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Episode One: What happened to the GOP?
23 Plays1 month ago
Republicans weren't always like this. Something changed. Now they're of and for the super rich. And they've been this way longer than you might think. What happened? What can we do about it?
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Transcript
Intro
America's Political Shift
00:00:18
Darwin Kastle
Welcome to the first episode of The Big Swing, where we talk about America's big swing to the right and what we can do about it.
Eisenhower's Policies and Legacy
00:00:25
Darwin Kastle
Part one, making America great the way things were.
00:00:30
Darwin Kastle
From 1953 to 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. The top marginal tax rate was 91%, affecting individuals earning over $200,000, equal to $1.5 million in today's dollars.
00:00:45
Darwin Kastle
With rich people's excess millions being taxed at such a high level, the economy was booming, reaching record highs in production, employment, and income. While President Eisenhower got shit done.
00:00:59
Darwin Kastle
You want to help everyday people? Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, creating the nation's largest public works project and leading to the construction of the interstate highway system.
00:01:10
Darwin Kastle
He created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He signed the Civil Rights Act and sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation. He even signed the Bank Holding Company Act, designed to limit the concentration of banking power.
00:01:25
Darwin Kastle
You want good science? He created the Atomic Energy Agency. He created NASA. He even launched a massive vaccination campaign. You want peace? He ended the Korean War.
00:01:37
Darwin Kastle
All that's not enough? Eisenhower even appointed five justices to the Supreme Court. This included Chief Justice Earl Warren, known for his progressive beliefs and rulings while on the court.
00:01:50
Darwin Kastle
In case Ike didn't already sound woke as hell during his farewell address, he warned of the growing influence of the military industrial complex and the danger that presented.
Trump's Vision vs. Eisenhower's Era
00:02:00
Darwin Kastle
As you can probably tell, Eisenhower was clearly ultra-woke, DEI-loving, commie, socialist, hippie, Democrat, right?
00:02:10
Darwin Kastle
Oh wait, did I forget to mention that Ike was a Republican? When Donald Trump first introduced his slogan, Make America Great Again, there were those who thought he was talking about the post-World War II era of the 50s when the middle class was thriving. A single middle class income could afford a house and a yearly vacation for the whole family while also being able to put the kids through college.
00:02:32
Darwin Kastle
If that was the type of America Trump was returning the country to, perhaps he would have found himself with lasting bipartisan support from voters. Supporting education, healthcare, civil rights, and public works while ending wars and taxing the wealthy does seem like a recipe for happy voters, regardless of party.
00:02:52
Darwin Kastle
The problem is the current grand old party isn't anything like the Eisenhower Republican Party. That party was interested in governing and making life better for average voters.
00:03:03
Darwin Kastle
The current GOP is centered around helping the rich get even richer. The Republican Party has been evolving away from Eisenhower for decades, thanks to presidents like Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes.
GOP's Evolution from Governance to Wealth
00:03:17
Darwin Kastle
Those presidents still made some effort at governing, but there was a key difference, prioritizing the desires of the wealthy. However, those Republican leaders still quaintly believed that you need to give average voters some incentives to support the Republican Party.
00:03:31
Darwin Kastle
After all, how would they have the power to help wealthy donors if they couldn't win elections? All that has changed with the Trump administration. I mean, why actually help people when you can just lie to them instead? We'll explore how the conservative movement has taken such a big swing to the right over the years and how things are different in the Trump era.
00:03:51
Darwin Kastle
We'll discuss what that means for America and the world's future. Most important, we'll detail how the U.S. can make big swings back in the opposite direction and why the world is depending on it.
00:04:04
Darwin Kastle
In the next few years, we have a golden opportunity to make big changes to create a country that's good for all Americans, not just the wealthy.
Trump's Resemblance to Jim Crow and Gilded Age
00:04:11
Darwin Kastle
We'll talk about how to take advantage of that opportunity and the policies that we can implement to start solving America's biggest problems.
00:04:18
Darwin Kastle
But first, I'm going to take you back to an era well before Eisenhower's administration, a time that actually resembles what Donald Trump envisions when he says, make America great again.
