

In 1994 Newt Gingrich led the extreme New Right to victory and became the first Republican Speaker of the House in 40 years. In the final weeks of the campaign, he introduced his Contract with America and claimed the party’s victory was a mandate for its passage. President Bill Clinton – I think accurately – called it a “contract on America.” Wisely, Gingrich omitted religious and controversial anti-democracy issues he thought would cost his party votes: prayer in public schools and opposition to abortion. However, that put him at odds with the rising True Believers, an even more extreme wing that was challenging the New Right.

Newt Gingrich, assisted by John Boehner, displays his agenda for the first 100 days of his leadership; As each one was brought up for a vote, he placed a check by it – whether it passed or not. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/AFP/Getty Images)

The contract did include other anti-democracy proposals: amendments to require a balanced federal budget and to set term limits for members of Congress. The former was intended to prevent any future New Deals, New Frontiers, Great Societies, or efforts to provide universal healthcare. It also would help to prevent prompt responses to such things as infrastructure needs, climate change, natural disasters, and the recent pandemic. The latter would prevent voters from voting for representatives that they wanted to keep because they approved of the jobs they had been doing. Fortunately, neither passed.

The True Believers also thought it would be fun to impeach Clinton for any so-called scandal they could fabricate. They investigated anything and everything, but Gingrich knew there was nothing there and was able to hold his radicals at bay until after the next elections in 1996. Clinton was re-elected, and Gingrich kept his majority in the House. However, the True Believers gained seats and pressured Gingrich to reluctantly support impeachment.

The True Believers were intent on providing a clear example of tit for tat: They never forgave Democrats for holding hearings on Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate and Ronald Reagan’s knowledge or lack thereof of the Iran-Contra Affair. Ironically, Democrats agonized over impeaching Nixon for the crimes he committed, even though the only other president to be impeached, Andrew Johnson, had been brought to trial only for political reasons – but Nixon’s crimes were real. Also, ironically, Democrats had no intention of impeaching Reagan because it was generally accepted that he was guilty only of sloth – not being on the job and not understanding what his people were doing even though he signed the authorization for the crimes. Clinton was considered a nobody from Arkansas who was not entitled to be president. It would be fun to impeach him just for revenge.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr presenting his report on the Bill Clinton/Monica Lowensky affair to the House Judiciary Committee. He later was one of the attorneys who defended Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. (Photo: David Hunt Kennerly/Getty Images)

The Republican-controlled Congress had given attorney Kenneth Starr the unique task of finding some reason to impeach Clinton. In a five-year search, nothing in the issues he investigated showed wrongdoing until Starr found out that Bill had cheated on Hillary. He then contrived a hearing to entrap him by getting him to lie about it under oath. It was diabolical, but it worked. Clinton’s private relationship with Monica Lowensky never threatened the constitutional system of the United States and certainly wasn’t worthy of an impeachment and trial. Even five courageous Republican senators broke with their party to vote not guilty. To lie under oath certainly deserved a congressional censure, but they didn’t have enough sense to do that.

In spite of how bad the impeachment made them look, the Republicans amazingly kept control of the House in the 1998 elections. Nevertheless, they lost so many seats that Gingrich realized he had to go: His New Right had become dominated by True Believers, whom he considered to be “cannibals” – and there was no way he could lead them. He had driven Robert Michel from his 14-year leadership of the Republican minority. Now, it was he being driven away by those even more anti-democracy and anti-government than he. He resigned from the House after four years as speaker.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, author of the infamous Hastert Rule. He resigned from the House after the Democrats won the majority in the Elections of 2006 and became a lobbyist. He was indicted in 2015 for bank fraud. In a sentencing hearing, he admitted to sexually abusing at least four boys earlier in his career when he was a high school teacher and wrestling coach. The Judge sentenced him to 15 months in prison. He currently holds the distinction of being the highest-ranking elected official in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence. Donald J. Trump hopes that remains true. (Photo: Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy)

Dennis Hastert of the 14th district of Illinois replaced him as speaker, and he implemented an extremely anti-democracy policy known as the Hastert Rule: He would only allow the House to vote on a bill if a majority of House Republicans supported it. That meant that if 100% of the Democrats but fewer than 50% of the Republicans wanted a bill to pass, it would not come up for a vote. This disenfranchised the will of a huge majority of American voters. Regrettably, he served as speaker longer than any other Republican (1999-2007).

Since then, Republican speakers have met the same fate as Gingrich. John Boehner (nearly 5 years), Paul Ryan (a little more than 3), and Kevin McCarthy (less than a year) all found it impossible to do their jobs at governing and satisfying the right-wing extremists within their own party. Boehner even announced his resignation singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah – it was a wonderful day for him.

