Ezra Klein has an excellent piece up right now on the modern GOP
HERE which makes an argument I've been advancing for quite a few years - that when the USSR fell, American right wing culture and politics was suddenly without a galvanizing singular enemy towards which they had been directing their three minute hate and that, in response, "liberals" became the replacement evil and existential threat. The piece is much broader than this one point but I think this is important.
"...The anchor of Democratic Party politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals,” Sam Rosenfeld, author of “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era,” told me. “The conservative movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”
It wasn’t always thus. The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”
Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.
And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans..."
