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I am a Republican who voted against Barry Goldwater on the issues in 1964. Subsequently, I am certain that Goldwater was a man of integrity beyond anything Lyndon Johnson could imagine. But I also voted against Richard Nixon in 1968 and twice in 1972, against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, against George H. W. Bush in 1988 and 1992, and against George W. Bush twice in 2000. I was born a Republican in the South, when we were an insignificant minority. My claim to being a Republican ante-dates the Gipper's and the claims of his Dixiecrat-come-lately fans. I recall a political landscape in which there were polarities, but they were not co-terminus with political parties and the landscape was the healthier for it.
I grew up in a Republican Party which named responsible federal judges in the South on whom the civil rights movement could rely for even-handed judgments and a Republican Party whose support was essential to the passage of major civil rights and environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. I supported California Congressman Paul N."Pete" McCloskey in his primary challenge to Richard Nixon in 1972. We McCloskey supporters were a tiny minority of Republicans in North Carolina that year, but large enough that Nixon's CREEP machine had moles among us. McCloskey recalls a time when conservatives knew that conservation was a conservative issue and that there is honor in telling the truth about our military operations. I supported Illinois Congressman John B.Anderson's Republican and third party challenge to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980, even serving on his state campaign committee in Delaware. Anderson seemed to represent a viable alternative to the flabby economic and foreign policies of the Carter administration and he warned the country that Ronald Reagan's promises to cut taxes dramatically, vastly expand military expenditures, and balance the federal budget were not compatible. They weren't and he didn't.
Pete McCloskey and John Anderson were the first Republicans in the House of Representatives to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Still, the long shadow of Watergate hangs over my Republican Party. The levers of its power have not gone to the Andersons and McCloskeys who knew that a clear repudiation of its scandal was necessary. Rather, they have fallen to the Reagans and Bushes. While Anderson and McCloskey called for Richard Nixon's impeachment, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush, called for balancing inquiries into Democrats' foibles. As CIA director, he helped to install a brutally repressive regime in Chile. Short of full-throated repudiation of Watergate's scandal, greater reticence about regime changes abroad, and the assertion that integrity matters, the doors were open to trading arms with enemies afar to support insurgents against enemies near at hand, to exposing a CIA intelligence officer as an act of political retribution, and to giving grandiose subsidies to an agent who traded in our own national intelligence. My party is in the hands of people who do not recognize their own betrayal of our national interest and values. There was a time when that would have been unthinkable.
I spend time on a forum whose owner quotes from DU when she wants to attack Democrats or liberals. But the proportion of angry, moronic DU types to the whole population of liberals, Democrats or Reagan-haters is much smaller than is the proportion of angry, moronic dittoheads and talk radio hate jock imitators are to the whole population of conservatives. I think the DU types are so few that they really aren't representative of anything, which unfortunately isn't true of the talk radio/dittohead crowd.
Derek Charles Catsam -
6/8/2004
Bob Dole popularized use of "Democrat Party" (at right around the time he made the inane criticisms of American wars as "Democrat Wars" -- remind your GOP buddies of that next time we're hearing about the GOP's inuendo that they are the truw party of defensing America).
dc
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Josh, I don't slum either at the Democratic Underground or at the FreeRepublic. Andrew Sullivan has been giddily directing everyone's attention to the DU site.
Name Removed at Poster's Request -
6/7/2004
"The full-throated accolades to and tendentious assaults on Ronald Reagan's historical reputation will make this a tedious week for me."
You had to go hunting for that tendentious assault, while the full-throated accolades are unavoidable.
(BTW, I didn't know you slummed at the Democratic Underground. Why do you bother with that site?)
Oscar Chamberlain -
6/7/2004
Richard. You are quire correct that our mess has many sources, including LBJ. However, I will take some issue with your indictment of the actions of federal courts.
The nation failed fundamentally in addressing the question of equality until the late 1940s or early 1950s.
The Supreme Court had to take an early leadership role in this period. It had to do so to overturn the the Plessy case and the attendant logic that led to many other decisions that limited action by any branch of the federal government in support of the 14th adn 15th amendments.
In doing so, the Court faced a number of southern states (and some northern ones too) that had shown great cleverness in maintaining a procedural adherence to the 14th and 15 amendments while substantively evading them. Thus the Supreme Court had to either take up the mantle of substantive due process--which requires an attempt to define equality in a variety of environments--including school systems--or to allow de facto discrimination to prolong the damage done by the de jure version.
Did that lead to mistakes? Sure. I don't know about the Missouri decision, but I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that it was a mistake. But I don't see how we get to the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s without an activist court that embraced substantive due process in the area of racial discrimination.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
It isn't new. It goes back at least to the 1970s in some ardent Republican circles. The notion is to deny the opposition the respect of claiming to be "democratic". But do we want to be called the "Republic Party"?
Stephen Tootle -
6/7/2004
I have wondered about this new thing of referring to "The Democrat Party." Any thoughts on the reason behind it?
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Stephen,
You sensed that I voted for McCain, did you? I 'spose it was obvious. We got buried here in Georgia. It wasn't even a contest. Under ordinary circumstances, I agree with you about opposition fiddling with a group's name. I thought it silly when some Republicans determined to rename the opposition the "Democrat Party". OTOH, the Nixon re-elect effort _was_ creepy, so I adopted the opposition's characterization. Sorry, but I don't circle wagons for this administration. Its defeat could be the best thing that can happen to the Republican Party.
Stephen Keith Tootle -
6/7/2004
I am a Republican moderate. I supported McCain in 2000. I feel your pain, but I come around when it is time to circle the wagons in November. Beyond sympathizing with your frustration, I would like to see more historians use the initials CRP to describe the Committee to Re-elect the President. It is one of those things that managed to creep (bad pun) into textbooks without proper scrutiny. I have asked several Nixon scholars who first coined the term. They have guesses, but all agree it was Nixon's political opponents. Political opponents should not be allowed to rename other people's organizations.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Question, Andrew:
Is an "idea" a policy proposal which the Republican Party, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government, has failed to implement?
