To give you an idea of how different I was as a young man, and arguably still am as a slightly older man, perhaps nothing is a better example than the following. While most people in college were pushing the limits of their freedom away from parents by getting drunk and having sex with anyone who was willing, I channeled my energies into the dubious pursuit of defending my Christian faith. Meeting once a week with a handful of other believers and a couple of Calvinist ministers from the local Presbyterian churches, we read theological studies on the esoterica of Christian (Reformed) Apologetics.
If that doesn’t sound like a rollicking good time, let me hasten to add that there were cookies involved. Sometimes. So there’s that.
There was a certain intellectual tidiness involved in the whole endeavor. It wasn’t lost on any of us that the founding father of Calvinism was a French law student by the name of John Calvin. If someone is doubting the capacity of a French lawyer to philosophize and argue a point, they are sadly mistaken. This tiny cell of young men (I can distinctly remember that there were about three of us, and in retrospect there is more than a good chance that the other two were closeted gays as well) and the two pastors spent long afternoons discussing various arcane subjects such as predestination while my roommates were playing Ultimate Frisbee on the campus quadrangle.
But the role of reasoned persuasion, of apologia, in defense of an idea has remained with me. Impassioned rhetoric has its role to play — I’m thinking of the fiery men of God in African-American churches, or the flourishes often utilized by prosecuting attorneys pleading before juries — but I’ve always been more drawn to the cerebral. Passions and emotion are not part of my internal makeup, or perhaps that’s also a vestige of my WASP background. Which is why I wanted to explain the “why” for my novel The Last Good Republican.
Some of you might be put off by the slightly provocative title. Those of you who are politically conservative might take offense that I am denigrating the Republican party by implying that there are no longer any “good Republicans.” I’ll speak to that in a moment. Then there are those progressives on the Left who would deny that there has ever been a good Republican, certainly none in the modern era. Blinded by their justified repulsion of Trumpism, they unfortunately demonstrate their ignorance of political history in the United States.
What I wanted to humbly try with this novel was to nudge the public conversation in what is hopefully a post-Trump era. If the past few years has shown us nothing else, it is that America’s political system is broken. The Federal government is evenly split between the two parties, and the stakes involved for control of the institutions are so high that the parties have become radicalized, thereby further energizing their respective bases into a perpetual frenzy. Whether one watches Fox News or MSNBC there is a constant, relentless outrage machine pumping out an endless amount of political heroin. As a result, each party is addicted to the endorphin rush of hatred for the other side. Compromise and moderation are no longer possible.
And yet, for anything to get done in Washington there is a need for consensus and compromise. Progressives might counter that no, if we could only fight back the Trumpists by stacking the Federal Judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with our own judges, and furthermore if we granted D.C. its statehood, and perhaps split California into two or more separate (liberal) states, and if we… well, the progressive prescription for how to fix the imbalance continues into a political fairyland where Biden and the Democrats are riding around on unicorns. Clearly the Democrats have no appetite for seriously pursuing these structural and political remedies.
Compromise and consensus are the only paths forward.
As for the Republicans… (sigh).
I come from a family of Republicans. I grew up in a middle-class, evangelical Christian family that was politically and culturally conservative. The kind of values that I learned from them were the importance of work (“what do you do for a living?” was usually the first question one was asked, in our typical Max Weber-ian, Protestant fashion), of honesty (doing the right thing, even when nobody else was, because #Jesus), of modesty (a rejection of flashy jewelry, fancy cars, and the bling-bling sex and drug-fueled culture of Hollywood), and finally, the importance of being fair (you can’t skip to the front of the line, everyone needs to play by the same rules).
Today I still live by those values, more or less. There are provisos and footnotes I have added to each as I’ve grown older and hopefully wiser, gleaned from my years of living in the real world outside of the bubble of my family and immediate circle of friends. For example, although I was fortunate to have been born into a middle-class family that loved me and I was able to go to decent schools and get a college education, there are many, many, many others who weren’t given that coveted starting position, and their lives have been mired far back in “the line” of life’s opportunities.
