The Republican Party is accused by some of being the party of inequalities of all kind, when in reality, the Party's genesis is owed to it's strident belief in the equality of all. The GOP has been framed as the party of environmental corruption, but alas, it was under Republican Presidents that the first national parks and the Environmental Protection Agency were established. Many assume that the Party is the unabashed guardian of big business, but here again, Republican chief executives moved first to limit industrial monopolies and corporate malfeasance.
What then, are the true core tenets of the GOP? They are justice, trust, and freedom. This is expressed by the GOP's insistence that people and their enterprises be given the freedom to flourish, so long as they are just in their operations. Further, the Party insists that every citizen should be trusted to make the core decisions of their lives.
The Republican party is an optimistic party, unashamed in it's pride in America, and respectful of the traditions and innate wisdom of the people that make up this nation.
Or at least it should be.
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3 comments:
Hey Kevin,
Warm welcome to the blogging community. I've linked you at my blog which is at pbae.blogspot.com.
Keep writing!
Thanks for stopping by Peter!
Kevin,
I think Deanna told you that I wrote a fairly long comment about this particular essay before, but it didn't go through. Now that I know what the hell I'm doing (because your lovely mother signed me up with a g-mail account), I will try to rewrite what I said before.
First of all, I completely agree with you about TR being a truly great Republican president. In fact, he was a truly great man overall, having overcome some huge obstacles to reach the pinnacle of American political life. He was fair and he was intelligent and he really looked out for the common man. A bit heavy-handed with the foreign policy, but hey, no one's perfect. (It might have done Roosevelt--and the country--a bit of good if some other country had grabbed TR's big stick and smacked us a few times; then we might not have been so willing to bully everyone else in the hemisphere.)
But that was 100 years ago, Kevin. Your Republican champion has been dead for many, many decades. My question is this: What Republican president since TR could be considered one of the greats? We've had 10 since then. I'm assuming we can both agree that Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Ford, and both Bushes cannot be considered great. That leaves Ike, Nixon, and Reagan.
I personally would argue that Eisenhower was a great president (and, like TR, a truly great man overall). About the only major flaw I see in Eisenhower's administration was his reluctance to do what he knew was right in Little Rock. But even there he prevailed; he overcame his innate strong aversion to the use of federal power over the states, and he ordered the National Guard to protect the people who needed protection rather than those who were threatening the people who needed protection. Even though he himself was largely a product of the American military, he warned the country about the potential danger of the military-industrial complex as he left office.
Perhaps you would include Reagan as a great president, and perhaps you would be right. I don't deny for a moment that he had a huge impact on history, and his dealings with the Soviet Union were astute and certainly very successful. I myself have a hard time assigning him the title of 'great' because I disagree with much that he did and because the guy had what seemed to be a pathological obsession with Nicaragua. (In that respect, he and TR weren't all that different.) The whole Iran-Contra fiasco clearly indicates that policy toward Nicaragua and the Sandinistas was based not so much on rational thought as on knee-jerk, radical anti-socialism/communism.
That leaves us with Nixon, a man about whom, I have gathered, we have very strong but different opinions. I think Nixon was the worst president of the 20th century. By that I don't mean he was the least effective; no one could argue that. But he was a moral midget, an ethical cripple. In your essay you write about how Republicans are "proud of being Americans." Well, to me, Nixon made it very difficult to be proud to say I am an American, just as Dumbya makes it very difficult today. Am I proud that I am an American? Absolutely. But I definitely am not proud of my current president, or Nixon. The important things that Tricky Dick did accomplish (including normalizing relations with China and helping to develop the EPA) were accomplished between long hours spent plotting (and then ordering to be carried out) major crimes against American citizens. It seems to me that any president who orders people to steal psychiatric files and to plant incriminating evidence in the homes of perfectly loyal Americans (whose only "crime" was opposing the president's policies) can hardly be considered great. Psychopathic and unbalanced, maybe, but definitely not great.
Thus, to my mind, we had exactly two great Republican presidents in the 20th century: TR and Ike. And this brings me to the title of your essay: "What the Republican Party was, and should forever be." If today's Republican Party was dominated by the likes of TR and Ike, I could envision myself as a proud member. I am all for the ideas of environmental protection, government protection of labor, and middle-of-the-road policies. Instead, today's party is dominated by people who I personally consider the near-antithesis of the Roosevelt/Eisenhower legacy, people like Gary Bauer of Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson. These are people who want to legislate morality, and that morality shall be THEIR morality and no other. People who want to force their own narrow, right-wing religious beliefs down the throats of everyone else. Instead of emphasizing the virtues of heterogeneity and pluralism, they want to enforce strict homogeneity that is largely based on biblical principles, and woe be unto those who disagree. Obviously not all of today's Republicans are like that, and I am so very happy that you are not like that, but I think you must admit that the scary (at least they're scary to me) and uncompromising Christian fundamentalists represent a bedrock of today's party, a group of people without whose active support electoral victory would be very difficult indeed. I cannot bring myself to support a party that is largely controlled by such people.
So I remain a Democrat, hoping against hope that the virtues and beliefs of TR and Ike will return to capture the Republican Party. Until that time, I cannot imagine myself voting for the glorious party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight David Eisenhower. I wish I could, but I cannot and will not until the party is once again dominated by moderates, not radicals.
Keep up the great writing, Kevin! Your essays obviously provoked my thoughts! And please don't take any of this diatribe personally; you certainly seem to represent the moderate Republican Party that I espouse and that I wish controlled the party today.
Keith
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