The Grand Old Party

In 1975 my maternal grandmother died. I was only 5 or 6 years old. I don’t really remember her, although I remember the road trip we took to attend her funeral.

Before long my grandfather who was already 73 years old was remarried to a woman that he had known for many years, and whom had lost her husband a few years earlier. She became known in our family as ‘Grandmary’.

My Grandfather died at the age of 98, but Grandmary is still alive today, still going strong into her 90’s. Last year she visited me and I took her to see the brand new Constitution Center here in Philadelphia.

:::flip:::
As we walked around the center we came to a display that asked us to vote for our favorite American president. It didn’t offer a list of all the presidents and it was heavily biased toward 20th-century selections. I chose FDR. Grandmary chose Eisenhower.

I raised my eyebrow. Grandmary could remember every President since Taft; she lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, l’affair Lewinsky.

She never struck me as a conservative. But she didn’t see Eisenhower as a conservative. She saw him as a man who led this country with honor. He didn’t leave us with a legacy of deception, there was no war, there were no second term humiliations.

A close examination of Eisenhower’s two-terms will bring up plenty to criticize, including some pretty big whoppers, including McCarthyism, including the U2 plane incident. But he gave us seven years of peace and prosperity, and he left the country stronger than he found it.

More importantly, Eisenhower led the GOP back to some degree of respectability. When Lyndon Johnson wanted to pass the Civil Rights Act, he found a higher percentage of allies in the GOP than he found in the Democratic Party.

Goldwater famously voted against it and began the long downward slide of the GOP into the moral morass we see today.

Today’s modern GOP is built on the ashes of the 1964 election and the resentment of the Civil Rights Act. It’s built on hostility to the Warren Court that brought us desegregated schools, an end to mandatory school prayer, and our Miranda rights.

The GOP combined its traditional pro-business, anti-communist stance, with a new emphasis on racist and xenophobic and evangelical populism. Take a look at the modern Air Force Academy and you can see all the evils of the GOP condensed into one relatively small campus.

This modern GOP is born of opposition to all of the things we are most proud of in the post-war era: Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, multilateralism and the United Nations, an emphasis on human rights in foreign policy.

And now we are witnessing a GOP that tolerates torture, indefinite detainment of American citizens, rampant graft and corruption in its leaders, and even the travesty of Plamegate.

After 37 years of predominately Republican rule we are wondering whether Roe v. Wade might be overturned.

Our 20th-Century leaders were almost uniformly disappointments. Looking back, perhaps only Eisenhower and the two Roosevelts can be considered great Presidents that did little to dishonor our nation. We need the GOP to honor the legacies of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. We need two viable, moral, ethical parties.

The rank and file members of the GOP need to stand up and be counted. They need to say ‘no’ to this administration, before it is too late.

Grandmary deserves that.