The GOP: Past, Present, and Future

The Republicans really screwed the pooch by allowing the Neo-Cons to take over their party. At this point in time, the mainstream media is promoting the meme that the Republican Party is dead, or dying. That’s a huge load of crap. As always happens in the history of politics, the pendulum swings to the left and the right in equal measure, each in its own time.

Many of the old guardians of America’s wealth, morality, and power, as many Republicans like to think of themselves, are deep in despair. These super-patriotic church-goers, the tight-fisted pinch-pennies who believe they are the strict parent-figures of our ignorant masses, are so ashamed of their party now, they are loathe to confess to being members of the Party of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Who can blame them?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any special love for the GOP. They rallied behind the Neo-Conservatives and allowed them to take over the party. I guess it’s kind of like how the Democratic Party has now been taken over by the “Progressives.” In both of these take-overs, the passive centrists of each party blindly followed as groups of radical usurpers took over.

But I do kind of feel sorry for traditional Republicans. I empathize with their struggle against the “new conservatives” as they try to redefine themselves and get back to their conservative roots. In a sense, the Republican Party was taken over by former Democrats. Ironically, one of their greatest heros was a former Democrat, turned conservative Republican: Ronald Reagan.

We generally associate the Neo-Con philosophy with the concepts of a strong US military dedicated to spreading democracy to the oppressed countries of the world. Deposing despots is their way of characterizing it. In other words, meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations to promote US interests abroad.

The neoconservatives are sometimes thought of as ultra-conservative, which is definitely not true, but they have that stigma because of their zealotry. Like a newly-quit ex-smoker or a newly-saved “born again” Christian, they exude more enthusiasm for their new religion than those who were raised in it.

We now tend to associate conservative Republicans with being pro-war (might makes right), pro-religion (Judeo-Christian only), and pro-business. By contrast, they are also seen to be anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-taxes, and anti-homosexual. Conservatism wants to preserve the old traditions. By some standards, they think the world has been going downhill since The Beatles came along.

To better understand the evolution of the Republicans, let’s go back to the beginning and work our way forward to the future.

Early Republicans

Thomas Jefferson, third president, founded the Democratic-Republican party, along with James Madison and like-minded cohorts. They arose in opposition to the Federalist Party, which was founded a year earlier by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s sycophant. Washington himself belonged to no party, but favored the policies of Hamilton. John Adams was the only president elected as a Federalist.

From Wikipedia:

Jeffersonian purists, or “Old Republican” wing of the party, led by Jefferson, John Randolph of Roanoke, William H. Crawford and Nathaniel Macon, favored low tariffs, states’ rights, strict construction of the Constitution and reduced spending. It opposed a standing army. The “National Republicans,” led by Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun, eventually favored higher tariffs, a stronger national defense, and “internal improvements” (public works projects). After the Federalist Party broke up in 1815, many former members joined the D-R’s nationalist faction.

The party’s elected presidents were Thomas Jefferson (1800 and 1804), James Madison (1808 and 1812), and James Monroe (1816 and 1820). The party dominated Congress and most state governments; it was weakest in New England. William H. Crawford was the party’s last presidential nominee in 1824. At this time, the party broke up into several factions. One faction, led by Andrew Jackson, would become the modern Democratic Party. Another faction, led by Adams and Clay, was known as the National Republicans. This group evolved into the Whig Party.

So the Whigs were the primary opposition to the Democratic Party until the creation of the Republican Party, which basically coincided with the break-up of the Whigs. They were in many ways the forerunners of the Republican Party, although the political positions these parties took have evolved and changed over the years.

Another excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from 1833 to 1856, the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the executive branch and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism. This name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence, and because “Whig” was then a widely recognized label of choice for people who saw themselves as opposing autocratic rule. The Whig Party counted among its members such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. In addition to Harrison, the Whig Party also counted four war heroes among its ranks, including Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig leader in frontier Illinois.

In its over two decades of existence, the Whig Party saw two of its candidates, Harrison and Taylor, elected president. Both, however, died in office. John Tyler became president after Harrison’s death, but was expelled from the party. Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor’s death, was the last Whig to hold the nation’s highest office.

The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction successfully prevented the nomination of its own incumbent President Fillmore in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott, who was soundly defeated. Its leaders quit politics (as Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The voter base defected to the Republican Party, various coalition parties in some states, and to the Democratic Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the party had lost its ability to maintain a national coalition of effective state parties and endorsed Millard Fillmore, now of the American Party, at its last national convention.

Abraham Lincoln was, famously, the first president elected as a Republican. However, the party was never a solid coalition, with internal factions quarreling over economic issues, which of course included post-slavery Reconstruction issues. The early Republicans did have a good run of presidents, including Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and the less-luminary presidents William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover (who presided over the beginning of Great Depression, starting in 1929).

