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Why Are Republicans So Damn Republican? |
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Written by Lionel Rolfe
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Saturday, 14 February 2009 |
Now that three renegade Republican senators have forced Obama to sign a stimulus bill that is woefully inadequate for the job it is supposed to do, I have been puzzling the oddness of people who are Republicans. I’m not talking about the yahoos who constitute the remnants of Reagan’s coalition of fundamentalist know-nothings and greedy plutocrats still blathering on and on about God knows what, but the three old kind of Republicans who voted for the stimulus.
I’ve always found it hard to understand why a human being who wasn’t an alien from another planet or a cyborg created by the United States Chamber of Commerce could make a principle out of denying jobless people food and medical care and a bit of a dole to maybe pay the rent.
But Republicans do that kind of thing. Granted, it is possible that some of them sometimes do the right thing, but at heart they are like scrooge, stingy with everyone but the plutocrats. Republicans are not all cannibals who devour their young. And sometimes it’s even possible some of them might even be decent on a personal level, unlike some liberals and leftists I have known. Sometimes, when they give you their word, you can take it to the bank, so to speak.
Still, all Republicans by nature are invariably draconian in their hatred of labor unions. Their heroes are the plutocrats. They don’t think it’s fair that workers should be able to organize in order to represent their interests. For the last decade or so, the Republicans have been giving the store away to Wall Street and foreign oil interests while pursuing a policy of moving manufacturing off shore. They do so for one reason only; they want to destroy the power of the organized American working class.
The Godfather of the new generation of so-called conservatives, Ronald Reagan, was driven by a hatred of people who aren’t rich. With Reagan, there obviously was an element of self-hate, because Reagan had come out of the New Deal, and had even identified with the Left. From time to time, he even had nice things to say about Roosevelt. But in the end, Reagan invariably allied himself with the plutocrats, first as governor of California and then as President of the United States.
Roosevelt was the leader of this country during the Great Depression, and most people—and some powerful statistics—suggest the New Deal, molded by the economic theories of the great mathematician John Keynes, worked. It took a few years, but Roosevelt was able to reduce unemployment from 25 percent of the population to 10 percent, just before World War II.
He did this by decriminalizing workers who organized. He established unemployment insurance and social security. He would have like to have done a medical plan, but decided that would have to be done later. Oddly, Roosevelt was more successful in saving capitalism than any Republican could ever have been, especially when you look at the Republican who preceded him. He not only saved capitalism, he kept politics democratic at a time when most people in the world were choosing between communism and fascism.
The communists had a real influence even in America. Without them, there would have never been the CIO, the industrial arm of the AFL-CIO. The communists also led agricultural workers in California, miners in Appalachia, auto workers in Detroit and port workers on the west coast. On the right, Roosevelt was being pushed by folks like Henry Ford, who would end up an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Huey Long and Father Coughlin were also pressing Roosevelt with a narrative of anti-Semitism and demagogic populism, the same formula being used by Mussolini and Hitler in Europe.
Roosevelt ended up saving the asses of the coupon clippers by making this country a more progressive democracy, a place where workers had rights as well as the rich. He reformed capitalism in order to prevent a revolution. In the face of what was occurring in Europe that was an impressive achievement. He wasn’t able to solve the national health system problem, but he pointed to a way. One of Roosevelt's favorite capitalists was Henry J. Kaiser, a steel maker, who also founded the Kaiser-Permanente health maintenance organization in the aftermath of World War II. Kaiser practiced team medicine, and was meant to provide a model for capitalism's response to socialized medicine. It has been a mixed experiment with some people speaking very highly of it and others being less enthusiastic.
Like Obama, Roosevelt was faced with a collapse caused by Republican President Herbert Hoover, who believed that the market would solve the problem. It didn’t. By the time Roosevelt took over, the economy had tanked. The banks had collapsed. Everything had ground to a halt. He used the power of government to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. The TVA brought cheap electricity to areas where there never had been electricity. Roads, bridges, libraries, post offices, hospitals and so on changed the face of the nation. Roosevelt also supported the arts, and the WPA theaters and symphonies brought a renaissance to American culture. The Republican Party was out of power for decades. But still they kept singing the same old song then as they do now. They railed on against labor unions, social security and unemployment insurance.
Republicans have an ideology. Not a very logical or convincing one, but they have one. Boiled down, it claims to represent fiscal conservatism. Neither Reagan or Bush proved to be fiscal conservatives. In Bush’s case, he bankrupted the country with a combination of his brand of unbridled and unregulated capitalism and war.
The basic thing to understand is that the “principles” of the Republican Party are a red herring. It never was about fiscal conservatism or personal liberties. The basic idea is one and one only. The protection of Greed.
The Republicans began to emerge from well-deserved obscurity with Newt Gingrich’s contract on America in the ‘90s, egged on by the likes of such cheap demagogues as Rush Limbaugh, a product of the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine.
Their highest moment was when they impeached President Clinton for his sexual practices, which, at last blush, were apparently G-rated compared to the sexual secrets of Republicans as practiced in airport restrooms and boys choirs in the churches they attended.
