I've been around long enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans used to be able to work with each other. They did some bad stuff together, like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but they also managed to work across the aisle to produce the Civil Rights Act.
What happened to produce this level of utter hatred among Republicans for Democrats? After all, Democrats have been remarkably accommodating to Republicans whether they were in the White House or not, whether they were in the majority or not in the House or Senate.
So what's their beef?
Finally, my Internet hopping uncovered a website that explained it all. Unfortunately, the site (whatwentwrong1589.org) was wiped and even the cached copy mysteriously disappeared. Thanks be to the Gods of Cobol that I happened to make my own copy before it was lost forever. Here is the pertinent material from that site's "About Us" page:
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party at least pretended to represent the working class and the poor. It produced the WPA, the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security. Forty years later, it came up with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and the War on Poverty.
It was easy for us Republicans back then. We could win the support of Wall Street just by advocating some modifications of those pro-worker and pro-poor provisions. Taft-Hartley, which eviscerated the NLRA, was a big one that bought us years of support from the job creators of the world. And we could also retain the support of a lot of our beloved Galts just by playing the Washington Generals to the Democrat Party's Globetrotters. "Gee, Mr. Morgan Stanley, we tried to stop that nasty Glass-Steagall Act, but we just didn't have the votes."
We probably reached our zenith with the great Dick Nixon. He was the master triangulator. Sure, the Democrats had a huge majority among the voters and even the Congress on the issues, but Dick played them like a master, passing the EPA act and even toying with the idea of a "negative income tax" that would give money to the poor in a simple, straightforward way.
American politics back then were the envy of the world. We were happy. The American people were happy. Sure, we were bombing the hell out of brown people in Southeast Asia, but you can't make a really big American omelet without a few million broken eggs.
Then, everything went crazy. First, that southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter got elected President and brought slightly left-of-Thurmond attitudes to the fore in the Democrat Party. When our man Henry Hyde added his amendment to prevent poor women from getting access to funds for abortions, Carter's comment at a press conference was, "Life isn't fair." Fucker stole our line!
Then came Clinton who decided to follow Nixon as his model, except that he was able to charm the very people he was fucking over! NAFTA. Welfare "Reform." And all the great plans for intrusions on civil liberties. The guy was a better Republican, and with an "aw shucks" Democrat veneer, than any "R" in the 20th century.
So what the fuck are we supposed to do? When Clinton, with Goldman Sachs' Rubin at his side, is a better Republican than us, how the hell are we supposed to survive, much less continue to get our bennies as Wall Street's toadies? Carter may have shown the way, but the masher Clinton forced us to make a move.
I know it's disgraceful, but what else could we do to survive as a political party? I'll admit, we'd already crossed the line back in the days of Nixon and Kevin Phillips. We could have told racists like Thurmond to go fuck themselves. After all, we were the party of Lincoln. But the electoral math dictated that we go after those Wallace votes in '72, so we made our deals, and made McGovern look like a loser when he really was threat. That must be what softened us up to cowtow to the Fundies, the homophobes, the Birchers, the Randians, the gun nuts, the homeschoolers and the rest. Before that, we had been the party of money. Atheists were welcome. Gays too. All you had to be was a Capitalist or a wannabee. That fucking Clinton with his Republican policies changed all that.
Now there's Obama and those Congressional Democrats. All of them are somewhere to the right of Eisenhower on economic policies. What does that leave us? Those goddamn Kochs don't know the meaning of moderation. Blankfein thinks he should be above the law no matter what. Especially after Bush was such a fuck-up, when the Democrats are willing to do whatever these rich pricks want, what room does that leave us to be a political party? Those were our people. We knew how to say no to them once in a while because we thought that was necessary to get elected to office. Now the other party is working so hard to compete for their money that we're required to advocate completely nutty, more accurately corrupt, policies to get even their partial support.
I hate Sarah Palin. I'm embarrassed that she was a Republican nominee for VP. But the fact that the Democrat Party has abandoned its old working class constituency to compete for Wall Street's favor has completely unbalanced the old American entente re: class representation. Frankly, I wish some party would emerge to represent those workers and the poor again so that we could no longer have to deny evolution and global warming.
An Ashamed Republican