The Republican Party had its beginnings in the conflict over slavery that preceded the Civil War. The infamous Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 permitted slavery in those two new territories if people there voted for it. Anti-slavery meetings all over the Northern States roundly condemned the bill. On February 28, 1854, Alvan E. Bovay, a leading member of the Whig political party, held such a conclave in Ripon, Wisconsin, where a resolution surfaced that would bring a new party into existence if Congress passed the hated bill.
Bovay called a second meeting in Ripon on March 20th, after Kansas-Nebraska cleared the Senate. The delegates were livid.
On July 6, 1854, at a party gathering in Jackson, Michigan, final details were hammered out and the name "Republican" was formally adopted. At that time, they weren't particularly conservative...in fact, at the outset, they weren't much of ANYTHING except a staunch anti-slavery alternative.
Obviously, that didn't last...
It has been expedient for three decades of GOP image-manipulators--Chuck Colson, Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove--to portray political thought as two competing ideologies, liberalism vs. conservatism. Propaganda and mass marketing are best served by simplification: Us and them. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. "If you're not with us, you're against us." Subtlety, nuance and inference are lost in a message aimed at the lowest common denominator of, say, television viewers. (Whose taste is suspect to begin with if they're entertained by such drivel as 'Survivor.' But that's another diary...)
Nonetheless, there is power in the childish simplicity of strict, polar opposites...except that in this case it happens to be a steaming load of balderdash. Political thought, like all human thought on ANY given subject, has no clear delineations; everything is a matter of degrees. It can best be thought of as a spectrum, complex and inter-related. In a rainbow, for example, at what exact point does blue become green? Show me. The distinctions between conservatism and liberalism are somewhat similar and, no, they aren't always opposites...although they ARE always different. The concept may be simple, but this distinction is crucial to understanding the kabuki dance between Democrats and Republicans down through the decades as well as the evolving face of conservatism itself.
Historical note: There were no political parties back in 1776. Fact. Small parties were forming at state and local levels, but James Madison and George Washington, among others, repudiated them as heralds of a counter-productive "factionalism" and thought they ought to be severely curtailed. Or banned outright. In Washington's farewell address in 1796, he spoke of "the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally [which] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration." You go, George! (A tip of the halo to Ted Rall for putting this wrinkle on my radar.)
Many people, and I'd venture to say most people, aren't discerning, critical thinkers. The late Robert A. Heinlein, Dean of science-fiction writers, put it this way: "Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively and without self-delusion...are the only people who count." (Emphasis mine.) Now that's a trifle stout for my taste, but experience forces me to agree in principle. Casting the debate into a classic good guys/bad guys framework makes detailed policy explanations unnecessary for the simple minded majority. (Don't give the marks too much to think about; a choice of two is acceptable only if the choice is obvious.) Information formatted in this way bypasses the analytical functions of the cerebral cortex and goes straight to the amygdala, the reptile brain. "They're the enemy." "Everything they say is wrong." "They're out to get us." Actual thinking becomes superfluous, logic and reason fall by the wayside and knee-jerk, adversarial confrontation occurs reflexively. It's Faux News' stock-in-trade; it's insidious and effective.
It has to be.
Conservatives, you see, are peddling shoddy, second-rate merchandise: Crippled conservatism. They HAVE to be top-flight salesmen. And it is incumbent upon them to use every trick of spin and misdirection and obfuscation because their agenda is not new and improved; it's old and inferior. The fact that it's proven unworkable since, oh, about the time of the Renaissance hasn't stopped them from embracing it. Or wholesaling it. In short, they are trying to subvert represantative democracy--the ACTUAL opposite of their ideology--into something approaching feudal monarchy with all its trappings, including stringent class separation and minimal mobility. At the end of the day, they absolutely do not believe that "all men are created equal." That's all there is to it. We're talking well-worn, antiquated ideals here...which took a sound thrashing at the hands of the Founding Fathers. Wasn't social stratification an evil the colonists had tried to evade by LEAVING England??
Oh, but conservatives learned long ago that they couldn't state their beliefs and objectives so baldly, of course; people are loath to think of themselves as serfs or vassals...or slaves...so the devious rotters have taken to couching their REAL intentions in "user-friendly" terminology and pursuing them obliquely...but ruthlessly.
Tax cuts? Sure, that sounds swell...but tax cuts without spending cuts are nothing more than tax REDISTRIBUTIONS; expenditures don't change. On a personal level, what happens if you're fired and have to take a lower-paying job? Do your bills automatically go down? Well...do they?? This is the mumbo jumbo that Republicans would have you believe. In the case of our current, blighted administration, we've run up the most outrageous deficit IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD...and effectively increased the tax burden on succeeding generations because that money will be paid. And not only have they made zero effort to cut spending, they have drastically INCREASED it, putting us thoroughly in hock to...Red China!! Is THIS a good idea? (Even the rightwad think tanks are whining about it!) If these liars were REALLY serious about reducing government spending, they'd be assiduously tracking and eliminating bureaucratic waste or--perish the thought!--flabby pork-barrel projects like the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere. Don't hold your breath waiting for THIS to happen! The other part of the equation is that Rip-Off Republican tax cuts have, historically, NEVER favored the Middle and Lower classes; percentage-wise these groups have ALWAYS ended up on the short end of the stick. Now just sit back and think about that one for a second. Why should, say, Bill Gates's taxes be cut by 10% while YOURS are only cut by 2%?? Shouldn't it be the other way around??? Hasn't happened yet.
Understand this clearly: making wealthy elites even more wealthy automatically and inevitably makes poor people poorer. Got that? Stay after school and write it 100 times on the blackboard. It doesn't enlarge the money supply, it doesn't energize the economy and it certainly doesn't "trickle down." (See "The Nontaxpaying Affluent Grew by 15% in One Year," New York Times 7/1/05. Google title of article.)