President Clinton delivers a State of the Union Address while the President of the Senate Al Gore applauds and Speaker of the House Gingrich looks on. Gingrich nodded to his delegation when they were allowed to join the Democrats in applauding or standing. (Photo: USNews.com)

Meanwhile, Trump was impeached twice: Once for extortion and a second time for fomenting a bloody coup against the republic. Although presented with overwhelming evidence, loyal Trumpistas in the Senate voted to save him each time. And today’s Republican House, which can’t even produce a budget – their primary reason for existing – is spending its time trying to find a reason to impeach Joe Biden. Tit for tat? Déjà vu.

A version of this essay was printed in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times on January 21, 2024.

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Posted by: David Offutt | January 3, 2024

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Newt Gingrich (Part 2)

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore: Even though both of these Republican presidents faced opposition within their own party, Lincoln successfully prosecuted the Civil War and saved the union and TR successfully led the Progressive Movement. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System was the last great achievement of Republican presidents. (Photo: David Offutt, June 2, 2013)

Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower are spinning in their coffins. What still goes by the name of their former Republican Party is poised to nominate for president in 2024 a man who staged a failed, violent insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021, so as to reject the will of the voters and remain in office. And it plans to renominate that man even though Article 3 of the 14th Amendment denies him the right to hold office again.

Donald J. Trump is already promising to use dictatorial powers as the next chief executive to achieve retribution against those who are attempting to hold him accountable for his 91 alleged felonies. Meanwhile, he spouts Nazi slurs against immigrants (“poisoning the blood in the U.S.”) and his perceived enemies (“vermin”) to dehumanize them. He never advocates efficient governance and administration of the people’s business or even consider them desirable – only to use them for his personal ends. In this series of essays, I am attempting to explain how a once-respected party has descended to the level of a fascistic personality cult.

Newt Gingrich, minority whip of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives (1989-1995), became a major leader of the New Right who opposed compromise with the other party and escalated the anti-government rhetoric espoused by Ronald Reagan. Gingrich and the New Right were obsessed with opposing any tax increases on the wealthy. All of this, of course, defines most of the party members today and helps make the current political polarization and the increasing rarity of bipartisan legislation more understandable.

Minority Whip Newt Gingrich and President George H.W. Bush in 1990: Bush’s breaking of his “no new taxes” pledge cost him the support of his party’s minority whip and his party’s rising New Right congressmen and voting base. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992. (Photo: Getty Images)

A case in point: George H.W. Bush at the Republican nominating convention in 1988 promised “Read my lips, no new taxes.” However, in negotiations with leaders of the Democratic majorities in both houses and leaders of the Republican minorities, he agreed to tax increases in a deficit reduction plan within the annual national budget to fund the government. While Bush got most of what he wanted and many Democrats didn’t like many aspects of the bill, it was Gingrich’s opposition to the tax increases that led the House to reject the bill. (He was able to get enough Democratic help for different reasons.)

(Grover Norquist, supposedly at the request of Ronald Reagan, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985. Its goal was to reduce government revenues as a percentage of the GDP. Ostensibly, it “opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle.” However, its anonymous contributors appear to be mostly wealthy individuals, right-wing foundations, and corporations. Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes on November 20, 2011, claimed that Norquist, more than anyone else, has been responsible, “for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.” Gingrich was a natural product of Norquist’s anti-tax ideology.)

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Newt Gingrich: Their opposition to new taxes stymied spending on infrastructure, climate change remediation, healthcare, and the social safety net, stagnating the U.S. for 40 years. (Photo: AP photo composite by POLITICO)

Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep funding the government, but Bush vetoed it, causing the Government Shutdown of 1990. It lasted for only three days (Saturday Oct. 6 through Monday Oct. 8). The reason it was so short was that the public mistakenly blamed Congress for the shutdown, so Congress scrambled to reach another compromise. The final product was the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. In return for allowing cuts to the capital gains tax rates that mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans, the Democrats were able to prevent many cuts to Medicare that the Republicans wanted.

However, Democrats did achieve an increase in the top income tax rate. Gingrich wasn’t happy about most of this, except that the government was up and running again. Gingrich was still aware at that time that funding the government was one of the House’s primary reasons for existence. Nevertheless, cutting taxes for the rich was the ideal because it would increase the deficit and thereby increase the national debt, giving Republicans the false claim that the richest nation in the world could not afford programs such as universal health care and improved infrastructure.

The 1990 compromise bill passed in spite of only 47 of 176 House Republicans voting for it. As minority whip, Gingrich was supposed to “whip” his delegation into line in support of what the leadership had negotiated – and he was part of the minority leadership. However, he seemed to influence 129 to oppose. This was embarrassing to Robert Michel (R-IL), the House minority leader (1981-1995) who was known for bipartisanship and being friends with many Democrats. Gingrich and the New Right were about to change all that. And defunding the national budget and debt, opposing any new taxes without equal cuts to vital programs, and threatening government shutdowns were going to be increasingly common issues.

