samboct
Posts: 1817
Joined: 1/17/2007
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Hi Jen
I think your confusion stems from the fact that the Republican platform, is well, kind of low on logic at this point in time. Like religion, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on to conceal the real drivers of the Republican party- which I'm not sure have changed since Harry Truman's time. Recall that Truman won a bitterly fought election- Dewey- "You can vote for a Republican or a Communist!" to Truman- "There is a secret cabal in this country of rich businessmen who like in Italy, Germany, and Japan want to nominate a front man that they can control. We call this cabal- Republicans."
So if we start with the assumption that the core of the Republican party hasn't changed- that the people that are really running the show are those wealthy businessmen- does this help provide a framework for the Republican platform?
First- you have to figure out what those folks want...
1) They want to be richer than anybody else. A large gap between the rich and the middle class suits them fine. An even larger gap between rich and poor- great! These are the same folks that said "Good help is so hard to find" meaning that the available supply of strapping peasant girls willing to scrub floors for pennies a day is a vanishing commodity in a growing economy. In a collapsing or depressed economy- well, that's a growing population. Paying people enough to get ahead is an anathema- not because they lose money on the deal -Henry Ford showed quite conclusively that paying your workers well could make you more money than anybody else, but because it changes the master/serf relationship.
2) Change is an anathema. The people with money want to make sure they hang on to it. Economic opportunity really translates to allowing someone else to make more money that what they've got. In short- they've already won the economic game- and they want to keep it that way.
3) Like Harry Truman pointed out- getting rich matters far more than the health of the country. The businessmen in Germany took a young, but reasonably successful democracy (the idea that the Weimar Republic wasn't well liked is Nazi propaganda- be careful about what you think you know about the history of Nazi Germany) and subverted it into a hideous dictatorship- all in an effort to make certain that they stayed on top economically. The super rich are NOT patriots- their only god is money, and as long as the government allows them to keep their money and keep everybody else poor- they're fine with that.
Once you apply these three principles to the "platforms" of the Republican party- a lot starts falling into place. Perhaps the biggest change in our political system was due to Richard Nixon- when he gave his "Checkers" speech in 1952 (he wanted to run as Ike's veep and wasn't well liked, so he gave the first major televised political speech that had really big impact.) who tried to justify his slush fund- which he claimed he used for political purposes only. The amount in the fund? $18,000- less than half of his $41,000 mortgage of his house in DC. Seems to me that when Nixon became president, he removed a lot of the legal and moral restraints of contributing to political parties. Mind you, if you go back a bit over a century to the gilded age, senators were for sale and were often identified with certain corporations such as the Senator from DuPont or the Senator from such and such a railroad so there were good historical reasons to limiting corporate contributions to politicians.
The money flowing into the political process has allowed the near monopolization of the "free press"- where local news stations in many parts of the country are owned by the Fox Corporation- a corporation which makes no secret of its allegiance to the Republican party and often serves as its organ. Effectively, the branch of government that is supposed to be protecting the system- the Supreme Court- has fallen down on the job.
Nixon showed the power of deficit spending to hogtie the country- by not raising taxes to pay for the Viet Nam war, he left Carter with what seemed to be an enormous debt at the time. Carter took the logical economic response- and inflated the currency to pay the debt with cheap dollars. It wasn't popular, but it solved the problem nicely. I still expect that to happen eventually to pay for the current wars.
Ronnie ran on the platform that he'd bring inflation under control and reform social security. Rich people hate supporting poor folks-if there isn't misery- what's the fun of being rich? Unfortunately, he was thwarted in his social security reforms and yes, the system doesn't make economic sense, but it's popular with the $#@Q%#% AARP crowd who are amongst the most destructive lobbies out there. So he took the opposite tack- and raised the benefits in an effort to bankrupt the country. It's been successful. Why the Republicans want to bankrupt the country goes back to the lack of patriotism of the super rich. I don't get it- maybe they figure that they'll be able to control whatever government comes next better than they control the current one? Or maybe it just boils down to them not wanting to part with any of their money to provide services for those less fortunate and that the only way to do that is to destroy the current government which insists on trying to maintain some levels of human dignity for the less fortunate amongst us.
The law and order Republican platform is basically co-opting what used to be a Democratic plank. Democrats ran on the idea that you shouldn't have to defend yourself- that they were going to put criminals in jail. This required a large police force- which cost money, which historically, the Republicans opposed. Then Johnson figured out that putting people in jail didn't solve any of the problems as to why they went to jail in the first place, and there was an effort to rehabilitate criminals. Ronnie decided that jails just needed to be punitive- and the length of stay in the jail went up as well since prison guards voted for him. So like the defense department, the prison system grew under Republican administrations- thus driving the need for a socially conservative agenda- need more crimes to put more people in jail so that the right people make more money. It's really a subversion of historic Republican ideals as you've pointed out.
Luckily, the Bible thumpers are not so monolithic as some previous posters think and there's a big generational divide. While the older crowd may be obsessed with gay marriage, sodomy, and drug use, the younger crowd has very similar values to the younger liberal crowd- issues such as Darfur, the economy, etc are all important to them- far more so than the conservative social agenda. Since politics has been known to make strange bedfellows, don't be surprised if some of the younger bible thumping set comes over to the Democratic party.
Anyhow- does any of this help?
Sam
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RE: Something bothering me about certain republican goa... - 
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