So I get it. I understand how traditional Republicans think about America and its societal values. Which what makes the current state of the Republican party so infuriating, because it didn’t have to become this personality cult that rejects truth, science, and yes, compromise.
From my perspective the Republicans started veering off into cuckoo land with the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1994. His toxic brand of scorched earth politics supplanted the traditionalists in the party, and his pomposity sucked all of the oxygen out of the room for the other “Young Turks” with fresh ideas.
One of whom was a gentleman named Jack Kemp.
I first came across Kemp when I was still in high school. I had a subscription to William F. Buckley’s National Reviewmagazine (didn’t all high-schoolers get that bi-monthly as well as Tiger Beat and Sports Illustrated?) which had a hard-on for Kemp during the Reagan years. I dutifully wrote a fan letter to his Congressional office and received a kind letter in response. I was now a missionary for Kemp, and by the time he ran for President in 1988 I volunteered to help on his campaign in South Carolina (working out of the law offices of then-U.S. Attorney/ future Governor of South Carolina Henry McMaster).
At the time South Carolina was just emerging as an important primary state in the presidential electoral cycle, and I became Congressman Kemp’s driver whenever he flew into the Midlands for a campaign event. Picking him up at the airport and then driving him to wherever he needed to be, I got a chance to chat with him and felt as if I got to know him as a person (spoiler alert: he was a remarkably kind man, with a quick sense of humor and a charm that came off as genuine). I remember one instance when we were at a private airfield in Columbia and Kemp had arrived just before Congressman Dick Gephardt (who was running in the Presidential primary on the Democratic side). He waited a few minutes before getting into the car so that he could say hello to his fellow U.S. Representative and wish him luck in his endeavors. He was indeed a class act.
Kemp got many things right: embracing civil rights and equality for all, advocating for a robust Federal government that invested in education, innovation, and infrastructure, leading imaginative housing policy that would enable public housing to be resident owned, and possessing a cheery confidence in the future of America reminiscent of Reagan. He came from a middle-class family and grew up in Los Angeles, one of the most racially diverse cities in America, and years later during his political career he never forgot where he came from, and he recoiled and pushed back against the lazy racism that manifested itself in America.
He also got some things wrong: building his brand as a tax cutter, he never wavered in his ideology that cutting taxes was what spurred growth. He only looked at the tax ledger but never recognized that the spending growth was probably just as important, if not more so, in driving the economic growth of the 1980s and 1990s. But I am not going to relitigate the macro-economic policies of the Reagan-Clinton era, at least not here. Over a bottle or two of wine at a sidewalk terrasse I will gladly engage in that debate. I will acknowledge, however, that there is an argument to be made in cutting tax rates across the board if those rates are shown to be strangling growth or innovation, but historically in the United States that has not been the case. Perhaps the decade most associated with American ascendancy as an economic superpower is the 1950s, during which time the top marginal tax rate was over 90%.
Unfortunately, the only animating idea that is the corpse of the Republican party is taxes. Reducing taxes is the end-all-be-all of the party, and as such was the only legislative achievement during the Trump years in office.
Today, intellectual vacuity is a sine qua non of the Republican party. Looking for solutions to the myriad problems facing average Americans that involves spending and not tax policy is impossible with a Republican party that refuses to compromise. Whether the issue is public education system, infrastructure, converting the economy to an environmentally responsible “green” future, or creating a universal health care solution, their only policy lever is one of tax cuts. There are no Kemps left in the party that has given America such good Republicans as Lincoln, Willkie, Eisenhower, and arguably, Reagan.
I take politics personally. When I was younger, in college with those other closeted gay Christians debating Calvinism, my politics were clarified through a Christian lens. Abortion was the overarching issue, fueled from conservative theology, and was the litmus test for any elective office. My perspective on abortion has since evolved, as has my views on most issues. But the cleavages that societal issues create historically have been fed from religious influences in America. Abolitionists against slavery, the Temperance Movement leading to alcohol prohibition, as well as the fight for full desegregation and civil rights all had deep roots in Christian theology with each side of the debate claiming a Divine blessing. In my lifetime abortion similarly has largely morphed into a binary test for most Christians (“Is this candidate for or against abortion?”) with no room for nuance, but in the past generation the issue of LGBT rights has now eclipsed abortion for many Christians.
