The Myth of the Republican Moderate
Can we please stop talking as if the phrase “Republican moderate” has any basis in political reality?
This week, North Carolina’s Republican governor Pat McCrory signed into law a voter suppression bill that the election law expert Rick Hasen says has no parallel in the United States, dating to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This brings to a close an extraordinary and well-chronicled legislative session in Raleigh. A state long known as a bastion of relative moderation, particularly relative to the South (I did say “relative”), is now in the thrall of extremists. They’ve attacked abortion access, thrown an all-purpose roadblock in the path of voting for groups they don’t like, shifted dramatically the tax burden in the state to the favored few at the expense of the many, substantially cut education spending when it’s already very low by national standards, rejected Medicaid expansion, thus denying perhaps half a million North Carolinians health coverage and much more. And Pat McCrory, who has likened himself to an “Eisenhower Republican,” has been a cheerleader for the right wing onslaught every step of the way.
Nationally, of course, the GOP has become a party of radicals, proudly wearing on its sleeve its contempt for the less well off and its ignorance of basic scientific and mathematical reality. Its primary approach to “governing” at this point is to try to keep government from functioning at all, except when it comes to protecting the interests of the wealthy. It can’t pass its own budgets, because they make no sense whatsoever. It’s seemingly a badge of honor within the party to utter idiotic statements about women’s reproductive systems in defense of retrograde attitudes toward women’s health. Its most passionate cause now is to try to undermine passage of a bill that would extend health insurance coverage to millions of Americans. This week, the far left wing socialist Newt Gingrich said about today’s GOP:
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything.”
In this context, no one should ever have taken seriously the notion that McCrory would govern as a “moderate,” whatever his record as mayor of Charlotte 15 years ago might have suggested. To a substantial degree, the idea gained traction because political media in general still cling to the preposterous belief that the parties are equidistant from some notional “center” in American political life. But that premise — symmetrical polarization — is simply and flatly wrong.