Post-Depression Republicans

The Depression set the stage for Franklin Roosevelt, succeeded by Harry Truman, for a toal of 16 years of Democratic presidents. Dwight Eisenhower, the 5-star general and Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, was actively courted by both the Democrats and the Republicans to run for president in 1948, but he declined. In 1952, he was drafted by the Republican party to run against Democratic Senator Robert Taft, whose platform was non-intervention in Korea and elsewhere.

Eisenhower was a decent president. He was conservative and wise, but never the smooth politician. He popularized martinis and golf. The earliest model of modern Republicanism, post-Depression, he was responsible for the Interstate Highway System of the US. He continued Roosevelt’s New Deal policies for the most part, especially Social Security, which he expanded. He presided over the Cold War with the USSR, proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine that the US would counter Soviet aggression anywhere in the world. Eisenhower advanced the Civil Rights acts of 1957 and 1960, signing each into law, making them the first real legislation to improve Civil Rights since the Reconstruction.

The main thing I remember about Eisenhower was his farewell address in 1961, cited here again from Wikipedia:

On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower gave his final televised Address to the Nation from the Oval Office. In his farewell speech to the nation, Eisenhower raised the issue of the Cold War and role of the U.S. armed forces. He described the Cold War saying: “We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method…” and warned about what he saw as unjustified government spending proposals and continued with a warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

After Eisenhower was succeeded by Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the next Republican president was Richard Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s Vice President, but was no favorite of Ike or the American public to succeed Eisenhower in 1960. Nixon rebounded in 1968 after Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Nixon promised stability in the restive times of the war in Viet Nam, the counter-culture, and race riots. He believed he spoke for the “Silent Majority” of conservative Americans.

Another major turning point in the modern history of the Republican Party was the migration of the Conservative Southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, to the Republican Party starting in 1964 and peaking in 1972. When LBJ championed the cause of Civil Rights, he rankled many of these southern Good Ole Boys to the point they switched parties.

The so-called “Southern Strategy” of the GOP (Good Ole Politicos) began in earnest during the 1964 election between LBJ and Barry Goldwater (who was defeated in a landslide). The 1968 election, sans Johnson, saw George Wallace, governor of Alabama, drawing most of the southern states, mostly on the basis of white southern resentment of Civil Rights legislation being forced upon them. Nixon seized on the strategy of wooing the Dixiecrats in the 1972 election, winning re-election easily over George McGovern. This collision of increasing Democratic liberalism and Republicans winning converts among white southern Democrats changed the political landscape for Republicans by bolstering their ranks with these disaffected southern Democrats.

The Republicans welcomed them with open arms because it added to their political strength. But it also helped to brand the GOP as the party of opposition to civil rights, even though there were few issues in the public eye that would make this blatantly obvious.

Nixon was rather liberal, as Republican’s go, but he was kind of nuts; certainly paranoid and a bit sociopathic. His greatest achievement was opening relations with Communist China. He eventually found a way to end the war in Viet Nam, after first escalating it. He  supported the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure equal treatment under the law for women, a law that was first championed by the Republicans in 1944, but opposed by Democrats of that time because of the resistance of Organized Labor. The Democrats didn’t get on board with the ERA until 1972, during Nixon’s re-election campaign. All in all, Nixon wasn’t a terrible president, and as a standard-bearer for the Republican Party, he was not very conservative, and was supportive of advancing the rights of all citizens. In today’s world, he’d be a Centrist Democrat with his policies.

Of course, Nixon’s paranoia was his undoing, causing him to become so fearful of his “enemies” that he became obsessive and eventually criminal in his efforts to thwart those on his “Enemies List.” His “alleged” illegal actions included (infamously) authorizing the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters housed in the Watergate Office Complex. This led to impeachment hearings and criminal investigations. Nixon eventually resigned the office of the President, the only president to do so, to avoid being impeached.

Nixon was succeeded by Gerald Ford, the only POTUS never elected President. Having succeeded Nixon’s disgraced Vice President, Spiro Agnew, with the approval of Congress, Ford was a place-keeper president. He was only in office for 2 years. Ford pardoned Nixon, and to balance that act, he declared an amnesty for Viet Nam era draft dodgers. Other than that, most of Ford’s presidency was spent trying to heal the nation after the Watergate Scandal, and economic issues.

Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Ford’s only run for election as POTUS, and Carter inherited a terrible economy, which he managed to make more terrible. He was a softy as a Commander in Chief, and was slow to use US military might in general. The Iranian Revolution occurred in 1979 on Carter’s watch. The Shah of Iran fled his own country under duress, with strikes and demostrations turning into street war against the Shah’s pro-West forces. The Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to a hero’s welcome and was named Supreme Leader. Carter was powerless to intervene. During the revolution, 52 Americans were kidnapped and held hostage by Iranian Islamists, who held them in captivity for over a year, thus cementing the career of Ted Koppel and the election of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was a trip. Originally a Democrat (until 1962) and a B-movie actor from 1937 to 1964, he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, then ran for governor of California, winning the office in 1966. He was an early admirer of FDR’s New Deal policies, but drifted toward conservatism because of his belief in small government and low taxes. His adamant opposition to Communism led him to outspend the Soviets in an arms race they couldn’t keep up with. This led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. His military spending led to huge budget deficits, which were continued under his Vice President and successor, George H.W. Bush, father of Dubya.

