The GOP is Not the Party of Abe Lincoln

The “defection” of long-term GOP staffer Mike Lofgren has been a recent topic of discussion on shows like Hardball. Chris Matthews’ segment on the former Congressional staffer, who left office after a 28-year career, and the hubbub over his recently published article sheds confirming light on what you and I have known for years: the GOP is not working for the good of the nation.

When long-term members of either party “come out” with such revelations, I often wonder about their motives for doing so. Not this time. Lofgren begins by spelling out his reason for leaving the fray:

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

Lofgren continues, providing stunning examples to illustrate his points.

As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

That very passage sums-up many thoughts that have floated around in my mind over the past few years. It is obvious to me that we are suffering from the fully developed “creature” that was an embryo during the Nixon Administration. Both Nixon and Reagan experienced political failure on multiple occasions while vying for the White House. Nixon — who was once referred to as the “man who would be king” — stumbled into complete failure based on the now infamous desperation tactic that was Watergate. Meanwhile, Reagan withdrew to editorial writing and radio shows in order to effectively re-tool while building a Right wing base. That very base was the embryo that developed into modern republicanism. Today, the Tea Party is the logical mutation of this overdeveloped “creature” from the Right.

Lofgren also addresses this mutation in terms of right wing tactics:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Clearly agenda driven and dangerous!

I recently re-watched FDR’s “they hate me” videos and his campaign comments related to the pre-1940 GOP. He faced many of the very same issues from the GOP as we face today. The party is not the party of the people. From resistance to Social Security through the recently manufactured national debt ploy, I cannot find evidence of one initiative or legislation that seems to exist for the good of the average American citizen.




Since I am on the topic of people, I must take it to a place where some avoid: ‘the other’ and ’those people’. Lofgren writes:

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama’s policy of being black.[2]Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some “other,” who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

As I watched the GOP debate I visually surveyed the crowd. They looked very much like the crowds featured on most television segments about the Tea Party in that they follow one common thread: few if any people of color. The one and only point that I am making here is my personal observation of a complete lack of diversity. Say what you will, but I see audiences that are not representative of factual national demographics. On the other hand, look at the crowds featured at the President’s speech in Detroit, Michigan this week. The crowd was visibly diverse; I felt like I was seeing America.

While treading carefully on the topic, Lofgren adds validation to this observation. Is the nation truly one of invisible people of color and invisible young people? Of course not. Thus, my observations of those events and Tea Party rallies conclude that they are the result of regressive paradigms from the Right. How wasteful are such paradigms? The nation’s demographics are shifting. Non-Hispanic whites are already the minority in three states, including two of the nation’s largest (California, Texas), and many analysts predict that they will be a minority of the entire nation by 2050.

If Lofgren is presenting credible information, and if my observations have merit, how serious a matter is the Right’s impact on the nation? Damned serious!

We often hear the likes of Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Gingrich and the ”Gang of Eight” reaching back a half century for examples of how America “WAS.” Paul talks about his disdain for FEMA at a time when the weather-related remnants of Hurricane Irene are still laying a destructive path. Romney mentions 1979! Why would anyone aspire to reach back to 1979? And of course, they all reach back to Ronald Reagan, as if to automatically generate some type of impact based on his moniker of “the feel good president.” Please. Reagan was not even a “real world” fiscal conservative!

For me, Lofgren’s article moves through the GOP agenda with the thoroughness of an AARP marketer looking for ways to find and communicate with anyone so much as approaching 50 years of age. Not only does Lofgren deconstruct current GOP tactics with amazing detail, he also provides a very credible analysis for what he calls the “three principle tenets” of today’s Republican Party. To quote Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast and Newsweek Magazine, who also writes about Lofgren’s article: if you haven’t read it, you must.