[img]583|left|Eric L. Wattree||no_popup[/img]Is the modern Republican Party really “the party of Lincoln,” and responsible for freeing the slaves?
I don’t think so.
But the GOP regularly, with a straight face, makes the claim. One Republican recently confronted me and stated:
“It was Republicans who beat Democrats in the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves. It was Democrats who started the KKK as its military wing to intimidate the (largely black) Republican party who were running the South after the war. Can a leopard change its spots? Are the Democrats now the party for the black people after being against them for so long? Many of you are duped by the devil's trickery. A few table scraps from massa's table and you run right back to his side. The Democrat is the racist.”
The above assertion is a prime example of how many Republicans can take a kernel of truth and create a banquet of lies. The truth is, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. So were Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King. But since the Civil War the Republican and Democratic parties have completely changed their relative political positions, so relative to political philosophy that the modern Republican party bears no relationship to its predecessor.
Prior to the Civil War the Republican Party was made up of big business interests and Northern aristocrats. The Democratic Party was made up of Dixiecrats and Southern agrarian interests, farmers and slave owners. Thus, the Republicans were progressive liberals and the Democrats (or Dixiecrats) were Southern conservative slave owners.
An Avalanche of Change
That began to change during the Great Depression when Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came out against the corporations and ran to the aid of the poor with his “New Deal for the American people.” With the New Deal, Democrats ushered in workers’ rights. They created Social Security so the elderly wouldn't have to go to the poor house or become a burden on their children when they became too old to work.
The Democrats also created unemployment insurance so people would have something to fall back on if they lost their jobs and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set rules of conduct for corporations that allowed workers a semblance of dignity. The new law set a minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor standards and other regulations protecting workers.
Prior to Fair Labor Standards, corporations could work employees as many hours as they liked. They often set wages so low families had to send their children to work just to survive. Children were maimed or killed because they had to work under the most horrific conditions, such as in coal mines and the like.
After President Roosevelt brought relief with these “big government, socialist programs,” the Democratic party became associated with the common man. Meanwhile, the Republican party embarked upon a single-minded mission to reverse bleeding heart liberal policies and return America to the status quo.
During the 1950s, the Democratic party came out in support of the civil rights movement. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Dixiecrats became disenchanted with the Democrats and migrated to the Republican party. At the same time, Southern Blacks began leaving the Republican party to align with Democrats.
A Party with Three Wings
Thus the Republican party is a coalition of three separate constituencies with confluent interests. First is traditional conservatives, highly patriotic Americans who believe in limited government, the primacy of the people over government and fiscal responsibility. The other two groups are more malevolent, international business interests and social bigots.
International business, made up of wealthy and highly educated individuals with huge amounts of monetary resources, and thus, political influence, control the GOP. Using their leverage, they manipulate what has become their citizen army, the social bigots who hate everybody who doesn’t look, think and act as they do.
We see social bigots armed to the teeth at Presidential speeches, disrupting town hall meetings and fighting against their own interests. These are the “Joe the Plumbers” of the world deluded by corporatist propaganda. Among their ranks are diehard racists fighting to promote a segregationist agenda.
Social bigots are merely the soldiers. Corporatists never have lost sight of their 70-year-old mission, to undo the New Deal. They have found the safety net President Roosevelt provided is too popular to attack head on. They devised a plan to chip away at the foundation.
When 9/11 struck, Republicans decided to use the war in Iraq to ravage the national treasury. They gave themselves a $4 trillion tax cut to deplete the treasury. Now they tell the poor and middle class, “Sorry, we no longer have revenue to fund programs you have come to depend on the past 70 years.”
Meantime, Gov. Scott Walker is hard at work in Wisconsin trying to dismantle the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Can a leopard change spots? Yes with regard to the Democratic and Republican parties. But the modern GOP never has been prone to allowing the facts to distort a well-crafted lie. That is why they have a fierce aversion to a well-educated electorate.
Facts dictate that the modern GOP’s claim to a connection with President Lincoln is not only a gross misrepresentation of history, but a blatant lie. If the Civil War were being fought today, the GOP would be the Confederacy.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