The Rise of the Neo-Conservatives

According to Wikipedia: The term neoconservative, first coined at least as early as 1921, was used at one time as a criticism against liberals who had “moved to the right.”

The “new conservatives” had their roots in liberal traditions of the mid 20th century, but were alienated by the New Left’s extreme liberalism, and the “counter culture” of the 60s and 70s. As the Democratic Party became more closely associated with a “nanny state” and opposed to military operations, the former liberals, now new conservatives, began to throw their support to Republicans, beginning with Richard Nixon.

Neoconservatives don’t really have a problem with the social reforms of the Democrats; they are not against “welfare state” programs in general.  Where they differ from regular conservatives and Democrats is their world view, largely as outlined by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in their Statement of Principles:

• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; [and]
• we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

In January 2009, at the close of President George W. Bush’s second term in office, Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, proposed the following as the “main characteristics of neoconservatism”:

• “a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms
• low tolerance for diplomacy
• readiness to use military force
• emphasis on US unilateral action
• disdain for multilateral organizations
• focus on the Middle East”.

Although some political analysts consider Reagan the first Neo-Con president, his brand of conservatism is more old school, Barry Goldwater conservatism. He was not a Neo-Con in the sense we now know the term. The Reagan Administration became a breeding ground, however, for the true Neo-Cons of the first and second Bush Administrations. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were instrumental in turning the Reagan White House into a whelping box for the Neo-Cons, although it’s difficult to see much evidence of their influence prior to the 9/11 attacks.

I seriously doubt that the Republicans can permanently shake off the Neo-Con faction within their ranks. GW Bush defined himself, and Neo-Conservatism by extension, with the catch-phrase “compassionate Conservatism.” This sounded appealing to many people. Centrist voters counted on the conservatives to hold the line on the budget deficits, except for military spending, but disliked the conservative view of opposing civil rights and the general welfare of the people. By Bush’s definition, there would be conservative principles guiding his administration, but not at the expense of programs that help people. Sounded good in theory. Very centrist, in fact. Had the 9/11 attacks not occurred, what would the Bush years have been like? I’d bet he’d still have found an excuse to topple Hussein.

The Future of the GOP

As an independent centrist, I don’t have any favorites on the Republican side, with the exception of John McCain. I kind of liked Bob Dole, especially after he retired. His wife, Elizabeth Dole, is charming and capable, so I like her. There are times I think Newt Gingrich makes a lot of sense, but other times I am repulsed by him. There were no front-runners in the last GOP field of presidential candidates that appealed to me, except McCain.

Regardless of who will be the leaders of the GOP in the near future, I am totally confident that they will remain as the only alternative to the Democratic Party, if for no other reason than that they have so much money behind them. The pendulum of our 2-party system swings one way, then the other.

For example: when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, after 12 years of Republican presidents, he was immediately confronted with Republican opposition to his policies. This led to the rise of Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America in the mid-term elections of 1994, when Republican gains in the House of Representatives made way for him to become Speaker of the House. Prior to that, the Democrats had controlled the House for 40 years.

As for future GOP presidential aspirants, there are Republicans in Congress, Republican governors, and I’m sure there are still some Republican B-movie actors with potential. Now that Obama has broken with the “tradition” of presidents being natural born citizens, as some believe, Arnold Schwarzenegger may get his bite at the apple.

There are female Republican leaders too, as many now know thanks to Sarah Palin. Somewhere in the US right now, Republican strategists are debating the merits of these various GOP politicians, and they will eventually select their next candidate. I wouldn’t look for reruns like Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani, nor Sarah Palin for that matter. It will be a new rising star, probably someone who will flex their muscles during the mid-term elections, vying for the top spot. Most likely it will be another governor, and possibly someone we’ve barely noticed.

Will the Republicans try to return to their former strengths to counter the “Progressive” Obama administration? Or will they aim for the center to draw converts? It’s a little hard to imagine them sticking with their old stand-by traditions of evangelicals and millionaires. I suspect the economy will be their primary weapon of choice, despite the runaway deficits incurred during the Bush/Cheney years while Republicans ruled both house of Congress. I think after Obama and the “new” Democrats get through with this economy, it will be fairly easy for the Republicans to make a case for fiscal restraint and responsibility.

What do you think the Republicans will offer as their next platform?

And who will carry the torch for Greedy Oppressive Party?