The Tribune

It still surprises the number of Bahamians who little understand American society or politics but who, hook, line and sinker, have been caught and netted by the country’s mythologies, which continue to be unmasked, demystified and demythologised by the march of facts and history.

This includes quite a number of Bahamians still mesmerised by the Republican Party and a number of easily debunked and baseless shibboleths and mantras, including the simplistic meme that the Republican Party and a Republican President are naturally better for the Bahamas economy. Ho-hum, yet another threadbare cliché.

One inveterate letter-writer, who often fulminates with fundamentalist frothing, suggested this very notion a few weeks ago, suggesting why the re-election of Trump may have been better for our economy.

Some people prefer anecdotes and emotionalism rather than considered analysis when proffering opinions typically unsubstantiated by facts and a little common sense.

When the American economy improves, our economy improves, though there is much more The Bahamas can do to take advantage of a thriving economy in the US. There are longstanding structural changes The Bahamas must make to take fuller strategic advantage of our proximity and relationship to the US, including how we may better reduce unemployment and spur more dynamic growth.

Writing in the New York Times last week in a piece entitled, “Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?”, David Leonhardt observed:

“A President has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic Presidents than Republican ones.

“It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office.

“The gap ‘holds almost regardless of how you define success,’ two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as ‘startlingly large’.”

Of Trump’s economic response to COVID-19, Leonhardt writes: “Mr Trump repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, and the country suffered. The economy would have experienced a downturn no matter who was President, but his scattered response aggravated the pandemic and the recession.”

Enraptured

Meanwhile, quite a number of Bahamian men are enraptured by the aggressive machismo of the Republican Party which they deem to be more muscular and masculine, playing to the male supremacist and patriarchal instincts of certain men whose analyses are often more driven by testosterone than reason.

Even as the Republic Party is in decline and controlled by white supremacists and anti-foreigner ideologies, there are black Bahamians who still gleefully and giddily lend their affections to a party which views them with racist and nativist contempt.

The evidence and arguments presented by the US House of Representatives impeachment managers in the second trial of Donald Trump in the Senate are emotive and compelling. They contrast dramatically with the shambolic and anaemic defence offered by Trump’s lawyers.

Despite the near dispositive briefs by the managers, the overwhelming majority of Republican senators are unlikely to convict the man who incited violence at the US Capitol and who put their lives at risk and continues to bully them.

The Republican federal legislators are paralysed with fear at Trump’s power to mobilise a state and local base of white supremacists and Christian nationalists who continue to support the former President as their demigod and demagogic leader.

Donald Trump successfully marshalled the worst instincts of racism, tribalism and nativism to win the US presidency through the Electoral College. In both his 2016 and 2020 races he not only failed to win the popular vote. He lost both races by millions.

The Republican Party has long known that the country’s demographic shifts, including greater black and brown voting power, more younger liberal voters of all colours, and shifting affiliations by many white suburban voters spells more electoral decline at the federal level.

The outcome of the Georgia federal Senate run-offs, which saw an African-American and a Jewish man elected in the heart of the old Confederacy - giving the majority to the Democratic Party - demonstrated the conundrum in which Republicans will increasingly find themselves.

The conundrum: the need to hold on to the base deeply enthralled by Trump and to win white suburban voters and moderates disgusted by the deep-seated racism, misogyny, homophobia and intolerance of this base.

This columnist remembers when California was a safe Republican state at the presidential level. California is now blue, with Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina all purple, likely heading to blue. In the years to come, Texas may also be in play.

The long-time observer of American politics Ron Brownstein has observed: “Trump has imposed a distinctive bet on the GOP. He’s increased its reliance on the people and places least touched by - and most resistant to - the seismic demographic, cultural and economic changes remaking America, while accelerating the party’s retreat in the places, and among the people, that most welcome those changes...

“As Robert P Jones, CEO and founder of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, recently calculated, the GOP coalition today closely resembles the racial and religious profile of people who are 65 or older in the overall US population, while Democrats more closely resemble the profile of those who are younger than 30. ‘It’s just not a sustainable trajectory,’ he says.”

To survive, the Republican elites are engaged in a massive and aggressive frontal assault on American democracy, which the assault on the Capitol epitomized. Republican-controlled state legislatures will continue to devise measures to disenfranchise black and Latino voters.

One writer has described contemporary Republican politics as a “cycle of contraction and purification”.

Diabolical

The twisted and outrageous gerrymandering of congressional seats and the obscene strategies to suppress black voters are part of a comprehensive and diabolical plan to thwart American democracy in the interests of a white Republican elite, of which Senate Minority Leader Mitchell McConnell is a national face.

McConnell knows the bind in which his party finds itself. But even this hard-bitten politico and tactician seems unsure how to manoeuvre the crosscurrents that resulted in bloodshed at the Capitol.

The election of Trump to the presidency represented many decades of the dynamics and forces of Republican electoral politics which has reached a sort of apogee, but which may now be heading toward decline.

The former Republican strategist, Steve Schmidt, with decades of political experience and who understands the racial politics the party has played since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, has left the party and is now a Democrat.

He has written with urgency and disgust at what now constitutes the heart and soul of Republicanism:

“The die is cast for the Republican Party...

“The poisonous fruit from four years of collaboration and complicity with Trump’s insanity, illiberalism and incompetence are ready for harvest. It will kill the GOP because its Pro-Democracy faction and Autocratic factions can no more exist together than could the Whig Party hold together the Abolitionist with the Slave master. It won’t happen overnight, but the destination is clear.

“The Conservative party in America is dead. It may continue to bear the name ‘Republican’ but it will be no such thing. Fascism has indeed come to America, and as was once predicted it is wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross…

“There are only two sides in American politics now. There is the American side and the Autocratic side...”

The Republican Party that may have existed in the younger days of many Bahamians, the party with moderates in the US Congress and the White House, the party that helped advance institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency and other actually progressive measures, is dead and will not be resurrected.

Despite the viciousness, the assaults on democracy and decency, the violence and hatred of the Trump ascendancy and its aftereffects which will last for some time, perhaps America needed to experience this cancer and bile in greater relief.

America will continue to struggle with its original sins.

How the Republican Party will reckon with these demons internally will have a profound impact on the body politic and on an America increasingly weakened by the conceits and decline of one of its major parties, which will likely have to lose more elections federally before any serious and sustained reckoning.

While politicians often fail to change in response to a moral imperative, it is the loss of power that typically focuses the mind and leads to change and conversion.