Besides shifting taxes from the filthy rich to those of us less able to pay, deficits make our hard-earned money decrease in value: it buys less That's a deliberate double-whammy, a little lovetap from the reactionary right to Mr. & Mrs. America who are already having trouble making ends meet because their salaries haven't kept pace with inflation. My only question is this: What is it going to take to make the public cognizant of the fact that the Bush Crime Syndicate is actively working AGAINST their best interests?? However outraged someone might be over abortion or George Takei's lascivious sex life, is it REALLY more important than being able to "put food on your family???" We need to keep our eye on the ball here, folks.
End of digression.
This modern-day version of the GOP dearly loves to puff their chests out and expound at excruciating length upon their abolitionist origins...but they tend to keep quiet about the inconvenient truth that they actually wanted to PRESERVE slavery in the South where it had become a key fiscal component. True fact. Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig, was only moderately against slavery; he was concerned about its spread westward. The circumstances of Southern secession rather forced his hand on the sticky subject. Don't get me wrong: Lincoln was a GREAT man. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared freedom for slaves in the 11 states of the Confederacy then in rebellion. It turned the tide of the Civil War, allowing Blacks to join and serve in the Union armed forces. Lincoln was COOL!
The South possessed a primarily agrarian economy. They grew food, cotton, tobacco and raised livestock. The North did some farming, but their economy, thanks to the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, was rapidly moving toward mechanization...and therein lurked another type of slavery, an undeclared and virtually ignored COMMERCIAL slavery.
The advent of powered machinery made it possible for one man to do the work of a dozen or more, so plants and shops rapidly supplanted domestic/cottage industries. Those early mills, mines and factories were poorly-lit--no electric lights until the 1880's!--hot, noisy and grimy. Runaway corporate greed compelled men, women and even children to labor 12 or 14 hours a day, six days a week, under oppressive conditions for beggars' wages. This was the heyday of the company store, the wildcat strike and the beginnings of union organizing...often accompanied by violence. Four years before the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, the following appeared in The Awl, a shoemakers' newspaper in Lynn, Massachusetts:
"The division of society into the producing and the nonproducing classes and the fact of the unequal distribution of value between the two, introduces us at once to another distinction--that of capital and labor...labor now becomes a commodity...Antagonism and opposition is introduced in the community; capital and labor stand opposed."
The Civil War did nothing for THESE slaves and, afterwards, the infernal crippled conservatives and their corporate idolatry had found themselves a toehold, by golly! They rightly perceived that the class distinctions in which they so fervently believed were now indeed present here in the New World...not by birth or entitlement, but through the ineffably vulgar standard or mere money. Well, they'd take it any way they could get it. The Republican Party, heretofore an aggregation of bean-counters and button-sorters, fell headlong into the crippled conservative ideology and actively began to see themselves as the enablers of capitalists.
You see, English kings had originally granted charters to the British East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and even American colonies. These charters allowed them and their cronies to control property and commerce while reaping dividends for DOING NOTHING. (The royal charter of Maryland, to cite just one example, required--completely against common sense, mind you!--that all of the colony's exports were to be shipped to or through Great Britain.) So it was that the colonists weren't merely revolting against a tax on tea; laborers, small farmers, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and many others among the landed gentry actively feared corporations.
While the ragtag American army was routing the redcoats, their local leaders took action to rein in these chartered corporations. After the successful revolution, then, they were determined to keep investment and production decisions both local and democratic. They believed wholeheartedly that corporations were neither inevitable nor always even appropriate. Colonists argued that under the Constitution, no business was eligible for special treatment. They were convinced that once corporations amassed wealth, they would use their status to control jobs, buy off the press and dominate elections and the courts. It's hard to believe that our ancestors could have been so prescient even before the turn of the 19th Century!
Early corporate charters were issued on the public's behalf and, for nearly 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, citizen vigilance and activism forced state legislators to keep corporations on a short leash; few charters were granted and, when they were, the decision rested with the prospective communities. Incorported businesses were legally prohibited from actions that locals and legislators deemed hurtful. Charters were limited and citizen authority clauses dictated the rules for issuing stock, shareholder voting, transparency of records and paying of dividends. Interlocking directorates were altogether outlawed. Charters were often entirely revoked at the whim of state and municipal government; t'was a MUCH different world back then.
Following the Civil War, however, the prevailing mood changed. "Let the good times roll" became the order of the day and Republican politicians and judges made themselves readily available to the fiscal persuasions of the financiers as well as the corporate empires that were making fabulously rich men of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and the like.
The final turning point arrived with a ruling made by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court--but during the Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland--in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In a decision unparallelled in its jugheadedness, the High Court declared that a private corporation--a consummate legal fiction!--was, in fact, a "natural person" under the US Constitution. (Sixty years later, Justice William O. Douglas declared there had been "no history, logic or reason given to support that view." But WE know what the reason was, don't we?) This judicial double-think meant simply that the "criminal prosecution of persons" under the 14th Amendment could not be undertaken without due process and huge corporations, flush with cash, were allowed to compete on so-called equal terms with neighborhood 'Mom & Pop' stores and even individuals! The outcome would have been predictable to a blind man.
"Within just a few decades, appointed [Can you say "activist?"] judges had redefined the "common good" to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit--no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed." (Copyright 1993, Richard L. Grossman and Frank T. Adams)
A very special thanks must go to the Conceptual Guerilla for his inspirational "blitzkreig rhetoric" and his penetrating, clear vision. We're just getting to the good part now, gang, so stay tuned for a comprehensive deconstruction of the right's intellectual dishonesty, their warped worldview and their toxic agenda. Angel Of Mercy over and out.