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    The GOP Will Not Govern
    The GOP Will Not Govern
    The GOP Will Not Govern
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    The GOP Will Not Govern

    By William Turner

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    About this ebook

    Republicans in the modern United States seek high office, not to govern well or pursue the well being of their fellow citizens and the nation as a whole, but to enjoy the perquisites and the opportunities to enrich themselves and their friends. This problem was obvious long before Donald Trump took office, although Trump exemplifies the problem to an unparalleled degree. The obvious solution is to not vote for Republicans at any level of government.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam Turner
    Release dateJul 10, 2020
    ISBN9781005824365
    The GOP Will Not Govern
    Author

    William Turner

    William B. Turner holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history and a J.D. He has published his dissertation as a monograph and a second, edited collection for which he had two co-editors. He wrote the first chapter. He has a total of eight law review articles in print. After living in five other states, he now lives in his hometown, Oklahoma City.

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      Book preview

      The GOP Will Not Govern - William Turner

      Preface

      This is a difficult book

      for a historian to write. Although our understanding of the past changes constantly, the basic events themselves do not change. The battles of Lexington and Concord always took place in 1775, the Thirteenth Amendment always ended slavery in the United States, and Harry S Truman was always the President who decided to use atomic bombs to end World War II.

      The events I describe in this book will be part of history some day, but they are ongoing right now, so I know this book will necessarily be at least somewhat outdated in terms of specific events by the time you read it. I press on, however, because I am very confident that the main thesis of this book is entirely correct, and no amount of historical change can make it turn out to be wrong in the future. Subsequent events change the significance of past events. The American Revolution looks very different from 2016 than it did in 1800. Rather than a slightly fragile, upstart Republic that might not survive another twenty years, the United States is now the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Even though at least some people now claim to fear for the survival of the Republic, I expect that, one hundred years from now, historians and others will look back, somewhat in awe, and find the politics of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries in the United States by turns horrifying and amusing, but always fascinating. They will still live in something that all informed observers call the United States of America that is still substantially similar geographically to what it is today. Florida may have sunk into the sea by then, but other than that, we will still be US.

      The continuing success of the United States only makes the bathos of the Republican Party as it is now all the more bizarre. I wrote this book because I find the phenomenon it describes frustrating and inexplicable, and because it causes daily harm to people all over the United States who deserve better. Human history and human psychology are endlessly fascinating to me, and never more so than when we make huge mistakes that cause each other enormous harm. I will never understand how anyone could have justified in her/his own mind the choice to claim ownership in other human beings, or using brutal violence to force those humans to perform menial agricultural labor for no compensation, or for only the absolute minimum in compensation humans need to stay alive, but such was a common practice in the United States from its founding until 1865.

      Similarly, I will never understand the choice to ignore overwhelming evidence that one has chosen a course of action that will cause harm to people one has a clear responsibility to help rather than harm. Such, however, is an all too common practice among Republican elected officials today. This is not to say that only Republican officials cause harm. Officials of all stripes sometimes harm their constituents, but that harm is usually unintentional. The law of unintended consequences is invariable in public policy. Humans and their unpredictable responses to laws and policies are a fact of life that makes knowing how a given policy choice will work out very difficult.

      I am an empiricist. Empiricism is the theory of knowledge according to which the best way for humans to know about our world is to rely on our five senses, suitably enhanced with devices that we have good reason to think amplify the thing we wish to explore in ways that make it more available to our senses. Empiricism is why we have computers and MRI machines and the space shuttle and all of the other technological marvels of the modern world. It may be possible, in the United States, to live without using any such technology at all, but it would be very difficult.

      I have engaged in intellectual inquiry at the highest levels one can in our society, and used methods that all well informed, thinking people agree are the most reliable ways to conduct such inquiry, receiving the approval of my peers for my efforts. The methods I used to gather the information I present in this book are not materially different than the ones I used in earning a Ph.D. in U.S. history or a law degree, both from highly reputable universities. What I find most strange and objectionable about modern Republicans is that they apparently reject empiricism.