00:04:30
Darwin Kastle
Part two, make America poor again, swinging back the clock to a time that Donald Trump longs for. To find the time period that Donald Trump seems to long for when he says, make America great again, we need to go all the way back to 1877.
00:04:47
Darwin Kastle
Two of America's most deplorable eras were beginning, Jim Crow and the Gilded Age. Jim Crow laws were a reaction to the Civil War and Reconstruction. They were intended to make sure Black people were kept subordinate to white people by excluding them economically, socially, and politically.
00:05:06
Darwin Kastle
This created a permanent economic underclass of low-wage workers. It gave the wealthy ruling class an entire class of people to redirect the rage of the white working class towards.
Parallels Between Gilded Age and Modern GOP
00:05:18
Darwin Kastle
Wages too low? Jobs hard to find? It's because those awful black folks are stealing your jobs by working for pennies. It also soothes the egos of struggling white workers.
00:05:29
Darwin Kastle
Unhappy with your life? Well, at least there was a group of people who would always have it worse than you did. You could blame your problems on them and feel like they are beneath you at the same time. This is a social engineering trick employed by those in power for centuries.
00:05:44
Darwin Kastle
When you're stealing the wealth of the common folk, you need to make sure they have someone besides you to unleash their frustrations on. It's one of the reasons it's important for airlines to have so many different levels of status and privilege among their customers.
00:05:59
Darwin Kastle
feels good to know that there are a group of people that have less privilege than you. Sure, you don't have much leg room, but at least you're not suffering as much as those losers back in basic economy.
00:06:10
Darwin Kastle
Just ignore the people skipping security and walking onto their private jets filled with caviar and champagne. The Gilded Age was known for massive wealth inequality and prodigious levels of corruption.
00:06:22
Darwin Kastle
Over 80% of federal income came from tariff revenue rather than from income tax. The modern form of income tax didn't begin until 1914. The late 1800s were full of collusion between big business and politicians.
00:06:38
Darwin Kastle
This led to powerful corporate monopolies, extreme wealth inequality, and voter fraud. In the late 1800s and early nineteen hundreds you didn't have to worry about all those woke commies like you did in the 1950s.
00:06:52
Darwin Kastle
Rich people didn't have to pay income tax because there wasn't any.
Contrasting Failed Eras with Progressive Leaders
00:06:56
Darwin Kastle
Not only did the government get income through tariffs, but those tariffs helped protect the big industries owned by many rich people.
00:07:03
Darwin Kastle
Who cares that the tariffs made life worse for everybody else? The only people the rich needed to take care of was their politicians. Don't do anything, buddy. We rich folk like things just the way they are.
00:07:15
Darwin Kastle
No progressive taxes, no meaningful regulation on big business, and no enforcement of rights for black folks. Governing is for dummies. Besides, the obvious cruelty and unfairness, what the people behind these policies don't want to talk about is that they are unsustainable.
00:07:33
Darwin Kastle
If the majority of people are too poor to buy stuff, where will the robber barons get more money from? Sure, America may have seemed great during the Gilded Age, but only for the select few.
00:07:46
Darwin Kastle
That's literally why it's called the Gilded Age, an upper crust of gold covering up the much, much poorer majority. It was a time of suffering for most of the working class, and especially Black people.
00:07:58
Darwin Kastle
But that's okay if you're part of the modern GOP. The reality is that the modern conservative movement was always about the well-being of the select few. Donald Trump is just worse at hiding it than his predecessors.
00:08:12
Darwin Kastle
Not surprisingly, historians look back at the time of Jim Crow and the Gilded Age as a failed era, much like the Great Depression, which came soon after. was a time of suffering for most average Americas and a time of moral failure for our leaders.
00:08:27
Darwin Kastle
The policies of precedents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower helped lead America in a better direction, and they are now considered by historians to be among the great presidents like Washington and Lincoln.
00:08:39
Darwin Kastle
So what happened? How did things swing so far back in the wrong direction after Eisenhower?
Reagan's Economic Policy Shifts
00:08:46
Darwin Kastle
Part three, the root of all evil. How did governing America go from serving all the people to serving just the wealthy?
