What are the GOP's roots?

[Ikari Gendo]

After their thumping in the latest election, the Republicans are talking about going back to their roots. Lets look at those roots and see where the GOP wants to go.

Lower the unreasonably high taxes set by Franklin Roosevelt Bill Clinton.

Destroy the entitlement programs of the New Deal Great Society.

Defeat the Bolsheviks Islamofascists.

Win the war in Vietnam Iraq.

Stop activist judges from from making decisions like Brown v. Board Roe v. Wade.

End the immorality and licentiousness of the Jazz Age 1960's.


Republicans frequently cite JFK about tax cuts increasing federal revenues, and Kennedy was correct. Roosevelt had tried to get a 100% rate on income over $250,000. Congress nixed that, but set the top marginal rate at 90%. This wasn't significantly challenged under the Eisenhower administration, but Kennedy saw that putting some of that money back in at the top would grow industry. The current Republican party sees any taxes on the wealthy as too high, but most Americans see the difference.

FDR spent that money on programs like CCC, WPA, TVA, and an alphabet soup of other programs to hire people to build America. While these did not pull us out of the depression, they kept America going until the country could recover. These programs worked because they were designed to give work to the rural poor, and they were roundly denounced as socialism. The one aspect of this that has survived is Social Security. Johnson's plan was much less successful because urban poverty is different than rural poverty and the same fixes don't work. Further, the New Deal was about flexible solutions for a short-term problem. The Great Society confronted long-term problems, but became ossified, and was largely disassembled under Reagan, with Clinton finishing the job. The GOP has given up on trying to eliminate Social Security, but is still trying to privatize it, which would cripple the program.

Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the Republican Party, was a cold warrior. He wanted to defeat communism and took the credit when it finally collapsed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, no one on either side of the Iron Curtain saw it coming. I remember the reports coming out of the Pentagon that this was a maskirova to get us to let our guard down. Had we not been blinded by our preconceptions about the unlimited ability of authoritarianism to perpetuate itself, we would have seen how shaky the sand under the USSR was.
Now the bogeyman is Islamofascism. This is not an existential threat to America. Despite Cold War rhetoric, terrorism is a threat better handled by police and intelligence agencies than by military action.

Related to that is the idea that America lost the Vietnam War because our military was betrayed by civilians back home, and that if we pull out of Iraq now, it is analogous to Vietnamizing the war. We left the ARVN force under trained, led by corrupt officers, and facing an enemy backed by China and the Soviet Union. While Iraq is almost equally screwed up, there is no overarching enemy out there. Communism was not the threat it was painted as, and Islamofascism is not up to that low standard.

Brown v. Board was 1954 case, in which the court held, in a 9-0 decision, that de jure racial segregation was unconstitutional. Southern segregationists were outraged. Their response was massive resistance, including riots, lynchings, and countless court battles to try to overturn a decision they felt was a violation of the fifth and tenth amendments. As the rest of America accepted this as only right, and southerners lost cases and support, it became obvious that this wouldn't be a rallying cry for the newly combined Republican/Dixiecrat party.
But then the Supreme Court gave them a new cause. Roe v. Wade energized the same base as Brown had, and actually had support in the north. Roe is slowly trickling away as support for abortion rights increases, but the same mindset of intimidation, bombings, and attempted court challenges remains.

Of course the issue of abortion ties into the sexual revolution. This isn't America's first sexual revolution, with drugs, wild music, teen crime, and hypocritical televangelists. Competing with wicked jazz for air time were radio preachers, and Aimee Semple McPherson was the first to fall from grace. The founder of the Foursquare Church disappeared while swimming, was presumed dead, turned up 35 days later claiming to have been kidnapped, but was found to have been shacking up with a married engineer from her radio station. Shouting religion went out of style in the 1940's and 50's, but the same wave of illogic that brought us hippie communes and UFO believers also brought back the evangelicals. They're still outraged about all the same things, and are still as annoying.


To sum up, the GOP may go back to their roots, but that will just make them all the more irrelevant. Their goals are either attained or unattainable. Until they decide to run on issues that matter to Americans, they will continue to see power flow away from them. Personally, I hope they get their act together. Loyal opposition can keep a party from getting too full of itself and blinded by ideology.

A pity we couldn't do that for them.

[WoodyM]

1. President Roosevelt said

that there would be no war profiteers in World War II. The 100% rate above $250,000 was to be on people who owned or were making materials for the conduct of the war and were in a position to make great profits. It must be remembered that $250,000 was a fantastic income for a person at that time in history. The congress set it at 90%. The Eisenhower administration made no effort to change it as it was being used to pay off debts incurred in fighting the war. When JFK cut the rate, the debt for the war had been paid off.