Trump con game is winding down
In 1852 antislavery Democrats, disaffected Whigs and independents formed the Republican Party to oppose the Democrats’ entrenched proslavery policies.
Republicans, initially the party of freedom, from graft and corruption during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, quickly became the party of wealth and privilege.
But this small super-affluent contingency could never command enough votes to elect a dogcatcher, much less a president and the congressional majority needed to form a government. For this they would have to secure the support of outside, often disparate groups of voters.
They first appealed to voters who had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War and to Union Army veterans, called “waving the bloody shirt.” They reminded them it was the southern Democrats who seceded from the Union to defend slavery and started the war. By this strategy the Republicans were able to control U.S. politics for almost 60 years, from Reconstruction times until Roosevelt’s New Deal, except for the two 8-year terms under Democrats Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.
During this time a coalition was formed known as the “Unholy Alliance” of conservative northern Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats based on cooperation on mutual concerns. The southern Democrats would vote with the conservative Republicans on economic, fiscal and labor issues and the Republicans would either vote with the southerners on bills supporting segregation or absent themselves when these came to a vote. This cozy arrangement worked well until President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and voting rights legislation of the 1960s caused a mass exodus of southern Democrats to the Republican Party. But this arrangement had little effect on politics in general since the southern Democrats had already been voting with the GOP on most legislation for almost a century anyway.
After the Civil War the Republicans remained the party of freedom and civil rights and the Democrats became the party of labor and segregation. No more today. The Republicans have recently convinced the northern blue-collar workers that their enemies are not really the wealthy antiunion industrialists but American companies moving offshore seeking lower wages and taxes. But the real culprit here is the microchip/automation and the jobs it has eliminated
To increase and solidify their newly-found influence among the southern and blue-collar communities the GOP has promised to reverse the Roe v Wade Supreme Court abortion decision, to restore the right to hold religious services in public facilities and to revoke recently acquired gay and lesbian rights. In the near future abortion rights will probably be diluted piecemeal by the new Supreme Court conservative majority which will be there for at least a decade or more. But church-state separation grows ever stronger and gays and lesbians are gaining new rights almost daily. Things seem to be looking up for liberals and moderates in some areas.
The wall that Trump promised would be paid for by Mexico is still far from completion and Mexico hasn’t yet paid a dime. Drug interdiction? Trump was right that illegal drugs come in from Mexico, but not by the same route as illegal immigrants. Drugs come ingeniously concealed in regular shipments aboard commercial tractor trailer rigs. The illegal immigrant crime wave? FBI reports from California and Texas, the states with the largest non-white immigrant populations, show that Hispanic males commit crimes at only about half the rate of native-born Caucasian males. The Trump con game is winding down.