House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich and Minority Leader Robert Michel: After leading his party in the House for 14 years, Michel was chased into retirement by the New Right led by Mr. Gingrich. It would happen to Gingrich, too. As the party has become more extreme at each step, it’s become like cannibals who eat their leaders. (Photo: Terry Ashe/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty)

Michel was under attack from the New Right as being too nice and willing to work with Democrats, so he decided not to seek reelection in 1994 and retire (without ever becoming a majority leader). Michel represented the last of the “Old School” GOP who considered collegiality, collaboration, civility, and courtesy to be political virtues. In the Elections of 1994, Gingrich “Khan” led the Republicans to their first House majority in 40 years. When Gingrich took the speaker’s gavel, the days of considering the other party as being a loyal opposition came to a resounding end.

Democrats are the enemy, traitors, socialists, irrelevant. Don’t fraternize with the enemy. Don’t get to know them. Don’t try to understand their constituents. Ignorance is bliss. There’s only one side to any issue. Don’t take your family to the home of an enemy and his family for dinner on the weekend – and don’t invite them to dinner at your house either. Refrain from those late-night poker games with the enemy. To hell with democracy; compromise be damned. It’s been that way for thirty years and getting worse.

To be continued

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Posted by: David Offutt | December 18, 2023

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Newt Gingrich (Part 1)

Newt Gingrich with Ronald Reagan: Reagan was the first Republican to be elected with an extremist agenda, and he accomplished much of it – hence, The Reagan Revolution. Newt Gingrich entered the House of Representatives during the last two years of Reagan’s tenure, determined to lead the New Right, which believed Reagan not to be extreme enough. (Photo: Gulfshorelife.com)

One of our two major political parties is threatening to renominate a man for president who was justifiably impeached two times – but was irresponsibly acquitted by loyal members of his party – and is awaiting four trials to defend himself against 91 felonies for which the evidence against him is legion. Donald J. Trump, two-time popular-vote loser (2016 and 2020), is promising to transform the executive branch’s departments and agencies into his own autocratic tools and use the federal courts and justice department to get those he considers personal or political enemies. In this series of essays, I’ve been trying to explain how the Republican Party, since WWII, has been descending step-by-step into the current anti-democracy/anti-government/anti-constitution Trump personality cult.

Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia.) was elected to the House of Representatives in 1978 and remained there until he abruptly resigned in early 1999. He early gained the moniker of Gingrich “Khan” because of his barbaric and very vocal contempt for the norms of government and contempt for his colleagues’ willingness to compromise with the House Democrats, who had held the majority since the Elections of 1954. Compromise – essential to governing a democracy – was anathema to him, although later as Speaker of the House he found it necessary to compromise with a Democratic president. The current House Trumpistas don’t know what compromise even means.

As a leader of the New Right during the Reagan-Bush Era (1981-1993), he was appalled when those two Republican administrations and moderate congressional Republicans compromised with Democrats, but he supported them on those occasions when they didn’t compromise. For instance: Predictably, in 1987, Gingrich joined those fellow Republicans who voted against the bipartisan Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and voted to support Reagan’s veto of the bill. In general, both he and Reagan were opponents of civil rights legislation. To his chagrin, enough of his party joined the Democrats to override Reagan’s veto.

Here’s a little background on the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987: The Supreme Court was dominated by Republican appointees who were put there to undo as much popular progressive legislation as possible. In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), it had ruled that only the particular activity of an educational institution that requested federal financial aid from Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 could by denied aid because of discriminatory policies – not the entire institution. The institution could still receive aid from other federal programs for other activities that still discriminated. The Restoration Act was intended to clarify what Congress had originally intended. It specified that the entire institution could not discriminate if it wanted that federal aid. There were still pro-civil rights moderates in the Republican Party, and they joined the Democrats to override Reagan’s veto. Those moderates would not be there much longer.

Associate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy: Although appointed by Republican presidents, each of these often sided with the moderate-left justices to defend civil liberties like abortion. However, they usually sided with right-wing justices to promote corporate and Republican Party interests. Former Justice O’Conner publicly lamented her vote to stop the vote count in Florida. (Photo: AP Photo/Bob Daughterty, File)

(The Republican-dominated Supreme Court would continue to be a tool of the right-wing extremists who wanted it to undo popular programs from the New Deal to the present. It stopped the vote count in Florida so as to allow George W. Bush to win that state and thus win the Electoral College in the Election of 2000 without winning the overall popular vote. Sadly, even the last two Republican-appointed occasional-moderates on the court – Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Conner – joined the three extremists in Bush v. Gore. Unfortunately, that ultimately allowed Mr. Bush to appoint the mostly right-wing John Roberts to be the chief justice and the controversial reactionary Samuel Alito as an associate justice.)

