New Whigs

In 1840 the Whig Party elected its first president, William Henry Harrison. There would be three Whig presidents in all. By 1856 the party was defunct. Will the Republican Party follow them into oblivion?

Harrison- First Whig President

Both the Whigs and the Republicans were formed in response to moral issues. The Whigs grew, at least in part, out of a revulsion with the brutal Indian suppression policies of the populist Democrat, Andrew Jackson. They also wanted to secure minority rights in the face of popular voting majorities. In 1852 the party split over objection to the extension of slavery into the western territories, failing to renominate its own president, Millard Fillmore. The Republican Party was born to take its place and emerged with the election of Abraham Lincoln, who went on to become the Great Emancipator, America's greatest president in the opinion of most historians.

Millard Fillmore- the last Whig

Whatever the parties were called in America's persistent two-party system, one usually worked to protect the interests of the well-off establishment while the other worked on behalf of the less-well-off. There were other pairings of opposed elements, such as north-south, central government vs. states' rights, agriculture vs manufacturing, liberal vs conservative. The tactics, causes and domains of the parties have shifted over time, as in the case of the Democratic solid south becoming the Republican solid south when LBJ enacted civil rights legislation.

The Great Emancipator

Whigs and Republicans have both represented professional and business interests but central to the Whigs' platform was a policy of tariffs to stimulate manufacturing. They also advocated free public schools to develop an educated and informed citizenry. After the Republicans replaced the Whigs as, in Bill Moyers' clever redefinition of GOP, the Guardians Of Privilege, they also gave the country its greatest trust-busting president ever in Teddy Roosevelt. GOP in those days was shorthand for Grand Old Party.

The Great Trust Buster

In recent years, the Republican Party has stood the policy of fostering industry, education and competition on its head. Today's GOP subsidizes the outsourcing of jobs, cuts funds for education while making giveawaysof public funds to billionaire professional sports team owners, and eliminates regulations against monopoly producing mergers.

At present, the GOP is facing a split, which may threaten its very existence, between its true constituency, the oligarchs that finance it, and its blue state voter base. Both parties have traditionally been made up of strange and seemingly incompatible groups but this time the coalition just may come apart, as in the Whigs' demise. While the party insiders are mostly denizens of the tonier precincts of NYC and Washington DC, the voting base is largely made up of white voters in the poorer states of the south and west. A recent study has shown that the white population with a high school education or less is undergoing a sudden drop in life expectancy. The mortality rate has taken a sharp upturn due largely to effects of alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide. These people have been persuaded for decades to vote against their own economic interests but if they keep dying off or becoming inert prematurely, no amount of gerrymandering may be enough to maintain GOP control. The ultra-right corporate takeover of the major media has been brilliant but the average viewer of the major propaganda outlet, Fox News, is in his sixties and so time is not on their side. No matter how much the NYT uncritically publishes handouts from the State Dept and the DOD, and the Washington Post publishes op-ed from discredited neocons promoting military solutions to everything, people are just not reading newspapers very much any more. In the past, immigrants climbing the social ladder into the middle class have often abandoned the Democrat party to vote Republican alongside their new suburban neighbors. With social mobility now virtually all downward, GOP leaders will have little left to work with except racial and ethnic animus. Divide and conquer! A new influx of refugees should help them there but how far can they work that theme?

Democrats have a deep divide of their own between corporatist and populist wings but only time will tell if they can be reconciled. Perhaps the corporate wings of the Republican and Democratic Parties could merge as a newly minted Democratic Republican Party. Some of us suspect that this happened a while back but simply hasn't been formally announced. Perhaps the announcement will follow the vote on the democracy-ending TPP. Hillary Clinton may be poised to become, like Lincoln, the first president of a newly formed party.

The Republican division has come out in the presidential debates over the issue of immigration reform, with half the candidates taking a harsh public stance against illegal immigrants, while the other half says it wants to find a way to accommodate them. While hypocrisy has always greased the gears of society, this split reflects a fundamental division in the ranks. The voting base doesn't want to compete with illegal immigrant labor. The funding base wants the cheap labor that only only illegal immigrants can furnish. It has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity and everything to do with legal status. Illegal labor, foreign labor, third world labor, prison labor, slave labor; it's all good, that is, it's cheap! The GOP wants and needs the Hispanic vote so some, at least, are trying to seem concerned. After all, the Hispanic birth rate is the only thing that keeps the national birth rate from going below replacement level. At the same time, Hispanic voters have the biggest stake in avoiding competition with illegals.