Newt Gingrich called his style of Republicanism “revolutionary,” which is a kind of semantic spaghetti of the worst type.
Their pap wasn’t true in the New Deal and it sure wasn’t true in the mid-'90s. It was semantic spaghetti then, and it’s semantic spaghetti now.
They keep telling me that Marxism is dead, and I guess I’ll take their word for it, but class struggle sure isn’t.
I’m a shop steward at my job now. I work in a media word factory. But my introduction to class struggle was originally of the armchair kind, meaning I listened to people talk about it and read about it in books.
Old Jack Boden was the first one to teach me about class struggle as he sat in a big, comfortable chair on the sunny porch of my grandfather’s home in Los Gatos, a five acre ranch at the top of the highest hill next door to a Novitiate.
I must have been 12 or 13 years old or so when I remember him pontificating on the evils of Roosevelt, who he said was a man who betrayed his own class. That got me interested in what the New Deal was. In Jack’s world, being a class traitor was the worse thing a man could be. Jack Boden’s view was not so different from another person born into this world as a poor Irishman. I was reading a lot of Jack London then, and one of his great descriptions was a screed against scabs, in which he talks about them having "corkscrew souls."
The difference between the two Jacks was their class allegiance. London thought of scabs as having "corkscrew souls" because they betrayed their class. Boden talked about how Roosevelt, especially Mrs. Roosevelt, were damn socialists because they were selling out their own class. The Roosevelts were descendants of the original Dutch New York patrons who founded New York City.
Boden was an ambitious lad who went to work in a bank, then married an heir of Bank of America's Giannini family, and along the way ended up as a top official of Wells Fargo Bank. Not far away from my grandparents, the Bodens lived in a mansion in Saratoga, which had many wooded acres and a private lake. It was 50 or so miles south of San Francisco. London made money too and lived on a ranch near Santa Rosa, 50 miles or so north of San Francisco. There he tried out new methods of scientific farming, welcoming some of the characters he had written about in his adventures around the world. He also carried on a heavy correspondence, invariably signing his letters, "Yours for the Revolution."
Like Jack Boden, Jack London didn’t graduate from college. But London knew the value of education, even though his education had come from reading books at the Oakland library, under the tutelage of the city librarian of the time, Ina Coolbrith—appropriately enough the same woman who had been involved in a triangle with a couple of the most notorious Bohemians of their time, Mark Twain and Brete Harte.
Boden through all of the things I venerated—libraries, universities, books, museums and orchestra—were unnecessary and even dangerous—certainly for working people who were not "responsible." While London reveled in the worlds of science and philosophy, and saw them as ways to liberate the species, Boden was uncomfortable with these things. They seemed at best tangential and at worst hostile to the business of commerce and finance, which is how he measured the world. He believed in class struggle, and engaged in it as a proud member of the plutocracy, it’s just that he had not been in the manner born.
Boden reflected the real Republican mindset toward education. Republican politicians will say they are for education, but they don’t want to have to pay taxes to provide it, and when they do, they want to control it so students are spoon fed only their point of view.
They’ve never really shared the enthusiasm for public education, which most people believe served this country well for many years. It was Reagan who launched a concerted effort on education, especially on higher education. It was he who took a university system that had not only been the best in the nation, but was purposely made to be within the financial reach of working people.
My grandfather, on the other hand, loved Roosevelt as much as Boden hated him. Because my grandfather was an immigrant who had done well in California, he had that immigrant’s outsize patriotism. But he said that without Roosevelt, there would have been no capitalism. The introduction of a social contract was what made raw capitalism work, he argued.
Even though I hadn’t quite reached puberty, Boden was already sure I was a Bolshevik, just like my grandfather. Maybe I was. His views were completely at odds with those of my grandfather, who had been a proud and loyal reader of The Nation and the New York Times for many years.
Even as a child of the ‘50s, I found Boden’s beliefs the opposite of values that made any sense. And today, whenever I hear Republican politicians, it’s obvious that Republicans still represent militant know-nothingism.
Later in life, Boden became sort of my step-grandfather, you might say. After his wife died and my grandfather died, he and my grandmother became very much an item, married if not in name, at least in spirit.
I can only say one good thing for Jack Boden. He was the original financier of Steve Jobs when Jobs was working out of a garage building the first of the Apple computers.
For me, Boden is the archetypical Republicans. Like most people who join The Grand Old Party, he was committed to waging class warfare. One Republican congressman made no bones about it—he said Republicans must emulate the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Insurgents in Iraq against Bush. Against Obama, they must be like terrorists.
So now we know the truth. Don’t think the Republicans are going away, either, even after they have destroyed this country. Even when they do the right thing, they extract a high price. They are like lurking snakes, always ready to strike and inject as much venom as they can. That is how you can explain the disembowelment of the stimulus bill by those three Republican "moderates."
Lionel Rolfe is the author of “Literary L.A., “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” “Fat Man on the Left,” which soon should be available on Amazon’s Kindle.
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