GOPAC, effectively a political action committee, is a Republican state and local political training organization. In 1990, it sent out a memo with a cover letter written by Mr. Gingrich, who had become the minority whip in 1989. The memo’s title was “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control.” It encouraged all Republicans “to speak like Newt.” Democrats should always be referred to as “radicals,” “sick,” and “traitors” or whatever other negative connotations the GOP decided on on a given day. Republicans themselves should always be identified positively, such as “courageous,” “principled,” or “the adults in the room.”

One goal was to de-legitimize the Democratic Party to make the Republican Party accepted as the only party qualified to be in power. Recalling Jimmy Carter being denigrated as only a peanut farmer, Gingrich and company never accepted Bill Clinton, the unwealthy hick from Arkansas, a no-account state, as being worthy of the presidency. It continued after Gingrich: Barack Obama was only a black guy from Kenya, and Joe Biden is just the father of the once drug-addicted Hunter Biden.

The future German dictator’s book My Struggle was not only a manifesto on conquest and racial intolerance but was a “How-to Guide” on using the Big Lie to control the minds of the masses. One of Donald Trump’s former wives said that he kept a book of Hitler’s writings on his bedside table. (Photo: Franz-Peter Tschauner/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP Images)

Gingrich doubled down on the tactics of McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of being the party of treason – communists, socialists, fellow travelers – utilizing the lessons of the Big Lie, which he learned from reading Mein Kampf. FDR once observed that “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” Nevertheless, Gingrich had learned that repetition of a lie can make a large number of people “believe” the lie as the truth. The Big Lie technique has been a staple of Republican politics since WWII (via Richard Nixon and McCarthy) and has been dominant in its messages since re-emphasized by Gingrich.

“To Speak Like Newt” was the instruction given by GOPAC to all Republicans in 1990, and the party’s members have adhered to those orders ever since. (Photo: John Duricka/AP)

“To speak like Newt” has routinely been used to deflect the unpopular intentions of the Republican Party by falsely accusing the Democratic Party of doing what they themselves are actually doing. The most obvious current example of this is the Election of 2020 and its aftermath. Donald Trump made it clear that if he lost the election, he would not accept the legitimacy of the election. Joe Biden won the popular vote by around 7 million votes and also won the Electoral College vote in what has been described as one of the fairest and best-handled elections in our history. In spite of having no evidence of a fraudulent election, Trump and his loyal Trumpistas, or MAGA base, have not accepted the results. He held a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, but who was trying to steal the election?

(To be continued)

A version of this essay was printed in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times on December 3, 2023.

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Posted by: David Offutt | November 1, 2023

‘The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Patrick Buchanan (Part 2)

Patrick Buchanan gave a good run in the primaries against President George H. W. Bush in 1992 before dropping out of the race. His extremism may have weakened Bush’s chances against Bill Clinton. However, Buchanan paved the way for more right-wing extremists to take over the Republican Party. (Photo: Steve Liss/Getty Images)

The pathetic non-leadership of Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Party’s titular Speaker of the House of Representatives, came to an embarrassing but merciful end on Oct. 2, 2023, after only 9 months. Eight members of what Theodore Roosevelt would have called the Republican lunatic wing (Trumpistas/MAGAs) fired him for the unpardonable sin of working with Democrats on two occasions to keep the government operating. For a constitutional democratic-republic with a two-party system to work, it’s essential for each party to be a loyal opposition with which compromises can be made to at least partially achieve the people’s needs.

The House Republican clown show continued for three weeks without a speaker so that nothing could be accomplished – which is probably what they had in mind. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise were briefly considered but were rejected by the revolutionary Trumpistas because both Emmer and Scalise recognized the legitimacy of the Biden presidency. Ohio’s Jim Jordan was also considered but was known by too many as a bloviating madman incapable of legislating anything. They settled on Louisiana’s Mike Johnson who thinks like Jim Jordan but is perceived as a nice guy who opposes the Constitution’s concept of the separation of church and state .

Both Jordan and Johnson actively participated in efforts to subvert the Election of 2020 to keep Donald Trump in the presidency. Needless to say, Mike Johnson cannot be trusted to defend the Constitution and has no business being two heartbeats away from the presidency. Nevertheless, all 220 Republicans present voted for him: They are all Trumpistas now. How did the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower descend into an anti-government, anti-democracy, dysfunctional, authoritarian cult that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other party?