America's two party polarity could better be described as the opposition of left and right but more often it is described as the divide between liberal and conservative. Since Reagan, the GOP has tried to turn “liberal” into an unflattering epithet. They've had some success, leading Democrats to shy away from “liberal” and to identify themselves with the more presumptuous term “progressive”. Republicans unanimously define themselves as “conservative”. What, if anything, does conservative mean? The word starts with conserve, suggesting a will to conserve something. Could be a lot of things; health, standard of living, sense of security, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, peace, the infrastructure, the air, the water, the environment, the planet, all are things that come to mind, although none of these things ever seems to rate mention at meetings of the GOP. Conservative also suggests a caution about change and a tendency to slow the pace of change. Change may be good or it may be bad but it is an inevitable element of life. A common distinction is made between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. Social issues are almost all sex-related matters, sometimes interwoven with civil rights issues and interpretations of the Constitution, while fiscal concerns are largely about debt and taxation. At the moment the American population consists of four large groups of people who are either conservative on both social and fiscal issues, on one but not the other, or on neither.

In the midst of the over-long presidential campaign, where does the vast assemblage of GOP candidates for president stand with regard to the public on conservative issues? Social issues have shifted quickly in the United States. The sexual revolution of the 60's has left the country a very different place than it was half a century ago. The South was fully segregated by race in the 50's and that too has changed even if racism persists. The status and rights of women have evolved, perhaps more by changing conditions than by political effort. In 1993 the implementation of “don't ask, don't tell” in the military was seen as a huge progressive step for the rights of homosexuals. It is now considered a landmark of discrimination and the push for gay rights has led to widespread acceptance of same sex marriage, something unimaginable just two or three decades ago. Abortion was almost universally illegal in the US until the Supreme Court decided it was a constitutional right in 1973. Many of these changes have been rapid but most are accepted by the majority of the population. Still, not everyone is happy with all these changes so we can assume that there will continue to be be a political party representing people with such concerns. The battles over social issues are real, with significant numbers of people on each side. What about the current crop of Republican candidates?

Most of these conservative candidates are sufficiently resistant to social change to satisfy the voting base. Where there is deviation from conservatively correct dogma, it is seldom a product of creeping liberalism. Three candidates recently attended a meeting of the National Religious Liberties Conference whose leader, on the same weekend, made the case for rounding up and killing all homosexuals. Do such policies qualify as conservative? Many good people oppose abortion but does the tacit approval of the murder of people running abortion clinics qualify as conservative? Slowing the pace of social change may be conservative but what about the radical and violent return to an era that probably never existed? Conservative or radical reactionary?

"Bad science! Bad science!"

Is being anti-science conservative? In 1633 Galileo Galilei was tried and convicted by the Inquisition for promoting the Copernican theory of the universe, in which the earth revolves around the sun. Surely, the Inquisition could be considered conservative in its time. Does it make sense 382 years later to consider politicians holding views similar of those of the Inquisition to be conservative? Was the space exploration program cut back due to budget constraints or by concerns of heresy? Does Jim Inhofe count as a conservative? What about the majority of GOP candidates who follow his lead in bashing science? The English language seems to be failing us here.

Greatest friend of the 1% ever

Most establishment Republicans don't really give a damn about social issues, except as a tool to fire up the base. Deep down, it's all about economics, often camouflaged as fiscal conservatism. If fiscal conservatism is about balanced budgets and keeping spending in line with income, how many of the dozen or more GOP candidates could rationally be called fiscal conservatives? One! While he may be way out there in right field on many domestic issues, Rand Paul is the only GOP candidate who has any reasonable claim to being called a fiscal conservative. He has even called out his colleagues asking: Is it really conservative to advocate unlimited military spending without paying for it when our military budget is already larger than the rest of the world's together? Paul is also the only Republican candidate who has ever opposed a war that the US has initiated. Since Ronald Reagan, Republican Administrations have consistently run up record deficits. “Tax and spend” liberal Bill Clinton produced a surplus, which was quickly eliminated by “conservative” George W. Bush by starting wars financed by deficit spending. So much for fiscal conservatives. They have perpetrated a monster hoax for years. All these Republicans holler about deficits but they keep making them bigger through corporate welfare, tax breaks for their rich sponsors and blowing ever more money on the insatiable military industrial complex. All the candidates seem to have a “tax plan”. Rand Paul isn't immune from this. In every case, these plans would drive the country deeper in debt while trashing its public resources, accelerating the decline of the middle class and further reducing the prospects of the poorer classes, into which the former middle class is sliding.

