Once upon a time, the Republican Party stood for something. It represented the rugged independence of frontier families, the self-reliance of the pioneer spirit. Its leaders valued the free-thinking rationalism found in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Natty Bumpo novels of James Fenimore Cooper. It stood for the ethical humanism of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. It was the political party that I admired as a child -- unfettered by unionism, religious fanaticism, or corrupt urban political machines.
Now, on the eve of the next decade of the 21st Century, I look back at the preceding ten years and wonder what happened to this once great political party. Once upon a time, the great Republican Senator from Connecticut Prescott Bush championed civil rights legislation, served as the first treasurer of Planned Parenthood, and helped to establish the Peace Corps. He motivated the Republican Party to stand up to the racist Democrats from the South and pass critical legislation. How ashamed he must be of his son who played a racist to get elected in Texas; and his grandson, who played an idiot to pander to the religious right.
Or, maybe I got it all wrong as a teenager in the 60s, maybe the Republican Party was always a party of hypocritical profligates, pretending to be high-minded while they kept mistresses on the side and sold out the poor to big business. It was a party of great men and women -- Abraham Lincoln, U. S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Jeannette Rankin, Marion Martin, and Oveta Culp Hobby. Thus, it is hard to think of the Republican Party as the party of Rush Limbaugh, John Ensign, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley. It is hard to imagine that the Party I admired in my youth has become a polictical party of racist, rumor-mongering religious hypocrites. It is difficult to listen to the voodoo science and anti-social blather of Mitch McConnell and not wonder how distance he is from ordinary Americans.
Once upon a time, ordinary people counted on the Republican Party to have a rational agenda, promoting the common welfare against special interests, mob rule, and mass hysteria. The Republican Party supported legislation that protected individual rights against the interventions of overly paternalistic government regulation, against the religious enthusiasm of charismatic moralists, against monopolies and unions and big government. But since 1980, Republican administrations and Republican controlled legislatures have expanded the federal government while plunging the nation into greater and greater debt. The Republican Party has become the voice of Christian extremists and started several costly and pointless wars. In my youth, I was told that the Democrats start wars and the Republicans end them.