New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (Left) and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (Right): Johnson was acceptable to the far-right Freedom Caucus because of his total loyalty to Donald Trump and his fanatic evangelical beliefs. (Photo: Tom Brenner/AFP via Getty)

As I’ve mentioned before in this series of essays, the divisiveness of Barry Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan was inspired by the segregationist campaigns of Alabama’s George Wallace. Nixon and Reagan were also strongly influenced by the “southern strategy” proposed by Kevin Phillips, who at 28 published “The Emerging Republican Majority” advocating the southernization of the party nationwide. During Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Phillips told conservative columnist Gary Wills, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who(m).”

Among the party’s many other consequential steps that ultimately produced the cult of Donald Trump were the presidential primary campaigns of Patrick Buchanan in 1992, 1996, and 2000. In 1985 he took leave of his right-wing TV punditry to serve as Ronald Reagan’s communications director. He was brought in to appease the growing right-wing extremists known as The New Right. Buchanan – and The New Right – considered Reagan’s extremism to not be reactionary enough and too accommodating with Democrats so as to prevent Republicans from getting rid of programs like Social Security and Medicare. When he eventually sought the presidency for himself, he emulated the even more extreme views of Louisiana’s David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,.

Kevin Phillips help pioneer the successful white supremacist southern strategy of the Republican Party. Later in life he lost faith in his party because the economic policies implemented by Reagan and followed by his successors until 2021 resulted in such great economic inequality. He recently died at 82. (Photo: Bill Moyers Journal)

Buchanan was critical of the four-year record of Bush-Quayle at the 1992 Republican Convention. That’s when he delivered his infamous “culture war” speech in which he blatantly described a terrifying, divisive “religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” It was a forerunner to Trump’s bizarrely apocalyptic and inventive inaugural address in 2017. He advocated immigration reduction and social conservatism, opposing multiculturalism, abortion, and gay rights. There were still moderates in the Republican Party at that time, and they were alienated by Buchanan’s intolerant ravings. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins described his speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German,” alluding to the days of the Third Reich.

In his 1963 Ich Bein ein Berliner speech, John F. Kennedy admitted that our system wasn’t perfect, but observed that we haven’t had to build a wall to keep our people in. Reagan pleaded to Mr. Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall.” Their topic, of course, was the Berlin Wall. I used to tell my history students that as long as the Soviet Union existed, the Berlin Wall would never come down and Germany would never be reunited. The wall came down in 1989. That was the writing on the wall. The Soviet Union broke up two years later in 1991.

One of our greatest achievements for a longtime was having the longest unguarded border in the world separating us from Canada and Mexico. That was something else I used to proudly emphasize in my history classes. But thanks to Buchanan’s strong showing in New Hampshire’s primary, during which he put forth his white nationalist and anti-immigrant positions, the Republican Party has been promoting a border wall to separate us from Mexico ever since their 1992 convention. The desire for others to enter our country says a lot about what we have to offer. A wall says nothing about why those people want to leave their own. The wall proponents refuse to accept the fact that we are a nation of immigrants. But don’t you forget: A future demagogue and authoritarian president may need a wall to prevent our best minds and democracy-loving consumers, workers, and taxpayers from leaving.

Also, campaigning in 1991, Mr. Buchanan expanded Reagan’s anti-government message into an anti-democracy and pro-autocracy one. He compared corporations like IBM to the federal government: “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”

Patrick Buchanan during his second primary campaign in 1996. Ahead of his time in appealing to the dark side of the American public, he paved the way for Donald Trump. (Photo: Eric Draper/Associated Press)

Following Kevin Phillips’ goal of one-party rule, Buchanan preceded Karl Rove (A.K.A. George W. “Bush’s Brain”) and his quest for a permanent Republican majority in our three branches of government. The goal was/is to divide the American people and then rule them while representing only a minority of voters. This requires several strategies. Among them are (1) taking advantage of the undemocratic Electoral College so that the candidate with the most votes doesn’t necessarily win the presidency; (2) getting control of as many state governments as possible so that congressional districts can be gerrymandered to their party’s advantage; and (3) limiting, denying, or suppressing the right to vote of those segments of society who are perceived to lean toward the other party.

While Patrick Buchanan failed to ever win his party’s nomination to be president, he made it possible for a Donald Trump to make it perfectly clear that “I hate who you hate, so vote for me.” He set the example. “Dog whistles” and winks and nods are no longer necessary.

Note: A version of this essay was published in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times, October 22, 2023.

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Posted by: David Offutt | September 17, 2023

Constitution and Citizenship Day 2023

Some calendars don’t mention it, some refer to it only as Citizenship Day, but September 17, 1787, was the day the United States Constitution was adopted. We will recognize this day at least one more time. Beyond that, what the future holds will depend on the results of November’s Election of 2024. One of our two major political parties, the Trumpistas (AKA: MAGA Republicans), since the Election of 2016, has rapidly descended into an autocratic personality cult that rejects our democratic ideals of equal rights, the rule of law, majority rule, and much of our constitutional system.

