What I Like About Republicans

What I like about Republicans is almost more historical than current. I am not at all happy with much of the political dogma that seems to afflict the party today. But there are a few bedrock principles that still underlie much of the party, making it possible for me to call myself one.
Republicans are under no illusions about what actually supports the entire national and governmental edifice. Private Enterprise. Private businesses that pay TAXES, and pay employees who pay TAXES, all of whom own property which is also TAXED. To paraphrase the song from “Cabaret”, it is TAXES “that makes the world go ‘round”.
If Obama is going to improve education, repair health care, and slog on in Afghanistan—let alone repair roads and other infrastructure across the nation, it is TAXES and only taxes that will pay for it all. The Sierra Club, the Gay Pride outfits, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO may all contain good hearted and wonderful folk, but they don’t PAY for anything.
They can’t. They don’t EARN. They do not generate money. Business—employers—generate cash. However greedy they may have been, however reckless their behavior, it is business and finance who create the monetary resources with which governments carry out their policies.
We can see what happens when governments or parties lose sight of that reality in the history of 16th Century Spain or 17th and 18th Century France. Both enjoyed military victories and, especially in Spain’s case, huge infusions of capital.
Both nations forgot to invest it in businesses that could grow the money. They saw business as merely a cash cow to be milked for the government’s purposes. Business stagnated, often never took root. Spain fizzled into a third rate power by 1700 and France collapsed into a fundamentally self-destructive revolution in 1789.
Shall we talk about what a governmental stranglehold on the means of production did for the Soviet Union after 1917? We didn’t actually knock it down; it collapsed of its own inefficiencies in 1989. This should be an economic horror story for us to frighten children with for generations.
Look at what the Labor Government of Great Britain did to British industry during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It nationalized everything in sight—and Britain, long a world class industrial power house, fell into stagnation and decay.
There is the risk that our current Democratic administration, in the guise of correcting excesses, may step too hard on the part of American business that has always paid our freight by growing, hiring and paying a reasonable tax on profits.
Republicans do understand this, better than Democrats. Historically, going back to the Whigs of the mid-Nineteenth Century, often too recklessly, often too ruthlessly, they created wealth. Even in their depredations, they generated the capital that built the society we enjoy today.
Restrain them, regulate them—but be very careful not to cut off the air supply and strangle them! (FDR understood this, even if many of his adherents did not.)
The practical side of me likes the Republicans for the above reason. The religious and moral side of me (while often holding my nose) prefers the Republicans for another reason.
Despite the rampant hypocrisy, the overwhelming number of cases in which moral preachments are honored strictly in the breach, the Republican Party at least pays lip service to the notion that there is a higher morality that supersedes questions of “fairness” and “constitutional rights”.
Whether we like it or not, this nation was founded by men who believed that. Washington and Adams certainly did. In his old age, even Franklin came around to something close to that opinion. And Jefferson, who is the patron saint of the modern day liberal Democrat, could swear “on the altar of Almighty God” when he felt strongly enough.
Jefferson could look at the Compromise of 1820—which secured the future of slavery—and state publicly that “when I consider that God is Just, I tremble for my country.”
I firmly believe that there is other and older and higher law than merely the Constitution, the Acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court. I support them all; I could take the Presidential Oath and swear to support them—but there is a morality that is higher than they are.
(People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that. It was at the core of their inner strength. It made them able to endure beatings, imprisonment and official condemnation. I suspect there may be people like that on the streets of Tehran today.)
Republicans more closely sense this reality than do their colleagues across the aisle. As someone who fundamentally agrees with the underlying attitude that enabled King and Gandhi to act as they did, I am—for now—more comfortable in the Republican Party.
I was—and this will horrify many—completely comfortable with George W. Bush’s religious certitude. He made some bone headed decisions; he either took no sensible advice or he didn’t listen well—but the fact that he held firmly onto his Christian beliefs stands to his credit for me.
This is not a popular position; many Republicans repudiate it. But enough do not so that, for this time, I must continue to stand with (and vote for) most Republican candidates.
On the issue of a practical view of business, finance and taxes and on the issue of the existence of a morality that is not dependent on anyone’s view of “fairness”, I remain a Republican.