New Leadership.  Conservative enough?

Some of the GOP base is angry and their anger lashes out in all directions, usually misplaced. Such people are referred to as the Tea Party. They may eventually morph into a separate party, something like the Know-Nothings at an earlier troubled time in our history, but they have little in common with the Wall Street insiders and the Karl Roves of the world, who have been using them badly.

The party insiders are getting worried that outsider candidates such as Donald Trump and Ben Carson are still leading the polls, fearing that they may lead the party into an electoral debacle, or worse, that if elected they will drive the country to ruin faster than the insiders' plan called for. The total collapse isn't supposed to come before the sanctuaries of the oligarchy are fully stocked, armed and fortified. Rumors have even surfaced of a plan to draft Mitt Romney. The group of GOP candidates has been frequently compared to a clown car.

Having spent the early and late portions of my career working on zoos, I'm inclined to view the spectacle as something you'd see in a zoo. A large gorilla roaring and pounding his chest, surrounded by smaller, nastier, screeching monkeys and cold blooded, beady-eyed reptiles with darting tongues. There are also some sloths and aardvark types waiting to be prodded into action but alas, there are no lions or tigers or Teddies in this crowd. Will their prayers be answered with an ark to save them from the coming deluge?

Signs of Life

My last couple of posts haven't been monuments to the Power of Positive Thinking, but that's nothing new. At my college graduation, Norman Vincent Peale, who coined the phase, or at least made a ton of money from it, nearly caused me to throw up when he spoke at the baccalaureate service. Even then, I had little stomach for militaristic expositions of American exceptionalism. Not wanting to end what had been four good years on an openly bitter note, I resisted the impulse to walk out in protest. Maybe that was the kind of mistake that people of my generation made too often.

Barack Obama is still sounding like Norman Vincent Peale. Nevertheless, there have been signs of hope recently. I can recall from trips to Florida, long before my college years, seeing rugged men wrestling alligators.

They would turn the alligator over and rub its belly, inducing a sleep-like trance. Those gators still had big sharp teeth but for the moment they were rendered innocuous. Last week Vladimir Putin seemed to pull off the same trick with President Obama, tranquilizing Obama's inner Fascist just as he was about to launch another ill-considered attack in the Middle East. In addition to Putin's firm hand, the President may have felt the weight of the polls which showed that his imperial appetite had the backing of fully 8% of the American public. Whatever it took, we can all be relieved that the gator sleeps.

Now we've gotten the news that President Obama has been on the phone with Iran's new president, Hassan Kouhari. That makes Obama the first American president to speak with an Iranian chief of state since 1979 when Jimmy Carter spoke with the about-to-be-deposed Shah.

In other upbeat news, the Senate has removed the extension of the Monsanto Protection Act out of an appropriations bill. It's still in the House version of the bill but there has been so much public outrage at this stealthily inserted provision, which had granted Monsanto immunity from all legal action brought against it, that the chances of killing it remain fairly high.

Larry Summers, President Obama's favorite financial adviser and one of the chief architects and beneficiaries of the Great Recession of 2008, removed his name (or had it removed) from consideration for the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the post Ben Bernanke is stepping down from in January. Although he had his supporters in the White House and on Wall Street, Summers faced opposition from politicians in both parties, as well as from virtually all non-comatose members of the general public.

The other big story of the week is that the Tea Party Taliban is plotting a terrorist attack on the US Government through its Congressional jihadis refusing to fund all government activities (already approved by Congress). Their main target appears to be Obamacare, but some seem determined to cripple Social Security as well. Better to collapse the government than to see the masses having access to health care. If they get as lucky as the nineteen terrorists of 9/11, they could manage to reverse the slow economic recovery and plunge the nation into a sea of rising debt and accelerated collapse. The 9/11 guys probably exceeded their wildest dreams when they brought down the twin towers. Do you suppose that any of them could have imagined that they would end Constitutional democracy in the USA as well? When terrorist strikes begin, it's hard to know where they will end or where they will lead to. Even McConnell and the Congressional loner, John Boehner, seem a little spooked by the jihadis in their midst, but they've lost control.

