The implosion of the Republican party is the biggest event in U.S. history since the Civil War that brought the GOP to power.
Today, the GOP has dissolved into incoherent babble. An immigrant, Publius arrived during the Reagan administration to find a President who stood for borrow and spend and little else. He cruised along on the giant wave of reforms of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, whose massive deregulation of transportation scaled companies as diverse as FedEx, Walmart and Apple and still scales them nearly half a century later.
These companies were able to use the Internet revolution that followed Reagan to information-optimize their operations, slashing days of sales in inventories and receivables, accelerating the conversion of customer information into cash at unprecedented speeds. America got to move down the Information Cost-Velocity Curve well ahead of the competition. No Facebooks or Apples in the EU or Japan.
Somehow, the GOP came adrift during Reagan’s two terms of inaction and never recovered. Then, in 2002, just as the Bush II administration was getting under way, the Tea Party splintered the GOP, shattering a structure that had held strong since the 1860 election.
The big problem was that the Tea Party was not based on a rational, logical platform on which it, or the GOP, could build a policy. The Tea Party was just a bunch of inconsistences strung together without clear purpose.
The Freedom Caucus that followed the Tea Party, splitting the GOP into three, made no more sense and just added to the incoherent babble that is now Republicanism.
As Publius warned years ago in Our Constitutional Crisis, anyone seeking to take advantage of the GOP slide into irrelevance could jump in and take over. Dumb Don did just that. As Publius explained then, the weakness of the U.S. structure is that, by making it next to impossible to start a third party, new parties emerge as factions inside the two existing parties. As the Democrats are now finding for themselves—they obviously learned nothing from what happened to the GOP right in front of them over a full 20 years—in the U.S. system, these factions can eat a party from the inside out.
Like the U.K. Liberals in the early 20th century, a party without a rigorous system for managing its platform risks self-dissolution. A leader like Dumb Don can accelerate this process blindingly quickly.
Map Dumb Don’s intellectual incontinence onto the fractured GOP and you get an unrecoverable mess. By using Don’s own words, Publius demonstrated over five years ago that the man never learned to read or write. He just spews an incoherent jumble of words. Endlessly. Don’s intellectual incontinence leaves us no mechanism for understanding what his blather means. And his mental limitations are such that he has no way of telling us what he means.
By the time Dumb Don was elected, the GOP could not push back, because, as Publius had demonstrated, it was a fractured mess. Worse, everyone around Trump fell into the stench of Dumb Don’s intellectual incontinence, rendering his administration vacuous and nonsensical.
Then, amazingly, a man crisis ripped through this mess. The Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 showed the males in the GOP as completely unsure of their masculinity. Or how or whether to restore it. How bad this got was clear to all on January 6th when thousands of males, all dolled up like Dumb Don himself in what we can only call man drag, tried to overthrow the government and kill the VP, Mike Pence.
We are now nearly two decades since the GOP dissolution began. Today, the GOP is a murky stew; you stick in your fork and have no idea what is coming out, if anything. No one knows what the GOP stands for and no one in the party can explain the party or its goals.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is struggling, just like his failed predecessors John Boehner and Paul Ryan, to give the GOP some meaning. Like Boehner and Ryan, he has nothing on which to center his efforts. He has no way of explaining Republicanism to his own party, let alone to us. He just spent eight hours rambling on all night on the House floor and couldn't do it.
Publius and a golfing friend, gabbing over lunch after a round—yes, at a Trump club; Don bought the place and we learned about him—built the beginnings of a new party platform. Publius calls it The Growth and Development Party (GDP)—a deliberate play on words—and laid out its policy four years ago.
The GDP is designed to build the businesses that America needs to compete. In GDP-think, infrastructure = market share = growth = profits = jobs. Not complicated.
Thus, the GDP is a simple test for Republicans. Do you want market share or not? If you do, make sure that we have the infrastructure to get us there and that it is paid for and managed in the most cost-effective manner possible. If you don’t care about market share, oppose infrastructure revitalization and praise America’s resulting collapse as a return to core values.
Makes no sense, right?
This same process of dissolution is now eating away at the Democrats. As Publius wrote on May 18, 2018: “A warning to Democrats: don't think you can avoid the same fate. Take the GOP Coalition lesson to heart. Keep other parties off your ballot lines at all costs. If you don't, you too will come apart at the seams".
They didn’t get the message. We are now back to our 1860 crisis. The main parties are imploding. How does Biden plan to avoid the same result?
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