In the past twenty years I’ve witnessed the exuberance of the Republican party in becoming an authoritarian-loving, almost fascistic, theocratic party. Their descent into ignominy became worrisome for me during the 2004 election cycle when so-called “gay marriage” was used as a wedge issue to drive up the outrage index among the so-called Republican base. This “othering” of a minority group, singling the LGBTQ+ community as a kind of scapegoat for the social sins of America, has deep roots in our human evolution and must be constantly resisted because this type of politic can too easily devolve into feeding the worst instincts of xenophobia (not to mention homo/trans-phobia).
Instead of embracing democratic (lower case “d”, as opposed to authoritarian, anti-democratic, government) traditions and constitutionalism, we now have a Republican party and an intellectual right-wing that gravitates towards Hungary’s Orban and Russia’s Putin as “heroes”, and embraces fascistic / plutocratic tendencies (the proto-militia Proud Boys, for example; and fueling income and wealth inequality to never before seen levels in the latest round of tax cuts enacted by the Republicans when they controlled the Federal government). The Republican party has long been enthralled to that peculiarly American virus that advocates for a theocratic interpretation of the republic’s origin story, and today is locked in a full embrace of radical Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity positions on social issues. So it should come as no surprise that these various threads should come together in the hate-filled quilt of regressive voting restrictions, a failed coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, and panoply of transphobia across the so-called Bible Belt culminating in the “Don’t Say Gay” law that was signed into law in Florida.
Is there a Democrat for whom I could never vote? Under the current political environment in the United States, where the Republican party is made up of intellectual pygmies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mo Brooks, chameleons such as Nikki Haley and Mitt Romney, and grifters such as Mark Meadows, Tucker Carlson, and of course, Trump himself, no matter how awful the Democratic candidate might be I don’t think he or she could be worse than the Republican. There are rare moments, however, when I can’t bring myself to vote for a Democrat. I’m no fan of the Clintons, and in 1996 I voted for Dole for president (it was largely because Kemp was on the ticket as well as his vice-presidential nominee). In 2003 following the colossal incompetence of then-Governor Gray Davis during the California rolling-blackouts (remember that?), I voted for his recall and voted for a Democrat, Cruz Bustamente, who lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Or consider the example here in France of Mélanchon. For those of you unfamiliar with this French politician, he is the most popular leader of the disintegrating political left in France. At first blush one might think he would be someone I would vote for, after all he is for the working class and common man and against the rapacious influences of capitalism. But he has repeatedly demonstrated anti-democratic tendencies, with whiffs of authoritarianism that are amplified due to his close ties to Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. He advocates for policies that are impractical (he would make it illegal to fire an employee, for example) and his caustic personality is such that compromise is akin to ideological heresy. It is remembered that when Mitterrand came to power in 1981 there was palpable fear among the French bourgeoisie that the Soviet Red Army would parachute into Paris the next day. Seriously. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. However, with Mélanchon his echoes of Joseph Stalin are close enough to make it impossible for a progressive such as myself from ever consider voting for him.
I don’t think a Mélanchon exists in the United States. No, “AOC” is not a Mélanchon, as much as Fox News and Marjorie Taylor Greene try to anathemize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s exactly the kind of Democrat I wish there were more of: independent from big, corporate money who fights for the working class. She believes in democracy despite the flaws and fissures in contemporary America. Likewise for Bernie Sanders. Questions over aesthetics and tone aside, because that is inevitably where criticisms of AOC and Sanders devolve, I would probably prefer as my ideal candidate someone less divisive who could appeal to a broader cross-section of voters, because the only way forward is through compromise.
