"Rule and Ruin" Revisited

 

Recent developments have inspired me to re-read Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, by Geoffrey Kabaservice (Oxford U. Pr., 2012). I wrote about the book here at the time I first read it, but the re-election of Donald Trump and his complete takeover of the Republican Party have motivated me to want to reexamine the half-century-plus story of the decline of traditional "moderate" Republicanism and the transformation of the party into its present, post-conservative, quasi-cultic character.

It is a very good history of the modern pre-Trump Republican Party and – by extension at least – of American party politics in the half-century plus since World War II, with particular emphasis on the earlier period. That, of course, is the era my Boomer generation so well remembers and – more than just remembers – the era so many of us were fundamentally formed in: the peaceful and prosperous decade of the 1950s, followed by the tumultuous and exciting but ultimately catastrophic 1960s, leading directly to the onset of national decline in the 1970s. (That decline would go into apparent remission somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s but then become almost inexorable in the first decade of the current century). From the way Kabaservice tells the story, Moderate Republicanism’s fate fairly parallels that larger trajectory of American political time. Given that, as recently as when I studied American Politics in graduate school in the 1970s, it was still taken for granted that American political parties were inevitably more or less broadly-based coalitions, the novelty of the current situation (in both parties) cannot be overstated.

Kabaservice emphasizes that the merit of Moderate Republicanism wasn’t just facilitating compromise (which is what it sometimes tends to get reduced to when its absence is lamented today) but real programmatic political substance. Indeed, one of the merits of this book is to highlight the important part played by Moderate Republicans in advancing much of what we retrospectively see as a progressive agenda – especially in the area of Civil Rights. At the same time, he describes in sometimes chilling detail the machinations by which the party was totally transformed, tactics which in some ways anticipated the norm-breaking behaviors of the present party.

The book concluded on a somber note, with "moderate" Republicanism virtually extinguished and even "conservative" Republicans being challenged by the new forces represented by, for example, the Tea Party. In his conclusion, he warned: "As the Republican Party continues to reject its own heritage and forgets the hard lessons of the 1960s, it seems increasingly likely that right-wing activists may prevail over the party professionals and nominate  an extreme presidential candidate."

Kabaservice was more prophetic than he knew. However, his prediction envisioned another Goldwater-like debacle, followed by a reconstruction of the Republican party "along more moderate and electable lines." He even cited the British Conservative Party under David Cameron. Well, we know how that ended!

Thus, while the first part of the author's prediction came true crashingly in 2016 with the nomination of Donald Trump and his complete evisceration of his "establishment" opponents in the party, both the party and the country had so thoroughly changed since the Goldwater debacle that not only did Trump completely take over his party, but also - in the 2024 election - the country.

Trump is a uniquely charismatic figure, whose success was not easy to predict and was never obvious - until it became so. Nonetheless, Rule and Ruin remains perhaps the best analysis available of how the ground was well prepared for Trump's takeover.