I’m not sure why but the other night I began trying to invent a different kind of definition for the word “change.” The debate in my head started thusly; if a person or party wished to return to an earlier period of time—restore things as they were—and if they were successful, should this be considered legitimate change or no? The “house” divided on this issue as my mind conjured up two powerful and equally persuasive points of view for each side of the question. Since they essentially tied, neither able to overthrow the other’s position entirely, I decided it best to set aside both and rely on political instinct in place of reasoned explication.
“Change” implies a goal, a positive achievement, a going forward; to try and reinvigorate an inequality of the past is not a healthy change at all but reaction’s negation. Since such thinking is an attempt to undo positive change, any “success” deserves a minus sign–as it would be “negative change” if the term is to be applied at all. If, after the great breakthrough moments of the Civil Rights Movement, Southern racists had been able to re-establish segregation once more, that kind of “change” would have been nothing but one giant step backwards: bigotry running amuck once again.
Granted, we might have had to concede that it was still some kind of “change” but certainly not the progressive kind of change that has come to typify American society: changes that bring us closer to fulfilling the promises upon which our nation was founded, changes that enhance and expand people’s freedom, improve their living conditions, and give education, hope, and opportunity to more and more families. I rather think the Republican Party fails to comprehend the distinction between positive change and negative change, between social progress and reactionary backsliding.
A Republican woman while talking on TV the other day used the word “nullification”. A few pundits picked up on it and batted it around in the air for a few days like a beach ball before the story disappeared. It was a term used back in the 1830s when some states wished to defy Pres. Andrew Jackson; the ultra-conservatives of that era wished to believe a state could ignore federal laws not to its liking. This thinking suffered a major defeat at the hands of Jackson and the courts since American democracy is founded on the simple premise that the Constitution is the highest law of the land. When laws are passed, they apply to the whole country; neither individuals nor states can pick and choose which ones to accept or ignore.
The same issue lurked in the background at the time of the American Civil War; the South again took the ideological viewpoint that they could ignore or nullify laws not to their liking. Curiously enough, it was the new Republican Party of that era which carried the banner for the liberation of the slave and, after the war, created suffrage rights for the freedmen. Those anti-slavery Republicans fought for positive change and passed three great amendments to the Constitution: to outlaw slavery; to grant equal protection of the law and due process to all; and to extend the vote to former slaves.
The Party platform was strongly in favor of these changes and remained so every four years as the last quarter of the 19th century progressed, but eventually—given enough presidential election cycles—the platform began transforming itself into something quite different, almost unrecognizably the opposite of what it once defended. By the 1920s a remarkable transformation had occurred; the platform by then had become the expression, the economic manifesto, of the selfish wishes of the conservative pro-business-and-pro-profit economic elites with which we are all too familiar today. Wealth fought its way to the top of the party and took control: wealth rules!
Now picture fully this historical inversion as we re-visit the female Republican leader who brought up the possibility that maybe it was time for states to “nullify” government action. In the year 2014, the Republican Party has “progressed” to the point of one Republican spokesperson suggesting openly the Party should consider adopting the same terminology used by southern states from the 1830s, a full thirty years before the Civil War! This is not responsible leadership favoring positive change and going forward; this is a wrong-way backsliding of the most embarrassing kind!
A political party of today begins to sound like the most racist elements in American society from 150 years ago! Southern plantation owners thought nullification might help them preserve Slavery. It just shows to go that when rightwing policies are morally bankrupt–because they are designed to only serve the interests of the few rather than the many–the most ridiculous inversions and idiocies become possible. The Republican Party now pursues policies which, if weighed as values on the political scales of the American Revolution, repeatedly put them far closer to the side of the British monarchy than it does to George Washington and American democracy!
The Republican Party can never be considered a party of change when the only “changes” it endorses would negate progressive equality, destroy momentum, keep the country at a standstill or move the country backward–preventing real progress. The party once had some moderate conservatives but it seems lately to have fallen under the control of right-wingers and wealthy billionaires who fight desperately against addressing the real needs of millions of Americans today. These right-wingers, however disguised, are the one-percenters who refuse to yield one cent of their wealth or budge one inch from their vaunted seats of power, both economic and political.