Ocasio-Cortez is quoted as saying that she has never lived in an America where political compromise was possible. It should seem self-evident to anyone who has been even mildly politically aware that the good ol’ days fondly remembered by Biden from his decades in the Senate are a by-gone era that hasn’t existed since Newt Gingrich’s vision of a militant conservative Republican party extinguished any hope for bi-partisanship. Her motto is distilled into the uplifting, and inclusive, “we can only accomplish great things together.” This suggests that even she recognizes that without finding common ground, or that politically dirty word “compromise,” getting legislation passed that will help move forward a progressive agenda is not possible. But while she would welcome the other side to cross over and join her, what she means by “together” is grass-roots mobilization. Getting not only the Democratic base energized but expanding it through voter registration and then a systematic get out the vote (GOTV), is possible (AOC has shown that it can be done), but it is not a sustainable, governing strategy at the Federal level where there are so many institutional impediments against the Democrats.
This is where I think she, with all due respect, as well as the other progressives in Congress are wrong.
Not that I think compromise is easy, or even oftentimes possible with the current Republicans in Congress. I don’t. But the art of politics is making possible the impossible. Finding “yea” instead of “nay” from the other side of the aisle in today’s political fractious environment is no less of a challenge than it was in the 1960s when my novel takes place.
For instance, in The Last Good Republican my protagonist, Carter Ridge, devises a strategy to move the playing pieces of his game of political chess by nominating an obstructionist vote for his agenda to an open judgeship. As a parallel for Biden, there are two Republican U.S. Senators not running for re-election in 2022 who are from states with Democratic governors. Nominating one or both for Federal judgeships, while distasteful at a certain level for progressives, would have at least freed up those two seats earlier for the Democratic governors to appoint interim (Democratic) U.S. Senators into those two seats. By now it is too late in Biden’s term to do such a Machiavellian maneuver, and this tactic can’t be telegraphed in advance obviously, but to date I have seen little imagination on the part of the White House in breaking the stranglehold that Manchin-Sinema have on Biden’s agenda.
For the narrow band of “independent” Republicans (I’m thinking of that sad trio of Murkowski, Romney, and Collins) who on the rarest of occasions break from the rest of their party to vote with Democrats, there must surely be a price, an earmark, a pet program larded with pork that can be included in legislation to get around the veto that “President” Manchin has on Biden’s proposals.
In another example from the novel Carter Ridge convenes a citizens’ deliberative caucus to meet. The role of this tactic is to create a formal consensus on a politically charged issue that the legislature has proved incapable of addressing. Since my novel takes place in the South of the early 1960s, the conflict around de-segregation and civil rights for African-Americans is what I use as my red-hot, seemingly intractable problem that needs solving.
For today’s America, while still suffering from ongoing racism and endemic poverty as in my novel, a similar tactic might be useful in jumpstarting a viable bi-partisan approach to building back better that reforms America’s infrastructure and energy grid. Perhaps no other issue is as important for the future as to how we reconfigure our consumption of resources and work to build clean energy. Clearly the American model of rampant consumerism and consumption is unsustainable for the planet, and there has to be buy-in from an overwhelming majority of Americans, not just Democrats, as to how to fix our dependency on oil and coal, as well as to rethink our idea of economic growth in environmentally friendly terms. The only way to get buy-in from 75% of Americans is to have this type of deliberative caucus that empowers ordinary, randomly selected citizens who on aggregate represent the demographic diversity of the country.
InThe Last Good RepublicanCarter Ridge brings together one hundred South Carolinians for a weekend where they are given the task of ratifying a proposal to end racial segregation. They are provided with accommodations, as well as child-care, and meet in a solemn setting that lends gravity to the task at hand. During their workshops they are presented with expert witnesses with whom they can ask questions as they grapple with finding an overwhelming consensus that is finally voted upon. The result is difficult for the state’s elected representatives to ignore, because it not only had been a huge media and political event, but also because it is clearly a kind of “we, the people” statement.
While the story of The Last Good Republican at its core is a love story, the politics I discuss were meant to be relevant for today’s readers to imagine a possible way out of the current dystopia we find America descending into. To inspire hope, or as the state motto of South Carolina says, “As I breathe, I hope,” and push the dialogue towards solutions is part of what I as an author attempted with this novel.
I hope I have succeeded.