My father-in-law is an occasional Kossack visitor but not a registered user, but when he sent me this, his "Republican jeremiad," I thought it would be of interest to many in this forum. He has enthusiastically agreed to allow me to post it for him. Below the fold...his words, not mine.
I was raised by Republicans. I grew up in Buffalo, Wyoming, a small town in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in a big, wide-open state with long horizons, where tradition has it that antelope still outnumber people. My dad held public office, serving as the county treasurer, from 1950 to 1970—elected to five successive terms as a Republican. I was 21 when the 1964 election arrived, and, of course, I registered as a Republican.
In school and out, we learned about the great iconic figures of American history who were Republicans and who had helped make our country become the great bulwark of freedom that it was. Abraham Lincoln, the archetypal Republican, had freed the slaves and extended the vision of the Founding Fathers announced in the Declaration of Independence—that all humanity were created equal. Theodore Roosevelt, the great Republican president of a century ago, was responsible for saving the great natural wonders of our continent, including our own Bighorn National Forest, which was like a big, communal back yard where we played, explored, fished, hunted, camped, and hiked. We knew that Teddy Roosevelt spoke softly and carried a big stick, which he used to bust the trusts, the voracious corporate interests who, in their greed, preyed upon the average citizen, stealing from the poor to aggrandize the rich. We wore "I like Ike" buttons celebrating the great general who, as president, brought the Korean conflict to an uneasy truce, who started one of the greatest public works programs of all time in the Interstate Highway System, and who, in his farewell address, warned about the increasing dangers of what he called the military-industrial complex. We took note when Earl Warren, former Republican governor of California and Eisenhower’s appointee as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, led that court in a unanimous decision that signaled the renewal of a national commitment to Lincoln’s noble vision for our nation.
To be sure, we understood that Teddy’s cousin Franklin had also been a great president, but we imbibed from our parents the sense that Herbert Hoover had gotten a raw deal in the official stories of the Great Depression. And reading David Kennedy’s massive volume Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (published in 1999 by Oxford University Press) a couple of years ago, I discovered that our youthful sense about Hoover had not been entirely mistaken. Kennedy documents that, while some of Hoover’s initiatives in response to the financial collapse were relatively timid compared to Roosevelt’s, continuing to rely on the voluntary cooperation of corporate leaders in preference to leadership by the Federal government, other of his proposed initiatives were significantly more aggressive than some of Roosevelt’s—but were stalled by a coalition of short-sighted curmudgeons, both Democrat and Republican, in the Congress. But Kennedy’s book raises in my mind this interesting question: What if, by some twist of fate, Hoover had won the 1932 election and had gone on to initiate, as he surely would have done, a Republican body of programs for the relief and healing of the nation’s financial catastrophe? What if the government takeover of financial institutions in the 1930’s like the government takeover of financial institutions in our present crisis, had taken place during a Republican administration? What would American politics look like today, and what would American political discourse sound like today if the Republicans had been responsible for The New Deal?
When I was a kid, "conservative" and "liberal" were not mutually exclusive terms describing polar opposites. The words still occupied their proper dictionary definitions. A liberal position often was a conservative position. Our own governor, Milward Simpson, opposed capital punishment on the humanitarian—and conservative—grounds that the government had no business inserting itself into anybody’s life, even a murderer’s, in this radical and lethal way. And that rejection of the ultimate vindictive and brutal act by the state in all our names against a single individual embodies also a spirit of liberality, of magnanimity. Hence, this governmental restraint was a liberal position as well as a conservative position.
We used to read with horror the news reports about torture and brainwashing of our soldiers captured in the Korean conflict, and we saw these same atrocities reproduced in fictional settings such as Orwell’s 1984, which made the further astonishing claim that our own government was capable of this kind of behavior, intruding into its citizens private lives, perverting public discourse with a systematic pollution of toxic euphemism that blurred, distorted, or even reversed the meanings of normal words. We took comfort in knowing that as the world moved forward into our own adult lives we would see a global progress toward the ideals of our own founding fathers as they were codified in international documents like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the fictional nightmare of 1984 was, after all, only fiction.
