The Party of Lincoln Is Now the Party of Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

FRC Founder James Dobson, Donald Trump and Tony Perkins

The Party of Lincoln is now clearly the melding of the Party of Trump (and  his mentor Roy Cohn) and the Party of Tony Perkins (whose early political connections were to David Duke). In other words, the Party of Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear and Ignorance.

Trump, who just recently asserted that he would be "much better for the gays" than Hillary Clinton, is perfectly happy to run on a platform dripping with the full panoply  of homophobic and other right-wing social doctrines pressed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, led by Tony Perkins, who is president of the Family Research Council (FRC), which justifiably has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (No matter that Trump has been on  both sides of just about every issue pressed by the FRC. 

And Perkins, in turn, is perfectly happy to support as his Party’s standard-bearer a thrice-married skirt-chasing narcissistic, mean-spirited billionaire who has never held a position of public trust, for whom the truth is irrelevant (including bogus and clearly racist allegations attacking President Obama’s eligibility for the Presidency), who routinely cheats those with whom he does business, has lived a life that makes a mockery of Republican-vaunted “family values,” and has no sense at all of the reasons for the greatness of the American Experiment.  Check out the video testimony at https://www.facebook.com/historiansondonaldtrump/

These elements of the Modern (post-1964) Republican Party -- Meanness, Selfishness, Hate, Fear, and Ignorance -- all have been present ever since the Party decided to use opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the basis for its anti-black Southern Strategy in the 1968 election.  Still, until now, those elements have always coexisted with at least some semblance decency and good faith.  Indeed, my first vote for the Senate was for Republican Charles "Mac" Mathias in Maryland in 1968.  But Republican politicians like Senator Mathias increasingly have vanished from the scene.   Speaker Paul Ryan, trying to channel the late Congressman Jack Kemp, at times has been an example of the effort to at least appear to be, in President Bush I’s words, a “kinder and gentler” conservative presence, however wrongheaded his Ayn Rand economic policies are.  And the Bush Family at least tried to project a modicum of decency even when pushing disastrous policies like the post 9/11 Iraq War; President Bush II made a strong effort to stem Islamophobia after 9/11. 

But there is no shred of decency apparent in Donald Trump.  And that personality combined with platform positions that are even more mean-spirited than those of recent Republican platform takes the Party into the nether reaches of politics.  The Bushes at least have the decency to opt-out of the Party this year.  Ryan, McConnell, et al. someday will have to answer for their political cowardice.

Many Trump voters will vote for him more out of Fear and Ignorance than out of Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  But the byproduct of Fear and Ignorance is too often Meanness, Selfishness, and Hate.  Even if Trump is beaten soundly in November, we still will have to deal with the legacy of the division sown by his campaign.