What is the Grand Ol’ Party? Part 2

Where did people ever get the idea that the Republicans are or ever have been a conservative party?

I suppose the idea came about because of their tepid opposition to the New Deal. But the Republican party began in revolution - fanaticism and greed, destroying the Union in favour of a consolidated irresistible government. It was a weird combination of fanaticism and greed. The purpose of the Republican party has always been to use the government for the benefit of the very wealthy. To keep power it has relied on the “respectable,” unthinking middle class Northern population.

Aside from fostering Big Business, when in the course of history has the Republican party ever conserved anything?

Aside from the Goldwater episode and Trump the party has never nominated a “conservative” for President. Republican Presidents have increased spending, acquiesced in government-enforced social revolution, and given us Supreme Court appointments that with very few exceptions have disappointed conservatives.

Through most of the later 19th and earlier 20 century, the real conservatives in national position were Southern Democrats and an occasional populist from the rural Midwest. In fact, the Democrats are now what the Republicans used to be---the party of the Northern elites. Now the Republicans are “conservative” only to the extent they have absorbed former Southern Democrats. That acquisition was a completely cynical move---gathering in voters that never had any intention of listening to.

The Republicans remained firmly in the Establishment, which is “progressive” when it wants to be. Reagan made many people feel better, but in domestic affairs his position was tacit submission to the left. Just as the Republican Establishment is now tacitly submitting to the Biden revolution.

Every bad thing that we complain of about Biden’s regime was fully precedented by the Republicans under Lincoln and Grant. Everything the Biden Democrats are doing was invented by Republicans: punishment of individuals for criticizing the government, kangaroo courts, marshaling of minority voters while arming and inciting them, government financial corruption at every level, control of communication, the attempt to make a one-party state, enabling indentured foreign labour to keep American wages down, looking out for the interests of Wall Street and the big banks.

I could go on. That was what “Reconstruction” was all about.

The Democratic Senator from Massachusetts recently pushed through a law to destroy ever trace of Confederate memory from the government. (She even argued for digging up several hundred Confederate graves from Arlington, too shallow to know that a great many sons and grandsons of Confederates are buried at Arlington for their service for the U.S.)

​President Trump vetoed the bill. Congress passed it over his veto with 109 Republicans voting against their President. Some of them Southern, the shallow, empty-suit politicians who have been groomed by the Republicans for public office. The new Republican speaker of the House is one of them, already solidifying his place in the Deep State Uniparty.