As my readers know, I’ve been trying to explain that the GOP’s devolution from being a loyal opposition to the Democratic Party has been incremental since the McCarthy Era following World War II. I’m hoping that the more aware voters are of what’s been happening, the more likely they’ll be to vote in favor of democracy rather than autocracy. John Steinbeck, in his remarkable tribute to “America and Americans,” observed, “At intervals, men or groups, through fear of people or the desire to use them, have tried to change our direction, to arrest our growth, or to stampede the Americans.”

Steinbeck optimistically concluded his homage with this: “We have failed sometimes, taken wrong paths, paused for renewal, …but we have never slipped back.” He wrote those words in 1966. He lived long enough to witness the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and died a month later. I’ve always wondered if the prospect of having Nixon in the White House is what did him in. He did not live long enough to see Watergate; Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair; the Republican Congress’s 4-year relentless hunt to find a reason to impeach Bill Clinton; Bush-Cheney’s turn to “our dark side” after 9/11; and four years of Donald Trump’s chaos, abuse of office, contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, and advocacy of violence, concluding with his staging a coup d’etat to overturn an election. Each time, we have pulled back from the brink of autocracy, but how many times can we keep doing it?

For three consecutive years, I concluded my 11th grade honors American history classes with having the students read John Steinbeck’s America and Americans. (Photo: ALM Law.com)

Our constitutional system is very fragile and requires constant vigilance to prevent our becoming an official plutocracy and theocracy ruled by a single autocrat. Some of Trump’s advisers recommended he declare martial law to stay in office, so we can’t rule out the possibility of our becoming essentially a military dictatorship.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment clearly prohibits anyone of Trump’s caliber from holding any civil or military office in the United States government or in any state’s. It states that anyone who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution and has then engaged in insurrection and rebellion against the Constitution is disqualified from holding any office in federal or state governments. The problem is that it can only be enforced if both political parties take their oaths seriously, and the Trumpistas have made it abundantly clear that they do not. The GOP respects the Constitution when it can be used to restrict democracy. It was not originally written to be a democratic document. Time, customs, judicial decisions, and amendments have made it more so.

The attempted coup d’etat to steal the Election of 2020 and prevent the traditional, constitutional peaceful transfer of power, January 6, 2021. (Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

How do you nominate a Donald J. Trump as your party’s presidential candidate twice and threaten to do so a third time if you have any respect for your nation, your oath of office, or the Constitution itself. In a debate with Biden, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded: “Proud Boys – stand back and stand by.” They listened to him, too, taking a leadership role in the assault on January 6, 2021. He refused to say whether he would accept the election’s result if he lost. His former fix-it man, attorney Michael Cohen, warned the U. S. Congress that if Trump lost in 2020, he would not go peaceably. He incited the insurrection on the U. S. Capitol and on the Congress to attempt to steal the 2020 election. He was twice impeached, but, in spite of clear-cut, overwhelming evidence each time, only one Republican voted guilty in both trials. He stole classified documents and, when caught, attempted not to return them. He is now under indictment for 91 felonies. Would a legitimate, responsible, and patriotic American political party support such a man?

Trump has already laid out his post-election plans to drastically expand the powers of the executive branch, limiting the scope of the other branches of government, and using his newly begotten powers to go after those who have tried to hold him accountable for his actions. If his worshippers also gain control of one or both houses of Congress, he will likely be able to succeed, thus ending the long-running American experiment in constitutional government.

Since this is also Citizenship Day, it should be noted that congressional Trumpistas are also opposing Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. It states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” I’ve always been proud of this. Immigrants have historically considered the USA as a beacon of hope and many have come here so that their children will be born American citizens. We are a nation of immigrants, but Trumpistas are strongly xenophobic and anti-immigrant. Apparently, anything that makes us look good to the rest of world is something they want to get rid of. Fortunately, as of now on this Citizenship Day, they don’t have the votes to amend the Constitution to remove that provision. If they win in 2024, it may not matter anyway.

Note: A version of this essay was published in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times, September 17, 2023.

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Posted by: David Offutt | September 7, 2023

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Pat Buchanan (Part 1 of 2)

Patrick J. Buchanan: He followed Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, leading his party even farther to the extreme right. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

In the nearly twenty years that I’ve been writing these essays, I’ve referred to the devolution of the Republican Party as being the FOX-Republican Party, the FOX-Republican-TEA Party, and now the Trumpista Party. Currently, it is popularly called the MAGA Republican Party, but I prefer the Trumpista Party. That’s because it more accurately addresses its revolutionary opposition to our constitutional system, our belief in the rule of law, our progression toward a more democratic society, and our adhering to scientific knowledge. It’s an autocratic cult that promotes minority rule by the plutocracy and theocracy.