This story may not appear to fit in with the upbeat nature of the earlier items. I may be simply succumbing to a bout of irrational optimism. The crocuses are coming out of the ground; I've recently experienced a wonderful new jazz festival growing out of the ashes left behind by the “austerity” ordered up by the plutocracy; and despite the planet being under unremitting attack environmentally, economically and politically, I've received the news that I have another grandson on the way. Unprecedented optimism or not, I'd like to believe that the GOP jihadis will just blow themselves up (politically speaking that is) without too much collateral damage. I doubt that Ted Cruz will set himself aflame on the Capitol steps if Obamacare isn't repealed, and if his fiery rhetoric does cause him to ignite, he'll get the best health care the country can provide.

It seems that even without this debt limit bomb going off, Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader of the Senate, has only about a 50-50 chance of being returned to the Senate in the next elections. If the bomb creates unanticipated havoc, he and his co-conspirators are toast. With people like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor still on the loose, the defeat of one McConnell won't restore the country to political health but it would be a start.

Please take a moment to call or write your Congressman to urge that the Republican National Committee be added to the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

The Opiate of the People

Religion, according to Karl Marx, was the opiate of the people. Although not a Christian himself, he lived in a Europe where the Christian doctrine of a better life after death for those who accepted Christ had been used by governments of all stripes to keep the populace docile and accepting of their earthly fate for nearly two thousand years. Christ taught other things regarding the temporal life, but many of these teachings, such as those dealing with turning the other cheek and doing unto others what you hoped they'd do unto you, also tended to help rulers maintain their rule. Ironically, while Marx excoriated religion, many of his own prescriptions were not so far removed from those of Christ.

Religious institutions tend to foster conservatism, if by conservatism we mean resistance to change and the preservation of the existing order. After all, if you believe in eternal truths, handed straight down from God through one messenger or other, why would you want to see any modification of those truths, as interpreted by your tribe, sect or nation.

In modern times we have come to use the terms liberal, or sometimes lately, progressive, for people who welcome change or actively seek it out. They tend to be artists, intellectuals, feminists, immigrants and other disreputable types. In Europe there is an exception to this usage in that liberal is often a term referring to laissez-faire economics, an approach which leads, not so much to change, but to a reinforcing of the existing order.

The USA has developed a political system built around a two-party system, aligned around class, race and religion, but typically holding to the division between liberals and conservatives, with the Republicans most often representing the conservatives and the Democrats usually representing the liberals. Race was the anomaly in this equation, since it was Lincoln's fledgling Republican Party, described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book Team of Rivals as “that curious amalgamation of former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, nativists, foreigners, radicals and conservatives”, which favored the abolition of slavery. For a century after that, southern whites remained solidly in the Democratic column until LBJ upset the apple cart by passing civil rights legislation, which together with Richard Nixon's southern strategy, assured a solid Republican majority in the ex-slave states for years to come, as well as assuring an even more lop-sided adherence by people of color throughout the country to the Democratic Party.

Conservative groups like to proclaim that America is a Christian nation, or when they're looking for Jewish campaign contributors, that it is based on Judeo-Christian values. Liberal groups insist that the US is a secular institution, based on separation of church and state. Both are correct. Colonists and early European immigrants were overwhelmingly Christian, of various sects and movements. The Pilgrims ventured over largely to escape religious persecution, only to set up their own forms of religious intolerance toward other denominations. Jefferson and his allies noted this and insisted that religion be kept separate from government interference, and vice versa, and they prevailed.

Until very recently Protestants comprised the majority of the US population, with Roman Catholics not far behind. The influence of the traditional Protestant denominations has waned and their numbers have dropped sharply but some of the slack has been taken up by the growth of the evangelical sects whose pastors light up the passion, if not the intellect, of their flock. The fastest growing religious preference in the US is now “unaffiliated”. Whereas the RC Church has traditionally emphasized God's love and forgiveness of all us sinners through confession and penance, traditional Protestant doctrine emphasizes that God's chosen people can be identified by virtue of their good deeds. Both approaches have yielded a lot of good works and civil behavior by the faithful, and even by the not so faithful, who want to be seen in a good light by their peers.

