Where are the Radical Republicans when we need them?

America once understood the necessity of uniting against existential threats.

A scene at the Lincoln Memorial the night before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty)

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History teaches a clear lesson: When a nation's democratic institutions are facing an existential threat, relentlessly opposing it should be the sole focus. But over the last decade, large swaths of the United States — including its elites — have forgotten that lesson. And we are paying a huge price.

Our nation is staring into an abyss, but instead of turning around, we are about to jump in. Unlike in 2016, no remotely reasonable observer can discount the gravity of danger of a second Trump presidency — or rather, a Trump dictatorship. Yet a neo-fascist movement that stands for abhorrent policies that a minority of Americans favor is on the verge of winning a second presidential election. 

While many individuals — not least members of the press — are conducting themselves in a deeply irresponsible manner at this time of national emergency, the problem is a systemic one.

The pundit class needs to get a grip

Unlike previous times when the nation faced a similarly existential crisis — including during the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries — there is no organized, institutional opposition representing the collective interests of the majority of Americans who stand to pay a huge price if Trump and the oligarchs who back him prevail.

Many pundits are focused on the purported fact that Joe Biden is “too weak” to beat Donald Trump. Biden is no Abraham Lincoln, FDR or even Barack Obama, they complain. 

Yet in 1861, and for much of the Civil War, Lincoln — who came into office as a one-term former congressman from Illinois who had lost a Senate bid — was not remotely perceived as what we think of him today. For most of Lincoln’s tenure, many questioned his wisdom and even his competence. But Lincoln came to office with the support of a party that had been formed for the sole purpose of standing up to a Southern oligarchy that was challenging the very political and economic foundations of the nation.

Republicans united much of the country against slavery

In the middle of the 1800s, the United States was approaching an inflection point as the tension between its enslavers and the rest of the nation began heading toward irresolvable conflict.  

The enslavers were dominated by a small number of oligarchic Southern plantation owners who had amassed huge wealth based upon their system of human ownership. From the nation’s founding, enslavers had, by design, garnered outsized influence in Congress (aided by the Constitution’s three-fifths clause) and elsewhere in the federal government.

But as the nation’s industrial and economic strength and geographic size began to rapidly grow during the 19th century, the enslaver oligarchs recognized that their relative economic and political power was inevitably going to shrink. Their response to the challenge was to use every tool available — particularly their long outsized power within the institutions of the federal government — to further their extremist agenda. 

How Trump turned the GOP into the party of lawless disorder

As the 19th century proceeded, enslavers adopted and promoted a newly virulent slavery-justifying ideology grounded on both pseudo-scientific and religious justifications for racism, and therefore the permanent subjugation of the enslaved. Politically, meanwhile, the enslavers pursued ever more aggressive opposition to any and all efforts to limit the expansion of slavery in the Western territories that were rapidly being integrated into the nation. 

The import of their agenda was clear: To impose the neo-feudal, slavery-based economy and social structure of the South on as much of the nation as possible. But extremist efforts by the enslaver oligarchs to remake the nation in the image of their plantations was met with an equally powerful, and institutionally cohesive, opposition in the form of the Republican Party.

Formed in 1854, in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act — which effectively nullified the limits on the expansion of slavery in the West that had been imposed by the Missouri Compromise — Republicans united large swaths of the nation’s economic elites, non-slave farmers, and Northern proletarians, as well as much of the nation’s nascent white middle class, together on one issue: opposing the expansion of slavery.

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At the outset, only a faction of the new party, which would come to be called the Radical Republicans, was comprised of abolitionists who were opposed on moral grounds to the continued existence of slavery. Furthermore, most Republican Party members (which were comprised entirely of white males, the only people then permitted to vote) were themselves racists, and many were xenophobes, antagonistic to the growing number of Western European immigrants to the country. 

Most Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery because they correctly perceived the Southern enslaver oligarchs as a threat to the political and economic system they relied upon and profited from, not because of moral qualms about enslavement. But the alliance, based on the shared interests of a relatively small number of strident opponents of slavery and a far larger number of opponents of the slaveholding oligarchs, proved to be extremely strong.