I devoted numerous essays in this series to Ronald Reagan, whose “revolution” led to a 40-year downgrade of our national infrastructure, an increase in the income gap between the extremely rich and everyone else, a neglect of environmental and climate-change urgencies, and set-backs on many other issues. As negatively consequential as Reagan was, it was Pat Buchanan who paved the way for the likes of a Donald J. Trump to take over the party. Mr. Buchanan felt that Reagan was too soft and pragmatic and not extreme enough, especially on social issues. He firmly believed that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” And that’s where he led the party.

In 1982, he became part of The McLaughlin Group on PBS TV. While there was always one token representative of the left, it was primarily a shout-fest of angry right-wingers venting their spleens on various current issues. Even though viewers might not have learned much from it, it was entertaining and qualified loosely as infotainment. Fox “News” eventually adapted the format with anchors like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity specializing in misinfotainment.

Thomas Braden and Patrick Buchanan on CNN’s Crossfire (Photo: You Tube/Crossfire

Also in 1982, he and journalist Tom Braden teamed up to be nightly co-hosts for “Crossfire” on CNN. Buchanan was on the right, Tom was on the left, and a noteworthy guest was caught in the crossfire of their questions. It was one of the most popular shows on CNN for several years. (Tom was also known as the author of his biography Eight is Enough, which was freely adapted as a TV series in the mid-seventies.) Later, Mr. Trump, too, became well-known nationally from his appearances on “The Apprentice,” the long-running “reality” TV show where he got to say, “You’re fired.”

After Tom passed away in 2009, I attended his eulogy in Washington, DC, and ran into Mr. Buchanan before the ceremony. I told him that we had met once before at Tom’s Georgetown home for the wedding of my friends Joannie Braden and Rick Ridder. I told him that the girl I had brought with me to the wedding spotted him in the den and rushed up to him to say, “Wouldn’t you know that the only two Republicans at this event would find each other.” I told him that I had been shocked to learn that I had brought a Republican to my friends’ wedding. He gave me a big grin. He does have a sense of humor. He and Rick gave two of three eulogies for Tom. In his, Mr. Buchanan recalled that there were times after filming a “Crossfire” episode that they were so angry with each other that he and Tom couldn’t even speak as they walked together to their cars to drive home.

Pat Buchanan and President Ronald Reagan: Reagan, similarly, used his movie and TV-star status to launch his career into politics, serving two terms as governor of California. While clearly extremist at the time, he still believed in democracy and compromise and used dog whistles and smoke and mirrors to hide his dark side from undiscerning voters. (Photo: Esquire)

With the support of even more Reagan Democrats, Reagan won a second landslide victory in the Election of 1984. By being more accommodating and appealing to Democrats, Reagan was alienating the New Right in his party that wanted greater extremism and less – if any – compromising. In 1985, to placate the extremists, Mr. Buchanan was brought in to be the communications director for the Reagan White House.

The new group that called itself the New Right gradually emerged after the embarrassing failure of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964. It began its ascendancy just before and during the Reagan Era with leaders like Newt Gingrich in the House, fundamentalist ministers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, industrialist-donors Charles and David Koch, George W. Bush, and, of course, TV personality Pat Buchanan. Their emphasis was on wedge issues that would divide the American voters: appealing to single-issue voters who were only concerned with such things as gun rights, abortion, immigration, drug use, or taxes. They also wanted to divide the people on what was moral or not. Things they could not abide included gay rights advocacy and any continuing civil rights protests. Also, they never forgave the Hippie movement and Vietnam War protesters long after the war was over (remember how they lied about John Kerry’s war record when he ran for president in 2004).

It was Pat Buchanan who showed Donald Trump how to use television to gain fame and notoriety in politics with extremist views. Trump saw how Buchanan used his TV popularity to launch radical-reactionary political endeavors in three presidential primary campaigns. Even if it wasn’t successful for Buchanan, Trump thought he might succeed. He was sure the GOP was ripe and eager for him.

A version of the essay was published in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times on September 3, 2023.

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Posted by: David Offutt | August 14, 2023

The Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Ronald Reagan (Part 8) – Anti-Environment

Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt and President Ronald Reagan: Almost immediately after its own scientists discovered the effects of burning fossil fuel, Exxon began a campaign of climate change denial with the help of Watt and Reagan. (Photo: UPI/TNYT)

This essay continues my recording many of the steps since World War II that has led to the devolution of the Republican Party into an anti-democracy party that’ has transformed itself into the autocracy of the Trumpistas. Ronald Reagan embodied the Big Lie of McCarthyism, the anti-government ideology of Barry Goldwater, the “I am the state” philosophy of Richard Nixon, and the implementation of future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s 1972 Memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce. Reagan’s personal popularity resulted in his policies leading our “advance to the rear” movement for 40 years (1981-2020).

