Last week, in a failed last-minute bid to prove himself bigoted enough to be Donald Trump’s running mate, Newt Gingrich said this:
.@newtgingrich: "We should…test every person here who is of a Muslim background, & if they believe in shariah they should be deported."
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 15, 2016
This isn’t just unconstitutional, it’s anti-constitutional. The idea of a religious test for American citizens, used for expelling those whose views are deemed unacceptable, runs counter to everything the First Amendment stands for. It’s pure pandering to the fundamentalist Christian theocrats and white-resentment voters who make up the hard core of the GOP, now that the party has shed most of its moderates. Whether Gingrich personally believes it or not scarcely even matters. What matters more is that he thinks this position will make him popular among the party’s base – and he’s probably right.
Gingrich’s embrace of the internment-camp mentality is emblematic of the Republicans’ accelerating rightward shift. You might think that Donald Trump, who’s not an orthodox conservative whatever else he is, would be a moderating influence on the party’s hard right wing. But that turns out not to be the case.
Trump’s ideological malleability and total disinterest in policy mean that he’s open to any proposal as long as it’s from someone who’s declared allegiance to him. As a result, the GOP’s social conservatives are exerting virtually unchecked power, and the party platform for 2016 is swinging hard to the right.
Although the final version is still being hammered out, the draft contains startlingly extreme planks that look set to pass. Among other things, it calls for:
• Getting rid of national parks. It’s a conservative dream to turn all federal land over to the states for logging, ranching and other exploitation. The white Christian terrorists who occupied the Malheur wildlife refuge had this as their goal, and although their bumbling rebellion fizzled out in failure, this philosophy has been quietly seeping into the Republican mainstream. The draft platform supports this idea with a call to “convey” public lands to the states.
• Declaring pornography a public health crisis. The draft platform asserts that porn is “destroying the life of millions” and calls on states to “fight this public menace”. You might think that the existence of the internet makes this an exercise in futility, but the GOP language shows no concession to reality. In their parallel world, pictures of naked people are an insidious menace that demands every possible measure to fight, whereas the daily mass slaughters by violent and disturbed loners with access to military-grade weapons don’t even merit a shrug.
• Overturning marriage equality and supporting anti-gay “conversion therapy”. Again showing a willingness to refight culture-war battles that they well and truly lost, the draft platform calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn Obergefell. Immune to changing public opinion or their future electoral prospects, the Republicans seem determined to entrench themselves ever more firmly in the most isolating position possible. Hateful theocrat Tony Perkins added language supporting “conversion therapy” for fundamentalist parents who are convinced that they can torture their gay children into becoming straight.
• Doubling down on immigration. One of the few cases where Trumpism leaves a detectable stamp on the party is when it comes to immigration. In flagrant contradiction to their own 2012 autopsy report, the draft platform echoes his call to build a border wall. Even beyond that, it goes out of its way to be hostile: since “illegal immigrant” might be seen as insufficiently pejorative, they made extra sure you know where they stand by voting to instead use the term “illegal alien”.
Granted, the party platform isn’t a binding document. And Trump doesn’t seem inclined to stick to anything other than his own pinballing whims. But this hard, hard lurch to the right offers a glimpse into the collective mindset of the people who make up the GOP. They’re fanatical in their determination to undo all the social change and progress of the last fifty years and then some, regardless of the views of their own nominee or the long-term cost it may impose in a changing country.
And the collective madness is spreading, like a flood tide overrunning all redoubts of reasonableness. Mike Pence, newly chosen as Trump’s running mate, who once called the Muslim ban “offensive and unconstitutional”, now embraces it. We can guess that, like Gingrich, he sees the direction his party is going and feels compelled to go along for the sake of his own career. It’s not that Pence had a record of moderation – on the contrary, he’s ferociously anti-abortion and anti-gay – but even he seems taken aback by what’s happening.
Not only do the Republicans still fail to understand why voters have turned against them, they seem more determined than ever not to even wonder about it. The prevailing thinking seems to be that their path to victory is to cut themselves off from all outside sources of information and not ask questions. The bubble is intact, and every loss only pushes them deeper into it.