Real Republicans

Timothy Noah writes:

I'm liking rank-and-file Republicans better and better. Earlier this month we learned that they favor Obama's plan to tax the rich. Now we learn that a 55 percent majority of them think Wall Street bankers and brokers are "dishonest," 69 percent think they're "overpaid," and 72 percent think they're "greedy." Fewer than half (47 percent) have an unfavorable view of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Thirty-three percent either favor them or have no opinion, and 20 percent haven't heard of them. Also, a majority favor getting rid of the Electoral College and replacing it with a popular vote. After the 2000 election only 41 percent did. Now 53 percent do. How cool is that?

Every one of these positions puts the GOP rank-and-file at odds with their congressional leadership and field of presidential candidates.

We keep hearing that the Republican base is a bunch of animals who applaud executions and jeer at gay soldiers. But poll data tell me that isn't the base; it's the knuckle-dragging nut fringe. The Republican base looks increasingly like a bunch of reasonable conservatives whose political views now put them well to the left of the ideologues they're sending to Washington. Time for Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Rick Perry, and Roger Ailes to dissolve it and elect another.

Herewith, the wise words of President Theodore Roosevelt:

I hold that a corporation does ill if it seeks profit in restricting production and then by extorting high prices from the community by reason of the scarcity of the product; through adulterating, lyingly advertising, or over-driving the help; or replacing men workers with children; or by rebates; or in any illegal or improper manner driving competitors out of its way; or seeking to achieve monopoly by illegal or unethical treatment of its competitors, or in any shape or way offending against the moral law either in connection with the public or with its employees or with its rivals. Any corporation which seeks its profit in such fashion is acting badly. It is, in fact, a conspiracy against the public welfare which the Government should use all its powers to suppress.

If, on the other hand, a corporation seeks profit solely by increasing its products through eliminating waste, improving its processes, utilizing its by-products, installing better machines, raising wages in the effort to secure more efficient help, introducing the principle of cooperation and mutual benefit, dealing fairly with labor unions, setting its face against the underpayment of women and the employment of children; in a word, treating the public fairly and its rivals fairly: then such a corporation is behaving well. It is an instrumentality of civilization operating to promote abundance by cheapening the cost of living so as to improve conditions everywhere throughout the whole community.

And:

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country.

And:

It may well be that the determination of the government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver) to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.

And:

The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

Together with the wise words of President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

And the wise words of President Ronald Reagan:

We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. [...] Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?

There is nothing moderate about support for abortion or for the overthrow of the traditional definition of marriage. But there is about recognising that unbridled capitalism in unconservative (and historically un-American and un-Republican), that social responsibility is integral to patriotism and to family values, that there can only be a large and thriving middle class if the several tiers of government are harnessed in order to deliver and protect it, and that the patriotic, morally and socially conservative attitude to wars is to avoid them wherever and whenever possible.

Apparently, the Tea Party is off on a RINO hunt against Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Would that be the same Tea Party that installed Scott Brown in the first place? It did not do very well last year, ending up claiming as its own several successful candidates whom it had previously disowned. Marco Rubio took fewer votes than his two opponents combined, and Bob Bennett would have been re-elected against the Tea Partier if he had run as an Independent. By contrast, the GOP’s old Moderate school staged a significant comeback, even returning Lincoln Chafee, who had openly endorsed Obama in 2008 and who was effectively endorsed by him in 2010, as Governor of Rhode Island as an Independent against the GOP’s official Tea Party nominee.

As the RNC is busy imposing open primaries in order to prevent any further Tea Party advances even on that pitiful showing, the Tea Party can look forward to campaigning next year for the Presidency to go to the man who gave Massachusetts socialised medicine and who ran for the Senate from the left of Ted Kennedy. But even he is not going to win. So, in 2016, the Tea Party will be out on the stump for a man who is currently a serving member of the Obama Administration.

Watergate would not be a story at all now, and I flatly refuse to believe that anyone was really shocked by it at the time, although one does have to mourn the passing of a culture in which they at least felt obliged to pretend that they were. So another complete non-story, which everyone has always known and which makes no difference to anything, recently had to be dredged up in order to discredit the Civil Rights sympathiser, in marked contrast to Kennedy, who suspended the draft, who pursued détente with China, and who ended the Vietnam War along with Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee (as, to be fair, was JFK).

No one must ever know that that was once the Republican Party. No one must ever know about the Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War. No one must ever know about those Republicans who resisted entry into the Second World War until America was actually attacked by either side. No one must ever know about Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indo-China, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.

No one must ever know about Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe; the people who lionise Reagan now compared him to Neville Chamberlain when he was in office. No one must ever know about James Baker’s call to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” and to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”. No one must ever know about Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. No one must ever know about Bush the Younger’s removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

And no one must ever know that there was once a President, a Republican President, who believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents. Those last have turned out to have been just as unpleasant, in their own way, as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime. And they now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the Haredi Jews.

A President forced out by the motley crew that had sought to replace Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1968: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists; in the California primary, Kennedy had denounced Eugene McCarthy’s support for public housing as a “catastrophic” proposal to move black people into Orange County.

Succeeded by a President mocked to scorn before, during and after his time in office, yet in reality the man who initiated the Helsinki Process.

The Nixon and Ford Administrations’ stood in stark contrast to the pioneering monetarism and the Cold War sabre-rattling of the Carter Administration, which was particularly bad for abusing the noble cause of anti-Communism by emphasising Soviet human rights abuses while ignoring Chinese and Romanian ones. Carter, who was not above electorally opportunistic race-baiting, even happily allowed the Chinese-backed Pol Pot to retain control of the Cambodian seat at the UN after Phnom Penh had fallen to the rival forces backed by Vietnam and therefore by the Soviet Union. But Carter, for all his unsung prophetic calls against materialism in general and oil dependence in particular, had had the nerve to brand Ford as soft on Communism for his entirely factual statement that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were “not dominated” by the Soviet Union.