What I Don't Like About Republicans

The biggest thing I do not like about Republicans is that they have lost their roots. An argument can be made that some aspects of the Republican Party go back to the Hamiltonians of Washington’s day. But if they do, the Federalists of the 1790s would not recognize them.
Hamilton was all about balance. He understood that private investment and industry drive national prosperity. He also understood that for this to happen, there must be close cooperation between government and business.
Each should work in its own sphere, but there should be COOPERATION, government making the improvements and even some of the investment to make business grow. Above all, they could not be enemies. The paranoid suspicion the private sector has today of governmental intervention or inter-action would have struck him as destructively insane.
If Hamilton were alive today he would likely be the first to point out that wars cannot be won without the help of private factories, cooperating with government. He would remind Republicans that the railroads that knitted forty-eight states together in a way that could not have happened without them were all built on government money.
The telegraph, that began the era of rapid communication, was stretched across the continent by government will. Our largest steel company was put together at the Navy Department’s behest so we could build a fleet to rival England’s.
The automobile industry—possibly the most heavily subsidized set of businesses in history—owe all of their size and heft to government assistance. (When I say this, students look puzzled. Then I ask them, “WHERE do you drive your car?” On roads and highways. “Who builds them? Where would GM or Ford be if government had not built streets and interstates?”)
Same thing is true of the airlines. Very few 747s or Airbuses land at privately built and maintained air fields. Local governments routinely give tax breaks or modify zoning codes to induce factories to build in their cities and towns.
What would we do without computers? I’m typing on one; you’re probably reading this on it. The whole computer revolution resulted from government investment—from the first one in 1939 that calculated the trajectory of naval shells to the space program that produced the desk top.
We could go on and on. Local government paved my street and forced the power company to put in street lights. The same government plows the roads so I can move in winter and, five years ago—just as my septic system was beginning to die—put in sewers. If, God forbid, there is a fire, the big red engine that responds is owned and manned by government.
Same thing for the police car that will come if I feel endangered. Government money runs the school district that makes my neighborhood as desirable as it is.
And Republicans claim to view all of this as inimical to their well-being as citizens. One can almost hear Hamilton snort in disgust. One can certainly hear the great capitalists of the Nineteenth Century harrumph and shake their heads in disbelief.
This is NOT an argument for Big Government that Democrats are accused of believing in. Not for a paternalistic government that makes us all play nice together. No, it is an argument for a government that sees its role as a servant of all its citizens—corporate as well as private. It is an argument for government that lends a hand when no one can or will.
There should always be tension—a little healthy watchfulness on both parts. Bureaucrats can be as acquisitive and power hungry as businessmen. But the fundamental attitude should be that of cooperation. Hamilton thought so. Republicans have come to believe their own anti-government rhetoric—and forgot this necessity.
Virulent distrust of everything and everyone inside the Washington beltway is not a sound basis on which to build policy—or to run a government. Republican voters, ask yourselves this. If your candidate loathes Washington so completely, what’s the real reason he’s running for office?
I don’t really have to say much about Republican feelings for the “little guy” that Democrats purport to champion. It is not surprising that when times are booming, Republicans—with their promises of lower taxes and unrestrained greed—win. When things go bust, masses of Republicans who now see themselves threatened with becoming little guys, vote Democratic.
The modern Republican Party was born in the election of 1896 as “the party of the full lunch bucket”. So I guess they’ll have to live with minority status when the lunch pail looks emptier. But it is hard to understand why there is such a knee jerk hostile reaction among Republicans at any hint that something might be done for the unfortunate or the calamity stricken.
Republicans might remember how the Biblical writer, James, answers his own question. “What is True Religion?” Yes, he calls for morality—“keep yourselves unspotted from the world”. It might also be noted at this point that most Republican urban reformers back in the 1890s were unfortunately far more concerned with the immorality of the city machines than with picking up their willingness to help the hungry and jobless.
Republicans might finally note that Herbert Croly, the “father of the New Deal” was essentially a Republican Progressive. (He was, incidentally, also a Hamiltonian.) So it is not inconceivable that Republican policy makers take up the cause of “ordinary folk”. It could win them a few elections. They could use that right now.
They should also remember what James says FIRST when he talks about True Religion: It is “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction”. I would like the party much better if it occasionally did that.
Which leads me, finally, to the Republican stance on religion—or faith—itself. Since Reagan’s election in 1980, I’ve heard a lot of moralistic talk from Republicans. This was immoral, that was unfitting. This ought to be reversed; that ought to be changed.
I’ve seen very little action and almost no results. Were they pandering to people like me or did it just not seem important once they were in office?
Whichever, my attitude toward the Republican Party and its positions on faith and morality have become pretty much what Eliza Doolittle, in “My Fair Lady”, shouted at the feckless Freddy, “Don’t talk at all! Show me!!”
I really don’t much care for either party. I’m not registered as either. But, by a narrow margin, I still have to come down on the Republican Party’s side. Not so much for what they say or even what they actually do—but for what they could be.
Perhaps futilely, I shall keep hoping.