But the language has shifted. "Liberal," a word that all these Republicans surely would have embraced, has been transformed in Orwellian fashion into a term of vituperative abuse in the mouths of right-wing evangelical preachers and radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh. "Conservative" has been transformed in the same way. It now describes an aggressive governmental intrusion into people’s most intimate private lives, seeking to criminalize the doctor-patient relationship when the patient and her doctor are confronted with a crisis pregnancy or other reproductive issue. It now describes—oh, how Orwell would resonate with this one—governmental eavesdropping and wiretapping, unrestrained and without legal warrant, and even the kind of torture that we had assumed was unthinkable in a republic such as ours. And it now describes an utterly undisciplined fiscal policy of spending without restraint while redistributing wealth and power from the lower and middle socioeconomic strata to the wealthiest citizens by way of a tax structure and regulatory system engineered to undo exactly what Teddy Roosevelt did.
There are signal moments in the devolution of the Republican Party in the past four decades. The first I remember is Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 national convention: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and I remember watching two of my heroes, New York Senators Kenneth Keating and Jacob Javits, walk out of the convention hall at that point. I remember 1970, when the Nixon-Agnew White House punished Republican Senator Charles Goodell of New York (who held what had been Keating’s seat), actively campaigning against their fellow Republican and contributing to his defeat by James Buckley, who was running on the Conservative Party ticket, because Goodell had had the temerity to challenge the Nixonian incursion into Cambodia.
More recently, I remember reading the transcript of a conversation between Alan Simpson and George McGovern. Simpson, a son of Milward Simpson, had followed his father to the U.S. Senate, where he served with distinction, including the co-authorizing and sponsoring of the landmark Simpson-Mazzoli bill, which became the 1986 Immigration and Reform Act. He became the Senate Majority Whip at the beginning of his second term in 1985, then the Minority Whip 1987 after the 1986 elections shifted the majority to the Democratic Party. In the course of this conversation with McGovern, Simpson observed that ten years after being elected Whip, he had lost the post in a challenge by Trent Lott in 1995 because, in holding to his conservative principle that the government should not intrude upon the integrity, privacy, and sanctity of a woman’s reproductive decisions made in consultation with her physician, he had lost his standing as a "conservative" and had become identified as pro-abortion.
Al Simpson’s demise in the Senate, his fall from grace and power, is yet another signal event, another milestone in this rise of intolerance and xenophobia within the Republican party—including what has euphemistically been called "hardball politics," the ruthless enforcement of party "discipline." I happened to be in Washington at the time of the vote on the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. As Whip of the nominating party, Simpson was carrying that project, lobbying fellow Senators for support, testifying on behalf of the nomination, coordinating others’ speaking on behalf of the nomination, etc. By the time I was in town, it was apparent that the nomination was going to fail, and Simpson’s office staff offered tickets to the gallery seats that were reserved for Judge Bork and his family to several of us who were visiting from Wyoming. So I was a witness to that historic vote, watching from the gallery as the Senate chamber filled and 100 Senators moved forward to the front of the chamber, each indicating their vote as it was tallied on the tally sheet. Afterward, in Simpson’s office, his secretary gave me a Xerox copy of the tally sheet for a souvenir.
I found that tally sheet recently. Looking over it, I was surprised to see the number of Republicans who had opposed their own president’s Supreme Court nominee, including still-serving Senators Arlen Specter and John Warner. And I wondered how many would have been able to exercise that kind of independent vote of conscience over these past eight years of the Bush administration.
I have another souvenir from that visit to Washington, a picture taken in Simpson’s office by one of his staff people, the kind of picture that politicians often give their constituents. Simpson and I are standing together in front of his desk. At the time, I was still almost 6-4. And the Senator towers over me in that picture.
That image seems emblematic of what we have lost. In 2001, Alan Simpson became honorary chair of the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay/straight alliance within the GOP. Today, that organization no longer exists. And this year’s GOP national platform contains a shocking dose of xenophobic, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, intolerant nonsense. My Congresswoman calls for a McCarthyite program of investigating all members of Congress to see if they meet the proper standard of "patriotism," reporting that she has concerns about Barack Obama’s patriotism, wondering if he might be anti-American. She then withdraws the charge when flooded with outraged reaction and, in the process of withdrawing the charge, repeats it yet again. At the same time, Congressman Jim Ramstad, her fellow Minnesota Republican, known for his pragmatism and his commitment to working across party lines on issues of social welfare, has chosen not to run for re-election. Even John McCain, a great American hero, has been whittled down by the small, defensive, mean-spiritedness that has come to pervade the Grand Old Party. The elephant seems to have been transmogrified into a legion of Lilliputian ankle biters, leaving one to wonder: where have all those Republicans gone?
I hope you enjoyed the read. My father-in-law is an amazing man. He reminds me of Sen. Joe Biden and Dkos' own Teacherken. My father-in-law has a great story about Joe Biden and I am encouraging him to join this community to share it with you!