The Hijacking Of The Party Of Lincoln

Lincoln fights off fellows from the Cato Institute.

If this comes off as concern trolling, so be it.

I've been studying America's "Second Party System", the division between Jacksonian Democrats and the Clay-Adams-Webster Whigs.  At the end of this - which concerned my reading What Hath God Wrought over the past six months (sumbitch was LONG) - I concluded that I am a Whig.  The Whigs were the progressive party advocating sane financial institutions, infrastructure improvements, moral and political reform and equality.  The Democrats were laissez faire, state's rightist, conservative and white supremacist.

But Whigs and Democrats, despite their real differences, agreed on certain principles in American democracy.  The issue of slavery, however, became an issue that the Whigs couldn't find a way clear on.  They eventually dissolved and were replaced by the Republican party.  The Republican party was the liberal party of the mid-19th century.  Lincoln even advocated women's rights in the Illinois statehouse.

From those liberal roots, there emerged divisions between the old Lincoln wing of reformers and the pro-corporate model ultimately typified by Mark Hanna and William McKinley.  This tension between the old progressive/Teddy Roosevelt/Abraham Lincoln wing of the party and the Old Guard/William Taft/Warren Harding wing of the party led to the rupturing of the party in 1912.  It was this rupture that helped push Woodrow Wilson to the left, as he tried to capture the Bull Moose vote for 1916.  It was FDR that finally swallowed most of the progressive Republicans into the New Deal coalition.

But there were always a few legacies from that progressive Republican past.  Famously, John McCain tried to aspire to that legacy and was smacked down for it.  So he reinvented himself as an Old Guarder for 2008.  But there were always a few Lincoln Chaffee/Bob Michel/Olympia Snowe types rumbling around the caucus.

Now, we have three left.  And they are all from within an hour of Fenway Park, and they are all effectively hamstrung by their party's ideological core.

And even the Old Guard of corporate friendly, Coolidge-esque Republicans are muscled aside by these new ideological shock troops.  I don't think Boehner and McConnell really want a shutdown.  I just don't think they have a choice.

What we have is the complete takeover of a political party by the political fringe.  In Lincoln's day, the Garrison abolitionists -the radicals in their coalition - weren't given a real seat at the table.  Now, the radicals write budget proposals that would drag American back into a pre-New Deal laissez faire plutocracy.

And they are lauded for being "courageous" and "serious" because apparently the political press is incapable of reading or simple math.

The GOP budget proposed by Paul Ryan would gut the safety net, not control health care costs but rather shift them to people who can't pay for them, leave defense spending intact while cutting just about every other aspect of the government and then cutting taxes for corporations and the rich.  It would "balance" the budget by assuming that these tax cuts for the rich would be offset by 2.8% unemployment.

This "serious" budget the GOP is proposing is as radical and fanciful a document as you are likely to see.  It rests on ideas that have been objectively shown to be false - tax cuts for the rich create jobs - and ridiculous assumptions - 2.8% unemployment and an American polity that will allow every single elderly person who is not rich as hell running through their savings in order not to die earlier than necessary.

This is a terrible farce.  It's an assault on the very idea that we exist as a commonwealth, with a social contract that guarantees a subsistence standard of living in your old age.

The new Old Guard is scared of this, I think.  I'm not sure Boehner likes the idea of blatantly ending Medicare, because he can read a poll.  But the hijacking of the Party of Teddy Roosevelt by the Rand Paul/Michelle Bachmann wing is now complete.

Their budget proposals, combined with their willingness to shutdown the government in the middle of a recovery and their assaults on unions in the midwest, demonstrates for anyone paying attention that they have abandoned all pretense to "compassionate conservatism" (which was itself largely a pretense).  They have become the party of libertarian extremism.  The party of the laissez faire, red in tooth and claw.

They are unfit to govern.