Parties fall apart; the center cannot hold. (We’ve sure seen that.) Mere anarchy is loosed upon the political world. (Have a look at the morning paper.) The best among them lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. (Cast your eyes toward the capital.) It can make us wonder what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born. (We can only dread.)
Can it be that William Butler Yeats, a Protestant steeped in the nationalism of Catholic Ireland and writing during the post-World War I pandemic, understood perfectly the tides of American politics? Can it be that his vision — sharpened by the struggles his father and pregnant wife waged against the deadly flu — helps us understand the contemporary threat to civic comity?
In the course of American history, several seemingly impregnable parties have faced grave challenges: the Federalists (beginning around 1815 with the party’s embarrassment over its opposition to the War of 1812 and its flirtation with a separate peace with Britain); the Whigs (after 1854, when the party’s stubborn reticence about slavery rendered it irrelevant); the Democrats (from 1860 to 1914, with a brief Grover Cleveland revival in the late 19th century); the Republicans (during the New Deal years, the high tide of progressivism); the Democrats (from the eclipse of the Lyndon Johnson Great Society until the New Democrat revival of Bill Clinton).
And now, the Republicans. (And here we move from Yeats to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and say: Let me count the ways.)
Each party trial is different. There is barely a similarity between, say, the unimportance of the Whigs following the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the crisis the Democrats faced when Richard Nixon (and then Ronald Reagan) set in motion a Republican White House domination that gave the GOP victories in five of the following six presidential elections, two of them in breathtaking landslides, beginning in 1968.
But the important thing is that party divisions beget party disasters.
In a week of tumult — the reaction to Donald Trump’s dinner with anti-Semites, his meditations about overturning the Constitution, the defeat of a Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in Georgia, the trend-defying emergence of a Democratic-controlled Senate with broad subpoena power and where Republicans will be at severe disadvantages in the Finance, Rules, Judiciary and Appropriations Committees — one bracing quote stood out.
It came from Newt Gingrich, whose emergence as a Republican warrior and then House Speaker was powered by his reputation as a futurist in the Alvin Toffler “Future Shock” template. “My greatest fear is that we’re going to end up in a 1964 division,” he told The New York Times, not his preferred outlet for news and analysis. “I can imagine a Trump-anti-Trump war over the next two years that just guarantees Biden’s reelection in a landslide and guarantees that Democrats control everything.”
Right on the money. It is well that Republicans reflect on those 1964 strains — and perhaps contemplate how they might translate the Barry Goldwater landslide loss into a Nixon revival.
The Republican crisis came in reaction to the 1960 election, when Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated Nixon. That campaign was significant in many ways: the breakthrough of television as a vital factor in American politics; the establishment of presidential debates, which, with 35 of these forums on record, became a customary element of our campaigns; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians, steeped in World War II service, that dominated American politics for a half-century and had a symbolic ending only with the death of Bob Dole, first elected to the House of Representatives, a year ago this month.
In many ways, Joe Biden, a senior halfback on the Archmere Academy football team when Kennedy was elected, had a political profile much like the 35th president. Both spent their Capitol Hill years more as — here we invoke congressional argot — a show horse than a workhorse. Both favored style over substance. Both were party moderates with sympathies, unusual for Democrats of their era, for business — Kennedy as the son of a multimillionaire, Biden as the senator from Delaware, then as now the preferred venue for business incorporation. Indeed, Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign was a slick cover band of the 1960 Kennedy campaign, though his soaring rhetoric, and his stylistic gestures, both were plagiarized.
The reaction among right-wing Republicans to the election of Kennedy (who in fact was a close friend of Goldwater) was furious. Conservatives were in full rebellion against the moderate (if not the outright liberal) strain of Republicanism personified by governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and William Scranton of Pennsylvania … and Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut, father and grandfather to later presidents. They propelled Goldwater to the nomination and, in a tumultuous convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, set the stage for a 44-state landslide defeat.
But the calamity was evident long before the November general election. “By January, every sampler of public opinion had become aware of the quaking instability of Republican loyalties, that questing and groping for a Republican way out which was to continue through spring and into the fall elections themselves,” election chronicler Theodore H. White wrote in his “The Making of the President 1964.”
Substitute December 2022 for January 1964 in the quote above, and you have a stunningly accurate portrait of the Republican Party in the wake of its tepid performance in the midterms and following the inexplicable — beyond the credence even of end-time loyalist Kellyanne Conway — conduct of Trump, whose conception of “very fine people” has widened considerably in recent days.
The collision between the Goldwater and the Rockefeller conceptions of Republicanism, a crescendo of the fight between the Robert Taft and Dwight Eisenhower wings a decade earlier, was one of the signature conflicts of 20th-century politics. But for all the talk of “extremism” in 1964 — a word that Goldwater himself employed to much controversy in his acceptance speech — Taft and Goldwater were mainstream figures. Neither would have countenanced talk about suspending the Constitution.
How did the Republicans eventually come back? Partially through cynicism (a Southern strategy based on race-baiting), to be sure. But also through conventional conservatism (frugality in domestic affairs, strength in foreign affairs). It could work again.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