00:08:55
Darwin Kastle
While the Republican Party had been shifting to the right for decades after President Eisenhower, it was the presidency of Ronald Reagan that finally completed the big swing of marrying the politics of benefiting the wealthy with using prejudice against minorities to gain electoral support.
00:09:12
Darwin Kastle
The wealthy themselves are an electoral minority. To gain the political power needed to give themselves more wealth and more power, they have to convince suckers, I mean voters, that the real villains were someone else.
00:09:24
Darwin Kastle
It's not our fault that your life is hard, while ours is great, but no worries. We're going to let you know just who to blame. President Ronald Reagan delivered.
00:09:35
Darwin Kastle
When he ran for president in 1976, he popularized the, quote, welfare queen narrative to turn voters against welfare reform. He used racial dog whistles to undermine food stamps, calling users, quote, strapping young bucks. He opposed social programs, including school desegregation. When running again in 1980, he appealed to white Southern voters by voicing his support for, quote, states' rights, echoing the rallying cry of the Confederacy.
00:10:07
Darwin Kastle
Reagan paired his attacks on the social safety net and minorities with a call for economic policies to benefit the wealthy. He's probably best known, at least by his detractors, for his philosophy of trickle-down economics.
00:10:22
Darwin Kastle
When he massively lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% 50% his first year in office, He said it would benefit low-wage workers, too, because giving more money to rich people would result in them hiring more working-class people, thus trickling down.
00:10:39
Darwin Kastle
He didn't just cut taxes on the rich. He cut spending on social programs for the poor and cut regulations on businesses, all the name of his new Reaganomics. One could argue Reagan even achieved his stated goals with these policies. Employment increased.
00:10:55
Darwin Kastle
The GNP grew and inflation lowered. But these arguably good things were accompanied by things his fans don't like to talk about. That may also have been his goals.
00:11:06
Darwin Kastle
While the wealth of the 1% sharply increased, it did not, in fact, trickle down. And economic pressure increased on the working class. The national debt tripled under Reagan, even though the GOP always decide lowering the deficit is suddenly the top priority when a Democrat becomes president.
00:11:25
Darwin Kastle
The increased employment and lowered inflation gave Reagan the cover to double down on his assistance to the wealthy in his second term, and he lowered the top tax rate from 50% to massive from the seventy percent at the start of his administration less talked about, but also incredibly influential to the expanding wealth gap that the GOP was trying to create was SEC Rule 10B-18.
00:11:55
Darwin Kastle
Before 1982, stock buybacks were considered illegal manipulation of the stock market. The Reagan administration passed a new rule making stock market buybacks legal.
00:12:08
Darwin Kastle
Before stock buybacks were made legal, a company with large profits was incentivized to use the extra money to hire more employees, increase compensation, increase product quality, expand their companies, and in general, do things that benefit everyone from an economic perspective.
00:12:26
Darwin Kastle
But that didn't suit the wealthiest Americans, who unlike the working class, own lots of stock. Why help make life better for everyone when you could just help rich people instead?
00:12:38
Darwin Kastle
Ownership of stock is often considered a defining characteristic of whether you have wealth or not. So why not create policies specifically to benefit stockholders? Instead of investing profits into expanding and improving their companies and rewarding the labor that helped gain the windfall, corporate leaders could now use the wealth for stock buybacks. This inflates a company's stock value, leading to greater wealth for shareholders and especially CEOs who typically own large amounts of their company's stock.
00:13:09
Darwin Kastle
Suddenly, executives saw their net worth soar and everyone else saw their wages stagnate. Reagan's disdain for the working man had already been made clear a year earlier when air traffic controllers went on strike and he fired 13,000 of them rather than considering improving their working conditions. The trend continued in 1983 with his Social Security reform.
00:13:34
Darwin Kastle
The simplest and most equitable way to keep Social Security funded would be to remove the cap on the income that gets taxed. while most people pay security taxes on 100% of their earnings.
00:13:47
Darwin Kastle
Not so for the wealthy. Notice the pattern yet? 1983, you only had to pay Social Security tax on earnings of $35,700 or less, about $120,000 today's dollars. Anything above the cap wasn't taxed. Frankly,
00:14:01
Darwin Kastle
If the government was concerned with equity, equality, or helping the people who actually need help, they could turn things upside down.