Belief in the devil is now at an historic low and with scientists telling us ever more about our universe, faith in heaven and an afterlife is waning as well. It's become fashionable in liberal circles to speak badly of the Catholic Church, especially since the dreadful pedophile scandals emerged. Of course, most of the critics never set foot in a church. It remains to be seen if the major pedophile scandal in the football program at Penn State will unleash as virulent a protest again major intercollegiate sports programs, certainly a world every bit as venal and corrupt as the Church ever was, but one in which a fair number of both liberals and conservatives revel.

The two party system has served the country reasonably well for a long time. The Democrats have pushed for change and have championed labor unions in their struggles for a better deal for workers and have rallied round leaders such as FDR and Martin Luther King. Changes did happen. When the changes started to appear too rapid or frightening to a majority of the population, that middle slice of the voting public turned to the Norman Rockwell imagery of the country that gave us apple pie and Doris Day movies, which the Republicans like to conjure up as the real America. This back and forth worked to allow a degree of social change while avoiding radical dislocations.

Then, a few decades ago, things went badly wrong. The Democratic Party lost much of its base as immigrant groups worked their way up to suburban comfort and moved from aspiration to a defensive mode. American manufacturing disappeared to China and its former workers to unemployment or fast food outlets. Seeing how well GOP fund raising had gone in the financial world, Democratic party leaders decided to compete for support from Wall Street. This abdication left the traditional Democratic constituency, the workers and the poor, without meaningful representation, as the party decided to emphasize sexual issues and ignore economic problems. Meanwhile, control of the Republican Party moved from the prototype mid-west conservative banker/small businessman types to a new breed of sharks, trained at the Harvard School of Business to devise new ways to relieve grandmothers in California of their savings. Close colleagues included propagandists following the Josef Goebbels model. They were joined in their efforts by neo-cons (sometimes called neo-liberals) determined to bomb the world into acquiescence to American economic control. There was nothing either liberal or conservative about any of them. Neo-fascists might be a term closer to the mark, but fascists at least strove for an advanced industrial base. These people sought only reams of money for themselves and their cronies, while making the middle class an endangered species.

Throughout history, many people have opposed the Church but few have openly opposed the teachings of Christ, even when their actions ran counter to His words. Ayn Rand changed all that. There is no shortage of atheists in the world. Many seek an ethics based on the best philosophical thought rather than on fear of divine punishment. Ayn Rand was unique among atheists in not only opposing a belief in God but in turning the teachings of Christ on their head, preaching that greed is good, the masses should be left to their own miserable fate, while the elite should work for their own betterment and to hell with everybody else. She could and would be dismissed as a tedious, mediocre writer were it not for the fact that among her acolytes were people high in the Republican ranks such as Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul and Clarence Thomas. For a deeper analysis of this phenomenon, see Jeffrey Mikkelson's fine article.

Mitt Romney personified this school of thought in his remarks about the 47%. Nobody really knows what he represents because he's advocated on each side of every issue. However, the most telling clue may be in his selection of a sociopath vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, the most avid Rand disciple on the American political scene, and the most consistent liar since Guinness kept records. Ryan also calls himself a Roman Catholic and recently said, with a straight face, that President Obama is leading the country away from Judeo-Christian values. Meanwhile he's concocted a budget that would throw grandma under the bus while exploding the deficit by giving additional massive cuts to his billionaire buddies, and curtailing most vital public services. A Catholic bishop even admonished him for a budget which was anything but Christian.

Evangelicals, who had some reservations about the Mormon Romney, love his science denials, and they're supporting Israel, no matter what, because the rapture, where Christ returns and carts off the true believers to heaven, won't happen unless and until Israel is safe in the Holy Land.

Lincoln's Republican Party may have been an ill-sorted bunch, but nothing compared to the present version. The party that claims to represent conservatives has everything except conservatives: neo-cons who would discard all international agreements the country has entered into; radical deregulators who have crashed the economy twice in this century and are ready to do it again; banksters; anti-tax zealots who would happily bankrupt the nation; traitors who publicly wished to see the government fail so they could take it over; science deniers; vulture capitalists, and even Roman Catholics who preach and live the anti-Christ dogma of Ayn Rand.