Further question:
How is "regime change" a Republican Party idea? Do you mean that the economic and military strength of the United States authorizes it to change any regime anywhere in the world that the United States government doesn't like? How is that an "idea"? Why would you find that conceit attractive?
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Andrew, If I'm not mistaken, electors are chosen within states and may be chosen by plurality rather than a majority of votes. So yes, a third party candidate could, like Al Gore, win a plurality of the national popular vote and still not be elected. It gets dicey if there is no majority in the electoral college. If the electoral college votes are split so that no candidate has a majority, the election of the president goes to the House of Representatives, with only the top three electoral college choices to be voted on. See Article XII. California's delegation caucuses and votes on how it will cast California's one vote; North Dakota's delegation caucuses and decides how it will cast North Dakota's one vote. The winner must get 26 votes in the House of Representatives. If the electoral college chooses no vice president, the two highest vote winners there go to the Senate for the decision. Each Senator gets 1 vote and the winner must get 51 votes. Is that a screwy business or what?
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Richard,
Knowing what I know now, there's no doubt that if I had it to do over I'd vote for BG in 1964 even though he was for the most part wrong on the issues. LBJ's huge landslide/mandate was a disaster in the making. His refusal to raise taxes to pay for the war led to the galloping inflation that dogged the economy through the 1970s.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
If you want to get rid of the electoral college, you have to amend the Constitution.
Richard Henry Morgan -
6/7/2004
For all the truths you list, I still wonder if LBJ didn't manage to wreak as much havoc on this country, despite the good things he did, than Nixon did. Vietnam still casts a large shadow, at least as big as Watergate.
The Vietnam War was premissed on a foolishishness that is breathtaking. The Joint Chiefs said it would take 10 divisions 10 years just to stabilize the South. LBJ, for cynical domestic motives, gave them three, and insisted that N. Vietnam would negotiate -- like a Senate-House conference committee. Never have such brilliant legislative talents and such strategic military ignorance ever been combined to achieve such monumental failure, accompanied by lies all the way.
As for reasonable judges, they are few upon the ground. Witness the federal judge who ordered the Missouri state to spend $1 billion (separation of powers?) on magnet schools and sumptuous facilities, to no effect whatsoever. Today, our public schools are more segregated than before, and the flight to the suburbs has taken jobs with it. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.
The mess we have created has many parents, of many ideological stripes. Shall we talk of JFK and Diem? That little trip into the Dominican Republic? It is the great fact of political life that parties sacrifice principle.
Andrew Ackerman -
6/7/2004
A lot of folks my age (22) were hoping McCain would win his party's nomination four years ago precisely because they felt it was necessary for the GOP to switch gears. It needed new leadership. But still, most of the interesting ideas are coming from the right these days. School vouchers, free trade (which has been preached but not really been adhered to by this administration), regime change, the establishment of Democracy in the the Middle East... represent policies that have been pushed by the current Republican party and ideas that challenge the status quo. Like them or not.
In contrast, I don't really get the feeling the Democrats are headed any place more progressive or safer for our national security or better for this country. Kerry's decision to consider delaying his acceptance of his party's nomination at the DNC convention, a nightmarish PR ploy to stall for five weeks in order to raise more money, speaks to the length to which the Democrats are tainted and controlled by monied interests; certainly not favorable to the GOP in this regard.
I happen to be in DC for a couple of days this week (and will hopefully have time to see Reagan in state at the Capitol). Yesterday, while walking down the Mall, a man in a DNC shirt asked me if I'd like to volunteer to "help defeat George W. Bush, the worst president we've ever had." Like him or not, it's a travesty that the Democrats' campaign amounts to a referendum against President Bush. "Don't you mean to ask if I want to volunteer for John Kerry?" I asked. It speaks volumes of the Democrats' lack of convidence in Kerry that they approach potential supporters in this way.
In any case, Ralph is right. The two-party framework is flawed and it's unclear how a multi-party system would work. John Anderson ran for president on a third-party ticket before I was born. I recall my father telling me he loved the guy. But what was his plan? Even if a third party candidate gets the majority of the popular vote, does he win enough Electoral College delegates?
Jonathan Dresner -
6/7/2004
Yup. I think the only salvation for these radicalized money-troughs is for people to abandon them en masse for more meaningfully moderate and clear-minded parties. Though I'm not sure about the Constitution: there's nothing there which privileges the party system, as I read it. You're right about electoral systems, though.
I think there's at least four, if not six, parties lurking in the two "big tents" now, plus some of the "third" parties would be more viable.
It won't happen, but it's fun to think about.
Ralph E. Luker -
6/7/2004
Within a two-party framework, I don't see how you could expect or desire a more highly ideological polarization. If you are talking about a multi-party system, it is unclear to me how it could work -- without some basic changes in the Constitution itself and in the election systems. Surely, the electoral college would have to go and you'd have to make some provision for preferential balloting.
Jonathan Dresner -
6/7/2004
The corruption is not limited to the Republican party. The gap between rhetoric and reality in my own beloved Democratic party is terribly wide. Partisanship is clearly bilateral (how many Democratic Senators are really respected by core Republicans the way McCain [and nearly only McCain] is respected by Democrats?) and the lack of distinction between personal and official power, the corruption of lobbying, etc., are deeply rooted in the system.
I've never been moved to vote against a major Democrat because, for all their flaws, I prefer the Democrat party lines to the Republican ones. But more and more I wish the parties would break up on ideological lines and we could have some real debates again.