00:14:13
Darwin Kastle
The cap could instead be a floor. That way people just getting by wouldn't have to pay social security tax. Social security would be fully funded by the excess wealth of the rich.
00:14:23
Darwin Kastle
Rather than removing or reversing the cap, Reagan just continued to make life worse for working Americans. He raised the retirement age, reduced benefits to people with pensions, and started making people pay taxes on the benefits themselves. Surprise! Thanks a lot, Kipper.
00:14:42
Darwin Kastle
Part 4. Foe News.
Rise of Conservative Media and Its Influence
00:14:45
Darwin Kastle
Helping sell the myths of the GOP. The good news for wealthy political donors was that President Reagan's administration had made massive policy changes to increase their wealth and power.
00:14:57
Darwin Kastle
The problem was, these changes were being made at the expense of ordinary Americans, which made it more challenging to get enough votes so they could keep on pillaging. Blaming everything on minorities helped, but when you gave fair and equal exposure to both Republican policies and Democratic policies, it wasn't a great look for the GOP.
00:15:18
Darwin Kastle
Republicans needed to create a mythology to rally voters to their cause in a way that avoided attention on their rich-person-first policies. Reagan to the rescue, surprise.
00:15:29
Darwin Kastle
He started by appointing Reagan-friendly chairman to the FCC. Then in 1987, they voted to repeal the fairness doctrine. This doctrine required broadcasters to air balanced views on controversial issues.
00:15:43
Darwin Kastle
But of course, presenting political issues in a balanced light wasn't working so well for the new GOP. So the doctrine had to go. Congress moved to be a check on the president's power, and they enacted the Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987 to make the doctrine fully into law.
00:16:03
Darwin Kastle
Reagan, ever determined to act as a champion for the wealthy, vetoed the bill. The days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were over. With the doctrine removed, this gave way to broadcast programs designed to only show Republicans and their actions in a favorable light.
00:16:20
Darwin Kastle
It started with conservative radio programs like that of Rush Limbaugh and eventually an entire network in the form of Fox News, an entire TV network in the form of Fox News. You might be wondering why Democrats didn't do the same thing and create their own TV networks.
00:16:36
Darwin Kastle
Right. Well, basically three reasons. The first one is the truth already helps Democrats. The previously previously existing news programs weren't the problem. Democrats didn't need to create propaganda. They just need there to be no propaganda.
00:16:51
Darwin Kastle
But now the floodgates have been opened. Reason number two, if you're trying to be the good guys, it's tough to sell that the solution to a problem is let's do what the bad guys are doing.
00:17:03
Darwin Kastle
And reason number three, who was going to pay for it? It takes lots of money to create a TV network, the kind of wealth that comes from people who like politics to favor the wealthy.
00:17:15
Darwin Kastle
Yeah, that's a problem. While in some cases, conservative-friendly programs just focused on portraying Republican policies in a favorable light and Democratic ones unfavorably, people like Rush Limbaugh took things even further.
00:17:30
Darwin Kastle
Limbaugh used sexism and racism to create things for the American people to fight over. This turned the attention away from rich people constantly transferring wealth from the poor and the middle class to those that were already rich.
00:17:42
Darwin Kastle
He called feminists feminazis, and said they were just trying to get power for unattractive women. He called a female law student testifying before Congress a slut and a prostitute just for advocating for health insurance to cover contraceptives.
00:17:59
Darwin Kastle
He called a 13-year-old Hillary Clinton the White House dog. Oh, and don't forget the racism. Limbaugh mocked the Chinese president in a racist accent.
00:18:10
Darwin Kastle
He said NFL football games were the bloods and the grips without weapons. He said white people shouldn't be blamed for slavery. Limbaugh even had a recurring segment on his show where he mocked gay people who were dying from AIDS.
00:18:27
Darwin Kastle
So yeah, not exactly the type of fellow that should be honored. Did I mention that President Trump has awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom? Yeah.
Episode Conclusion
00:18:41
Darwin Kastle
Well, thanks for listening. The Big Swing is written and read for you by me, Darwin Castle. Be sure to subscribe for free to follow along in our next episode as I discuss the greatest myths that have helped the conservative movement get to the level of power that it has today.