This is a top heavy party where the “status, power, and wealth” of the richest families matter far more than the needs and desires of average Americans. In pursuing such narrow self-serving policies, the ultra-conservatives of the Republican Party have become increasingly anti-democratic and barely remain reasonable within the political process of elections and representative modes of thought. There are fundamental democratic principles expressed in both the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, and yet the language of the founders seems far removed from the language of the modern Republican Party.
The current crop of GOP leaders are slowly moving away from our traditional American framework, ripping it up in favor of outright power and wealth.
Its anti-government chants help plant the seeds of violence everywhere; what else can you call it when they use the “big lie” technique of fascism so often? It seems the Republican Party can only “succeed” by using the propaganda of falsehoods and by stooping to unfounded attacks upon the character of the President of the United States. This party has been gerrymandering (“fixing”) targeted districts for years, substantially undermining real representative democracy in the process. The Party uses its wealth to pay for attack ads to befuddle, benumb, and brainwash Americans. It invents ways to kick people off the voting rolls, typically the poor and minorities, to help its own numbers appear more impressive. It spreads lies and rumors in equal measure about honest leaders of the Democratic Party.
The GOP contributes greatly to the low esteem many American feels for this “do nothing” Congress, for this party blocks every attempt to pass legislation and negates every presidential appeal to work cooperatively in a bilateral manner. This Congress, with its recalcitrant Republican-controlled House, holds the dubious record of fewest bills passed in the country’s history. This party maligned the president-elect from 2008 onward, casting doubt on whether he was an American when this was nothing but a derogatory bald-faced lie. What “spirit of democracy” remains in a party that chooses to place a higher premium on “palming off a lie” than on telling the truth?
Did Pres. Obama’s skin tone offend these privileged white men so much that they lost their minds in their obsession to seize upon any trifle, however fictitious, with which to insult and smear? Convinced in their delusion that they were on the right track, they ran into an unexpected wall of reality when Pres. Obama ran for re-election; despite all the money spent, lies told, and insults cast by the worst of the Republican leadership, they lost. The Democratic victory of 2012 pulverized their conceits and deceptions; their faces began showing the stress and strain of coming to terms with a new reality as their electioneering hocus-pocus blew up in their faces.
It is a well-recognized fact that today’s nation has a new demographic pattern emerging that is not particularly favorable to these soon-to-be rusted relics of a bygone era; that is why they wish to turn the hands back on the clock of time to “the good old days”, an all-out blitz to move the hands of the clock backward, not forward. They wish to recapture the social niceties of an era where only white men were presidents and there was no fact-checking, Internet, or social media to expose their dirty tricks nearly as soon as they are hatched. “Moving backward” is not positive change; it is defeat, it is political suicide, it is national chaos . . . it is the wrecking of a party’s ship upon the rocky shoals of time because real progress waits for no man and cannot be stopped by lies and insults (no matter how petty, spiteful, and vindictive).
The Party of Lincoln in 1860 has become, a century and a half later, ever more similar to the “nullifying” secessionists who opposed Lincoln–only now they are called the nullifying Tea Party extremists who oppose Obama. In both eras, the warped thinking is the same. The Republican Party has convinced itself it can do anything to anybody—can even play outside the boundaries and principles of the Constitution—whenever it finds it cannot buy, bribe, or coerce others to get its way. In this conceit, it has badly underestimated the common good sense of the American people and their fundamental commitment to fair play and democracy. They will not for long tolerate a loaded deck being used to undermine their social standing and chances for happiness.
The GOP at times behaves like a child having a temper tantrum to the detriment of our healthy democracy, since the current leadership no longer abides by the rules and beliefs of a democratic nation. The Republican Party arrogantly thinks it can escape these impossible dualities, these clashing contradictions, by moving backward, by wishfully trying to escape real solutions by going farther and farther back in time—but in so doing, it inevitably arrives at a point where its thoughts and actions clearly contradict the bedrock ideals and principles of our nation; indeed, the GOP’s agenda should be seen as entirely hostile and antithetical to the very heart and nature of our Democracy.