Accordingly, in 1860, in the wake of ever more extreme moves by the enslavers and their allies in the federal government — culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision recognizing a constitutional right to own humans — the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln as president. He won the election and took office the next year, in the wake of the formation of the Confederacy, and soon before its declaration of war against the United States.

He's not even trying to hide it

Lincoln gets deserved credit for holding the nation together politically during the Civil War. But without the strong and robust (albeit also sometimes fractious) coalition that comprised his Republican Party, it is impossible to imagine the United States prevailing in the face of the enormous cost of human lives and resources required to maintain opposition to enslaver oligarchy and bring the war to a successful conclusion. 

By the same token, it was the strength of the party that ultimately allowed the Radical Republicans to ultimately prevail, however incompletely, including by the addition of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which were intended to prevent a return of a slavery system.

Of course, the Radical Republicans’ project began to wane with Lincoln’s assassination. It ended with the termination of Reconstruction and the reinstitution of a new expressly racist regime in the South and elsewhere in the nation. But that failure did not obviate the extraordinary fact that a new party had managed to sufficiently unite the majority of the white males — including capitalists — so as to stave off a fracturing of the nation.

Similarly, the broad Democratic Party coalition that elected FDR, in the wake of the catastrophic failure of Hoover’s GOP to meet the challenge of the Great Depression, and then and went on to lead the fight against Hitler, was the product of years of weaving together an unlikely alliance that ranged from Southern segregationists to Northern machine politicians and labor unions. And in an even more unlikely development, Democrats ultimately continued the Reconstruction project of the Radical Republicans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, albeit at a cost to the cohesion of the party itself.

We need to unite against Trumpism

Now, about 164 years after Lincoln’s election to the presidency, the stakes are perhaps even more clearly dangerous for most voters than the Southern enslaver oligarchs were to the Northern white males who installed Lincoln in the White House.

Trump stands in favor of voiding civil and reproductive rights, of potentially ruinous economic policies, and indeed in favor of voiding democracy itself. Furthermore, Trump’s current candidacy comes after a previous term during which he bungled the handling of a pandemic, at catastrophic human and political cost, and thereafter attempted to cast the nation into another potential civil war in order to remain in office after he lost his bid for reelection. 

Trump’s covid response was even worse than you remember

Against that backdrop, the imperative for establishing a coalition today, extending from capitalist elites down to the working class, all focused on fending off the near certain cataclysm that would follow a Trump victory, is more compelling than ever. Yet at a time that the United States, and indeed the world, faces a potentially existential threat, we lack the sort of broad and institutionally committed opposition that comprised the Republican Party before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.    

The question, then, is: Where are today’s Radical Republicans when we need them? 

Despite both the gravity and obviousness of the challenge, the opposition to Trumpism is fractured and absurdly ineffective. The fact that the press — which spent 2016 obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails — is now singularly focused on the “risks” posed by President Biden is a symptom of a broader civil ailment that has overcome the nation and left it at risk of being overcome by the disease that is Trump’s neo-fascism.

If Trump and the party he has remade in the image of his personality cult prevails again, it will be far more because of the collective failure of the rest of the nation to unite in opposition to a now fully recognized threat than due to the political strength of the fascists.

But of course, the Republican Party, including the radicals within it, didn’t emerge organically. The party formed and grew rapidly because sufficient numbers of white male citizens, with enough collective economic and political power, recognized the existential dangers posed by the extremism of the enslaver oligarchs and chose to construct a coalition as a bulwark against them. Today, no such robust and cohesive coalition is in place, or seems to be on the horizon, despite more than ample notice of the threat. 

Charlie Sykes on the GOP's Trump cult

It is entirely possible that the fragile majority Democrats have assembled in recent elections to fend off the threat of Trumpist fascism will prevail in November, whoever is at the top of the ticket. But even if Trump is kept out of the White House for a second time in November — and that’s a big “if” at the moment — it will hardly be the end of the neo-fascist threat that he and his allies pose at home and abroad.

Accordingly, the critical need to build a robust political coalition, singularly focused on opposing the authoritarian threat, will remain. We can’t keep on making the same mistakes, or losing sight of the grave risks our nation is facing.

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That’s it for this week

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