      Whether they have some, to my knowledge, unstated philosophical objection to empiricism, or they are just so opportunistic as to have no compunctions about disregarding empirical evidence when it suits their short term self interest to do so, I have no idea. Maybe someday we will find out if the correct answer is one of those two options, or some other that I just have not thought of. To some extent, it does not matter. What matters is the obvious immorality of pursuing policies that defy justification in terms of the available empirical evidence, as Republicans routinely do.

      The good news is that, as people who study it like to say, science is true whether you believe in it or not. Reality beyond Republican belief continues to impact humans no matter how fervently the Republicans may wish it away. Humans have an impressive ability to alter our surroundings to our liking, bu that ability is not infinite. If sea levels rise enough, the State of Florida will disappear. No amount of Republican denial will change that fact. All we can do now is try to minimize the harm that such drastic, unwanted changes in our environment will cause. And hope that Republicans stop standing in the way of the attempts to minimize that harm.

      The good news is that, because Republican wishful thinking cannot change reality, reality increasingly impinges on our world in ways that thwart Republican plans to cause harm, and/or to ignore the harm they have caused and are causing. Many observers are not yet satisfied with the repercussions for Michigan governor Snyder of having disregarded the consequences of leaving a city in his state with a water supply that put what amounts to toxic waste in some residents houses and exposing effectively every child in the city to lead poisoning, which can cause irreparable harm, but the point remains that medical science played a critical role in finally exposing his malfeasance for all to see.

      Snyder’s conduct was obviously morally reprehensible, which he yet does not seem to grasp. The point of this book is that the crisis in the water supply in Flint, Michigan, is not an isolated aberration, but the entirely predictable result of the Republican refusal to pursue rational, moral public policy solutions to the problems their constituents face, and that there is currently no reason to believe that the Republicans have yet changed their basic attitude to their responsibilities as public officials. Whether you think I have proven my case, and what implications to draw from it if I have, is for you to decide. I find myself in the unusual position for a historian of keeping up with news because every day some new story arrives that further proves my point here. At the moment, to some, the Republicans look unstoppable. But we have survived worse, and eventually their malfeasance will bring them to a halt.

      I could wish that any discussion this book provokes will take place as a rational exploration of whether the evidence I adduce here is actually sufficient to carry my argument, but of course, because it involves Republicans, who have every right to dilate on the topic as they see fit, their attacks on this book will no doubt follow the form of their usual attacks on anyone who disagrees with them: since all is pure politics for modern Republicans, they care not for evidence, they care only for the political impact they calculate will result from their statements. Thus, if they deign to notice this book, they will likely denounce it fulsomely, but not by arguing about the evidence it contains.

      So be it.

      Introduction

      In April 2012, two highly

      respected students of American politics, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which they explained that the Republican Party had jumped the rails. They wrote that "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." As they noted, this attitude coming from one of the two major political parties creates an enormous problem for the essential business of governing the country.

      Mann and Ornstein point to two individuals as being primarily responsible for this parlous state of affairs, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Gingrich is the notorious Republican bomb thrower who, as a member of the House of Representatives, launched various ethics allegations at Democratic leaders, including spearheading the disastrous impeachment of Bill Clinton. Norquist founded the group Americans for Tax Reform, which has become infamous for persuading many Republican elected officials to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, a policy position that is patently, grossly irresponsible.

      Now, as the Obama presidency approaches its end, we should recall that, at its beginning, Republicans explicitly pledged to oppose anything Obama proposed with the goal of making him a one-term President. This is virtually the twenty-first century equivalent of secession by Southern states in defense of slavery, with the trivial difference that the secessionists were mostly Democrats, the two Parties having almost exactly switched positions on major policy issues since 1860. Happily, conservatives no longer have literal slavery to defend, but they are still firmly committed to a type of social hierarchy that was common in the American colonies and prevailed in the U.S. South apart from slavery, with credulous, ill educated white people not arguing too much with the supposed natural aristocracy who make the decisions,

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