The Republican Party is broken. But we live in a country with a two-party system. For that reason, I want the Republican Party to reform itself and function as a legitimate alternative to the Democratic Party. So, I thought I’d lay out some of the things that I want the Republican Party to do.
Democrats want to offer all Americans access to health care, including subsidized access to prescription drugs. I want the Republicans to resist the temptation to give away an open-ended entitlement that would give every American the right to live forever through limitless organ transplants and other medical procedures. I want them to insist on a limited prescription drug benefit that focuses on life-saving drugs, not life enhancing drugs like Viagra.
Democrats want to enact Hate Crimes legislation that would add penalties to crimes deemed to be committed against certain minority groups. I want the Republicans to resist such attempts and instead increase the reach of existing civil rights statutes.
Democrats often clamor for handgun control. I want the Republicans to help close the gun show loophole and insist that gun owners are registered and trained to use their weapons. But, Republicans should protect the right of ordinary citizens to own handguns.
Democrats correctly want to improve the quality of the air and water in this country. I want Republicans to make sure that efforts to regulate pollution take into consideration the impositions such regulation has on businesses.
The Republicans are supposed to stand for limited government. They represent people that want to be left alone to conduct their business, that don’t want a huge portion of their income taxed. They are also supposed to support people that do not want their personal communications monitored. They are supposed to represent the ‘live free of die’ credo. But, under Bush, they are failing on all fronts.
Spending is through the roof. The government is becoming entangled in more and more areas of civilian life, including faith-based organizations. The President has passed enormous new programs, including the No Child Left Behind bill and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. We are engaged in a never ending Global War on Terrorism. And the government is doing more snooping on ordinary citizens than at any time in our past.
The country needs a Republican Party that functions and that represents the values it purports to represent. But, we don’t have that right now. We have a party in power that pretends to support small government and civil liberties, but that, in reality, does not support small government and civil liberties.
We have a government that is controlled by big business interests and supported by religious fundamentalists. As bad as the Democrats are, it is the broken Republican Party that is the biggest danger to the Republic.
I have never been a Republican. And even if the Republicans reformed themselves, I still wouldn’t vote for them. Yet, for the sake of the nation, I hope the Republicans shake themselves out of their stupor and return to their roots.
The country needs and deserves to have two functioning parties that balance out the competing interests of the rich and the poor, the employers and the employees, and the socially conservative versus the socially progressive. We don’t have that now.
I used to believe in a competitive two-party system. I used to believe that the human race was moving forward, that liberals were the dreaming engine that powered progress and conservatives were the rational voice that kept us going in the right direction. I used to believe that the system worked best when both parties served their roles for the benefit of the nation and world.
Then I studied politics and history and law, got degrees in each of them, and realized that the system has never been anything close to my ideal. People are imperfect, the progressive party has rarely been progressive, the conservative party has rarely been truly conservative, and narrow self-interested greed dominates most political thinking.
This has gotten significantly worse during my lifetime, you’re right that the Republican party in particular has completely abandoned all of the values they used to espouse, and I’m not sure if there is any way to turn it around. How do you inject values like honesty and integrity back into the process when the corporations that own the media are themselves a major culprit in the sacrifice of public interest on the altar of profit?
The roots you speak of are fantasies. The GOP, at least for the last half-century, has never championed civil liberties or conservative (ie Adam Smith) economic policy. It has been strictly the fifth column for corporate fascism. Its most awesome achievement was persuading small business owners and farmers that their interests somehow coincided with those of the party’s corporate clients — Probably the most stunning propaganda victory in American political history, unless you prefer the loyalty the GOP extracts from the “religious” right toward the social darwinists who control it.
In other words, the modern Republican Party depends for its survival on the stupidity and know-nothing beliefs of a sizable portion of the population. For all its many flaws, the Democratic Party does not. Since there’s no prospect of the GOP returning to the Lincoln era, I don’t think there’s anything there to go back to. Stupidity and ignorance are not valuable, and corporate greed unleashed is not desirable. And that’s all they got.
When I saw your headline, Boo, I thought I was finally going to agree with you all the way. But no. You were just talking about the GOP. You had it right in the beginning: the two party system is broken. Always has been. The founders explicitly didn’t want one and they were right. As long as you have a duopoly you will not have representative government — the prime directive of both parties will always be to keep things pretty much as they are. The role of the GOP is to posture about the horrible dangers of “communism” and “socialism”, and the role of the Dems is to do the minimum reform that will defang any threat to the ruling juntas. That means dismissing without discussion any and all ideas that stray outside the dull synthesized “middle”.
Short of a Constitutional Convention to officially break the two party system, the only hope for true representative government would be radical reform that takes money out of politics. It’s also the final test of whether there is anything in the current system that should not be tossed in the nearest dumpster and forgotten.
when did you become such a centrist? :p
I think that the Republicans’ opposition to limitless organ transplants, etc, might interfere with their supposed ‘live free of die’ credo 🙂
I agree totally with Dave W. Well said.
The results you get are the product of the system you have. The results also include the actual people who pop up as leaaders.
It’s a two party system. The emphasis should be on the word “a” and not on the word “two”. It’s a singularity.
It’s, in fact a Hegelian Dialectic in full bloom. It’s also a scam.
Like a couple of tennis players, they have agreed on the rules, exclude other players and put on a show of competition having agreed on everything except who is going to win. That’s OK for entertainment especially where people are free to go and play and even create their own games. But politics is different.
Dave, could you expand on your comment about the authors of the Constitution being against the two party system?
Any meaningful democracy would require more than 2 political parties. What we’ve had for quite a long time is 1 corporate party with 2 heads. We should be insisting on proportional representation. Most modern countries have this and thus have actual political parties which actually provide representation to different groups in the population with different interests. This set-up also allows for votes of no confidence and collapse of the necessary alliances which grow out of a system where no party can have absolute power. If we had that, we wouldn’t be where we find ourselves today.
It’s an academic question, but important nonetheless. Exactly when did the Republican Party turn into the monster that it now is? As the above posts note, that date goes back at least to the 1940s, when Richard Nixon was still in the House, and probably to the 1920s, when the Republicans took over the more vicious features of Woodrow Wilson’s regime change of 1917. But they were once a respectable party, and remnants survived until recently (and among their electorate, even today). What happened? How did it happen?
FDR was clearly a turning point. They hated him with a passion that anyone who didn’t live through it (I only lived through my non-politically conscious years)cannot imagine or sense. Part of it was resistance among the WASP elite to the Americanization of the great wave of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration, which created a body of citizens who had no connection to the Revolution or the Civil War. Part of it was simple greed. Whatever it was, we need a good history of American conservatism, and how it became not conservative, but reactionary, and in recent times, proto-fascist.
but with reports like this, ‘taint gonna happen in our lifetime…
WASHINGTON (AP) — Protection of marriage amendment? Check. Anti-flag burning legislation? Check. New abortion limits? Check.
Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.
In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40 percent, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.
“It seems like for only six months, every two years — right around election time — that we’re even noticed,” said Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council.
“Some of these better pass,” he added. “You notice when it’s just lip service being paid.”
Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer agreed that the effort matters.
“If they get to these things this summer, which we expect that they will, that will go a long way toward energizing the values voters at the base of the Republican Party,” said Bauer, head of Americans United to Preserve Marriage.
Killing thousands of innocent people in an illegal war? People losing jobs left and right? Millions without health care? Who the hell cares — got to keep them damn gays from marrying and stop those damn librul commies from desecrating the Amurican flag, Emma! And let’s not forget saving the lives of all those future taxpayers (assuming they can find jobs to pay taxes on)…