Nancy Pelosi is Right & Wrong about the Republican Party

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Being a Democrat frequently means having to answer questions about my leaders that I don't generally agree with.  For example, recently Nancy Pelosi made a comment that essentially surmised to "America cannot run healthily without a strong Republican Party," which was met with outrage, some of it real & some of it performative.  Pelosi, it's worth noting, is right to a degree.  America is a two-party country and while there have been long stretches (1933-53 or most of 1969-93) where a party can enjoy an extended period in the White House, inevitably the other party will gain an upper-hand.  Pelosi's point here was largely that you need a Republican Party that is willing to handoff power when they lose it in these circumstances, which the party increasingly seems unlikely to do, with people like Liz Cheney & Mitt Romney (i.e. Republicans who can admit who actually won in 2020) being supplanted by the likes of people like Doug Mastriano & Kathy Barnette, officials who seem willing to ensure a Republican victory even when their states don't actually deliver one.  I've said this before, but the Republic cannot sustain if only one of the two parties believe in the sanctity of elections.

Pelosi, though, gets it wrong when she seems to imply that the Republican Party has been "good" in the lifetime of most Americans.  I was born in the 1980's, during the Reagan administration, and I have never seen a decent Republican Party in my lifetime.  While people like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, & George W. Bush certainly believed in elections (all of these men had to concede an election or two in their careers), they didn't practice any sense of decency or even any sense of belief in the truth during their lifetimes.  People oftentimes will say that "Donald Trump is the worst president in American history" and that is probably correct in terms of corruption, moral decay, & immediate damage to the country, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who did more to hurt the country in the long-term than Ronald Reagan, frequently deified by the Right.

It's sometimes hard to grasp how different the Republican Party before and after Ronald Reagan's presidency was.  Certainly Reagan didn't come to conservatism by himself.  Barry Goldwater, for example, was the 1964 presidential nominee and was clearly the catalyst for what would be Reagan's presidential runs (the 40th president would win in 1980, but he'd run unsuccessfully in 1968 & 1976 before that).  But while Eisenhower, Nixon, & Ford would have conservative values that would emulate some of today's modern party (and lord knows Nixon, in particular, was about as much of a straight line to Trump's paranoia as any president before-or-since), they weren't really the kind of party that we think of Republicans as being today.

Dwight Eisenhower had a frosty relationship with Civil Rights leaders, and he hardly could be compared to someone like President Johnson in terms of getting tangible legislation through Congress that sought to end segregation & address the country's racist past...but he arguably did more for Civil Rights in his two terms as president than Truman or Kennedy did even if he did so reluctantly.  He chose Earl Warren to serve on the Supreme Court (who would eventually end segregation in public schools through the Brown vs. Board of Education Act), and he would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1957, arguably the biggest step forward for the Civil Rights Act since the Reconstruction era, and certainly the most important piece of Civil Rights legislation to ever have a Republican president's name on it (it would be overshadowed by the Civil Rights acts of the 1960's that would become the cornerstone of President Johnson's legacy).

President Nixon would become an unusual champion of environmentalism in his presidency.  Nixon created the EPA in 1970, and throughout his presidency he would sign the Endangered Species Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, & the 1969 Environment Policy Act.  Combined, these would become the foundation for much of our modern discussion about environmentalism, and would become integral to the movement to the coming decades.  It's hard to imagine the state of our lakes, rivers, & wildlife without Nixon being an unlikely ally to the environmental movement.

Presidents Reagan & Ford

President Ford's atypical legacy would be to the ERA and women's rights.  Likely driven by his wife Betty (who would be a flaming liberal by modern standards), Ford was a champion of the ERA, a constitutional amendment that seemed inevitable if it hadn't been for the rise of Ronald Reagan & Phyllis Schlafly later in the decade, and actively pushed Republicans to back the amendment.  Ford was not as pro-choice as his wife, but in the wake of Roe v. Wade he maintained a balancing act of being at least tacitly pro-choice that a modern Republican would struggle to be able to do.

But Gerald Ford left office in 1977, and so unless you were born in 1958 or earlier (which, of course, Nancy Pelosi was), you have no memory of a Republican Party that cared about Civil Rights, women, or the environment.  The Reagan presidency, not the presidencies of Eisenhower, Nixon, & Ford, would become the building block of the modern party.  Reagan and his movement actively sought to end the ERA (which they successfully did), and while he appointed pro-choice justices (specifically Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy), his most lasting legacy on the Supreme Court were justices like William Rehnquist & Antonin Scalia, who would slowly but steadily dismantle most of the progressive reforms that came out of the Warren Court.  Decades before the antivaxxer movement, Reagan openly suggested that acid rain wasn't real, stopped investment in solar power, and essentially linked the environment not as a necessity of humanity like Nixon did, but instead as a hindrance to capitalism & big business.

And Reagan's views on Civil Rights were horrifying, and out-of-sync with his predecessors.  He had a long history of standing against Civil Rights (he publicly opposed the Civil Rights Acts of the Johnson years), and as California's governor he opposed fair housing legislation.  He only backed Martin Luther King Day when it became clear that any veto he'd issue would be overridden, and he did veto the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 (thankfully Congress overrode him).  He also spent much of the decade demonizing gay-and-bisexual men who were dying of AIDS, basically ensuring through his scorn & apathy toward the pandemic that these men would continue to die.  It took his surgeon general basically going rogue (to Reagan's disapproval) advocating for condom use as a way to prevent the spread of the disease before anyone in the Reagan administration finally made public comment trying to end the pandemic.

Ronald Reagan's party is the Republican Party that most Americans know.  Not just Gen Z, but Gen X & Millennials have very little association, certainly not as voters, to the Republican Party of Eisenhower, Nixon, & Ford, which were certainly not liberal but had a grounding in truth & science that the modern party simply isn't capable of having.  As a result, Nancy Pelosi's comments feel leaden to younger voters.  She is right, we need a Republican Party that believes in democracy-it is unhealthy for the American experiment that only one party believes in the will of the people, science, & the central tenets of freedom for all.  But Trump & McConnell are simply the current poster children for a party that has been profoundly, morally bankrupt for over forty years.  Pretending otherwise undermines the gravity of the Democratic Party's task ahead if they ever want to get us out of this political abyss.