The recent passing of James G. Watt (d. May 23, 2023) reminds us of the anti-environment policies and close-mindedness against climate change that has afflicted the Grand Old Party (G.O.P.) for decades. Mr. Watt was Reagan’s secretary of the Interior (1981-83), and it was he who set the example for denying climate change and advancing the use of fossil fuels even after scientists at Exxon, earlier in 1978, acknowledged that they were burning up the planet.

Watt was profligate in his leasing of federal lands to fossil fuel companies under the pretense of helping to pay off the national debt. Ironically, this was at a time when Reagan was cutting taxes on the extremely wealthy and tripling the national debt accumulated by all his predecessors combined. Besides, Watt’s leases were at rock-bottom rates, a steal for the fossil fuel industry, so hardly anyone bought Watt’s justification.

The House Interior Committee, chaired by a Democrat – whose party still held the majority in that body of Congress – asked him if he favored preserving wilderness areas for future generations. His reply was, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” I, and others, interpreted him to mean that we needed to use up all our natural resources while there was still time before Armageddon.

Watt’s supposedly “last gaffe” was when he complained about a Senate vote – and Republicans held majority control of the Senate – that barred him from leasing any more federal land. He was upset about who composed the panel that criticized his coal-leasing policies: He said that it contained “every kind of mixture – I have a Black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” He was forced to resign post haste.

Nevertheless, each successive Republican administration during and after the Reagan-Bush era has tried to do more damage to the environment and more good for the fossil fuel industry than that of James Watt’s tenure at the Department of the Interior.

President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney: Bush placed Cheney, who had close ties to Halliburton and the fossil fuel industries, in charge of the newly formed anti-environmental Energy Task Force. (Photo: Brookings)

George W. Bush created an Energy Task Force in early 2001 that consisted of numerous Cabinet secretaries and other appointed federal officials and was chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney. Although its meetings and findings were held in secret, we have since learned who they met with. In at least 40 sessions, the task force sought extensive advice from utility companies and the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy industries and their lobbyists. It agreed to hold one meeting with representatives from 13 environmental groups, but Cheney didn’t bother to attend. Please remember that climate change was well recognized as a global issue at that time. With news of polar bears drowning due to melting ice, Bush II eventually admitted that climate change did exist, but that was about all he did.

Donald Trump’s energy policy was basically the same as Bush-Cheney’s: Promoting fossil fuels and denying climate change. In addition, his main emphasis was on undoing everything Barack Obama had done to try to save the planet. Sadly, for six years, Obama had to do everything by executive order, which could be undone by a later chief executive, such as Trump.

Recent polls indicate that virtually all Republican leaders and a large majority of likely Republican voters do not consider climate change a serious issue that must be addressed. This plays straight into the hands of Charles Koch’s donor network that finances multiple extreme right-wing think tanks to replace our democracy with an autocracy that represents plutocratic and theocratic interests.

Charles Koch: With his late brother David, Mr. Koch used his wealth from Koch Industries to gather like-minded anti-environment and anti-government donors to sponsor numerous think tanks to guide the policies of the Republican Party. (Photo: Bo Rader/AP)

The Heritage Foundation recently published a catastrophic G.O.P. “battle plan” called Project 2025: Acknowledge the obvious existence of climate change but deny any urgency to do anything about it; increase drilling and cut back on clean energy; to be implemented by an autocratic president. It’s essentially a “How to Burn Up the Planet Guidebook.”

As I have pointed out time and time again, the way for the G.O.P. to gain power is to accept that there are not enough extremely rich voters to win elections. The plutocrats (the wealthy) must get the support of single-issue voters: the minority who are evangelicals, the minority who oppose abortion rights, the minority who oppose gun safety regulations, the minority who oppose LGBTQ rights, the minority who oppose saving the planet, the minority who oppose democracy, the minority who want to suppress voting rights….

To win elections, they must unite these disparate minority groups, and they have been extremely successful. How else did George W. Bush (2000) and Donald J. Trump (2016) win the presidency? The Koch donor network has been brilliant at getting control of state and local governments. They’ve set the stage for winning the undemocratic and now-dangerous Electoral College vote that officially selects the American president even if a candidate loses the national popular vote.

In addition to his appointment of Mr. Watt, another notable contribution to Reagan’s climate-change denial was his bragging about removing Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House. His legacy continues to threaten us. If the Trumpistas, as the current G.O.P. is presently constituted, regain control of the executive branch and either or both houses of Congress, we will not only lose our democracy: We will also lose the quality of life on the planet that we’ve been neglecting for far too long.

A version of this essay was published in south Arkansas’s El Dorado News-Times, on June 25, 2023.

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