Republicans - Please Take Back Your Party
Today's so-called Republicans have established a mind-numbing record at polluting the environment; bloating government;
appointing crony partisans; pushing the nation into debt to fund tax cuts for the rich; legislatively catering to the
world's largest corporations; opposing women's rights; kneecapping states, local communities, and schools; eviscerating
constitutional protections of liberty at home; and devastating our nation's reputation abroad.
They try to re-write history - the biography of Thomas Jefferson on the www.whitehouse.gov website has been re-written
to turn him into a man who had "assumed leadership of the Republicans," while the reality was that Jefferson's party was
the Democratic-Republicans and still exists today, called the Democratic Party. (The Republican Party is much more
recent, having come into national existence in 1856.)
Corporate shills like former Enron lobbyist and current GOP chairman Ed Gillespie would have us think the Republican
party was born in service to corporations. But Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was also the first
president to actively use the power of government in support of striking workers.
In Lincoln's era, the idea of strikes was so novel the word "strike" was put in quotation marks in newspapers, but
Lincoln was often on their side. "Labor," Lincoln wrote, "is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the
fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration."
Republicans would do well to revisit the Republican Party's campaign platform of 1872, before the era of corporate
personhood, as it may hold the seeds of their redemption.
The Republicans of 1872 didn't think that anybody should be appointed to high office just because he was a party hack
or the son of the Secretary of State. Instead, they wrote in their platform, "Any system of civil service under which
the subordinate positions of the government are considered rewards for mere party zeal is fatally demoralizing; and we,
therefore, favor a reform of the system, by laws which shall abolish the evils of patronage, and make honesty,
efficiency, and fidelity the essential qualifications for public positions."
They didn't think corporations - particularly big ones - should get the kinds of freebies that corporations today
regularly demand for moving into a community. Instead, resources owned by We, The People should be held in trust for, or
given to, human beings, as they wrote in their platform: "We are opposed to further grants of public land to
corporations and monopolies, and demand that the national domain be set apart for free homes for the people."
The Republicans of 1872 felt that the national debt (from the Civil War) should be paid off as quickly as possible, and
a budget must not only be balanced but show a surplus while at the same time paying pensions to retired persons. They
were also protectionists, in favor of import duties and tariffs to protect working peoples' salaries and keep
manufacturing jobs from moving offshore. They proclaimed in their platform:
"The [nation's] annual revenue, after paying current expenditures, pensions, and the interest on the public debt,
should furnish a moderate balance for the reduction of the principal [of the national debt]; and that revenue should be
raised by duties upon importations, the details of which [duties] should be so adjusted as to aid in securing
remunerative wages to labor, and promote the industries, prosperity, and growth of the whole country."
The Republicans of 1872, having just freed the slaves (in part, at least), also spoke to that era's women's struggle
for equal rights. Their platform explicitly said:
"The Republican party is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause
of freedom. Their admission to wider fields of usefulness is viewed with satisfaction; and the honest demand of any
class of citizens for additional rights should be treated with respectful consideration."
The Republicans of 1872 had repealed most of Lincoln's wartime abrogations of civil rights, and opposed any other
Patriot Act-like interferences with civil liberties. They were rediscovering the Bill of Rights, and said so in party
platform plank sixteen:
"The Republican party proposes to respect the rights reserved by the people to themselves as carefully as the powers
delegated by them to the States and the Federal government. It disapproves of the resort to unconstitutional laws for
the purpose of removing evils, by interference with rights not surrendered by the people to either the State or National
government."
The party platform said that Republicans would embrace only "modest patriotism" and "incorruptible integrity" in their
leaders, because the nation's "honor" was, in that day, "kept in the high respect throughout the world."
The party noted that since it had first achieved national power with Lincoln's election, "During eleven years of
supremacy it has accepted, with grand courage, the solemn duties of the time." Republicans had "emancipated four
millions of slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established universal suffrage. Exhibiting unparalleled
magnanimity, it [the Republican Party] criminally punished no man for political offenses," and tax "revenues have been
carefully collected and honestly applied."
"This glorious record of the past is the party's best pledge for the future," the Republicans of 1872 wrote, blissfully
unaware of how corrupt their party would become.
They added, perhaps presciently. "We believe the people will not entrust the government to any party or combination of
men composed chiefly of those who have resisted every step of such beneficent progress."
In the years since then, the Republican Party has been seized by Ayn Rand utopians, Pat Roberson fundamentalists, and
the largest and dirtiest of America's corporate elite. They've trashed the values of Lincoln and Eisenhower, rejected
Jesus' words in Matthew 25, and turned our commons into a dumping ground while using our nation's treasury as a honey
pot.
At the same time, there's a growing concern that George W. Bush's projected quarter-billion-dollar campaign war chest,
and demonstrated willingness to use Big Lie techniques and October Surprise wars, will be enough to induce national
amnesia in 2004, destroy the last vestiges of a civil society, and permanently turn our nation into the land of the
observed and the home of the worried-about-the-terror-alert.
And, so, those of us "on the left" ask our Republican friends: Please take your party back from these fanatics, before
it's too late for America to ever again be the land of the free and the home of the brave.
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© copyright 2003 Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann (thom at http://thomhartmann.com) is the award-winning, best-selling author of over a dozen books, and the host of a syndicated daily talk show that
runs noon-3 ET in cities from coast to coast. www.thomhartmann.com
This article was published on Friday, October 24, 2003 by CommonDreams.org