Monday, Sep 29, 2014 07:30 AM CST
“Not the true Republican Party”: How the
party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz
Once the party of income tax and checks on
property, an expert details how the GOP turned into a nuthouse
Elias Isquith
Speculative reports of an impending
third Mitt Romney presidential run
notwithstanding, the Republican Party today is no longer the domain of
the genteel patrician with a passion for frugality, as it was for much
of the 20th century. Today, the GOP belongs to former Dixiecrats,
fundamentalist Christians and devotees of the philosophy of the free
market. To put it bluntly, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who in 2012 ran one
of the most disastrous presidential campaigns of the modern era, but
who’s also an ex-Democrat, evangelical Christian and
deregulator par excellence — is
taken seriously as a threat to win the GOP’s 2016 nomination for a reason.
If
you take a longer view, though, the distance between the GOP today and
its previous incarnations becomes even more striking. This was the party
of Lincoln, after all; it was Republicans who rejected an absolute
right to property (meaning: owning other humans), who initiated
the first income tax,
who argued government could be used to promote opportunity, and who
waged a revolutionary war against the smokescreen of states’ rights. How
did the party that was formed in large part to fight
the Slave Power become the chief guardian of today’s 1 percent?
In her new book, “
To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party,”
Boston College professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson offers an
answer, claiming that the historically Janus-faced GOP has struggled to
reconcile its purported belief in equality of opportunity with its
passionate defense of the right to own property. Salon recently spoke
with Richardson about her new book as well as the way the GOP’s internal
contradictions mirror those of America itself. Our conversation is
below, and has been edited for clarity and length.
Why write a book about the GOP instead of the Democratic Party?
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I’m
a historian of American politics and the economy generally. And if you
want to understand American politics and the economy, you simply have to
understand the 19th century. So much hinges on the Civil War and the
Reconstruction years. You must understand that if you’re going to
understand anything else. You have to understand the Republicans because
they ran politics for the majority of that century.
For
the most part, the major political parties are simply tools that groups
of Americans use for political ends; but do you think the GOP has any
distinctive characteristics or consistent themes that have endured
throughout its whole history?
The Republican Party is
part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality
of opportunity and protection of property — which is sort of the point
of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion — and
Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy
between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at
the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would
manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of
Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a
political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a
set of principles; it wasn’t any kind of law or codification of those
principles.
The Constitution went ahead and codified that the
central idea of America was the protection of property, so the
Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of
the Declaration of Independence’s equality of opportunity. Throughout
their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a
sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied
themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American
principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between
equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which
are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.
You
put a great emphasis on the roles Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and
Dwight Eisenhower played within the GOP and how they pulled the party,
for a time, at least, toward caring about equality of opportunity as
much as the protection of property. But did these men change the GOP of
their respective eras, or was it that they happened to be around during
moments when the GOP was in general more devoted to equality? Or perhaps
it’s not so much an either/or?
The simple answer is that
it is both. It’s a reflection of the fact that in each of their times
they lived in, the majority of Americans believed that government was
controlled by the very wealthy and they were manipulating the government
and laws to put more money into their own pockets. Wealth was very
stratified in each of those periods, and there were a lot of really
angry people. When those conditions were right, you got these three
great leaders — and in each case, they were really bucking a trend. They
were bucking a world where too many Americans felt that they no longer
had the opportunity to rise and to support their families.
All
three men were concerned about political extremism in their time, and
all three men considered tamping down extremism by promoting widely
distributed economic growth a core principle. To flip the coin, are
there any figures from the GOP’s history that come to mind when you
consider the other half of the American and Republican equation —
namely, a “small-government” focus on private property?
There
was great — and I hate to say fun, but I am a historian and I do love
to see the way patterns work out — there was great fun when I got into
the Republican reactions to the Depression. When you hear about the
Depression, you always hear about the Democrats; but, in fact, the
Republicans don’t roll over and die. They’re still very much there.
When
I started reading what they were saying back then, I was gobsmacked,
because it was the exact same language that you heard [during the
economic crises of the] 1890s and after the crash of 2008: The only
way you can fix the Depression is to cut taxes, stop the greedy
government employees from making such high salaries, cut the salaries of
people like teachers, and people need to go out and be more moral and
work harder. If I put quotations in front of you from 1890s, the
1930s and the 2000s — and didn’t tell you when they were from — you
honestly could not tell.
I want to emphasize: These people are not
evil. They don’t wake up in the morning and say, “We’re going to screw
somebody over!” Their belief in the principle of the protection of
property, they hold it as firmly, and rest it on the Constitution just
as firmly, as people like Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rest on the
Declaration of Independence and the idea of equality of opportunity.
This is a legitimate, in their minds, position, and they are defending
America by holding to it.
To name some people who embody that
other tradition, it would be people like Mark Hanna, a senator nobody’s
ever heard of who runs for Republican Party in the late 19th century …
Somebody from the Harrison administration — or better yet, President
McKinley. McKinley was all over this. In the 1920s and 1930s, it would
have to be Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover, who are both active in the
administrations of Harding and Coolidge.
And in the modern era,
you know, start picking. It starts with Buckley and Goldwater, and
Reagan … in the present day, I guess I’d go with George W. Bush or Dick
Cheney.
Has the GOP ever before been as far along the property side of the opportunity/property spectrum as it is right now?
Sure.
It was absolutely this way in the 1920s. In fact, much more strongly
[than now] because there are regulatory systems in place now that nobody
has been able to dismantle, although they would like to very much … So
the 1920s Republican Party was even more “pure” than it is now; as was
the case during the 1890s. In each of those periods, the Republican
Party was even more strongly dedicated to the protection of property.
That
being said, there is a new piece since the ‘80s in the Republican
Party, and I would argue that what we have right now is not the true
Republican Party. The true Republican Party is a very different
construct than where we are right now. The modern-day party has done
something the party has never done before — and this kind of throws a
monkey wrench into seeing where it’s going to go because the Republican
Party has always stood for education. It has always believed that
central to American democracy was the idea of education, that you must
have an educated population and that the country will only get better if
more and more people have access to better and better education.
But
if you look at policies in America since the 1980s … rather than
focusing on education, Republicans have focused on sort of a populist,
religious, in many ways anti-education, anti-science, group of voters and that will change how the next generation of the party plays out.
Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Reuters/Tami Chappell/Kevin Lamarque/photo montage by Salon)
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