{"id":4870,"date":"2009-10-25T14:55:48","date_gmt":"2009-10-25T21:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=4870"},"modified":"2009-10-25T14:55:48","modified_gmt":"2009-10-25T21:55:48","slug":"continual-battles-against-the-ahistorical-the-republican-party-of-1948-through-the-50s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2009\/10\/25\/continual-battles-against-the-ahistorical-the-republican-party-of-1948-through-the-50s\/","title":{"rendered":"Continual battles against the ahistorical: the Republican Party of 1948 through the 50s"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m frequently surprised by this ahistoricality, or this lack of sense of political history, even from sources that seem\u00c2\u00a0 like they should have it who nonetheless betray themselves in a need to make a political pot shot.\u00c2\u00a0 This shot from 1948<\/a>, to the prominent crooks and liars blog,\u00c2\u00a0fails where the blog generally shows they don’t have to fail.<\/p>\n

The obvious difference between the Republican Party of 1948 and the Republican Party of 2009 is the absence of the lunatic fringe then, which today appears to be driving away all those sane and moderate voices that would otherwise aid in the healing process and perhaps steer the party in a constructive direction.<\/em><\/p>\n

Like Newt Gingrich singing the praises of George McGovern <\/a>in order to suggest that unlike Barack Obama, he was decent and pro-American. \u00c2\u00a0The one that keeps getting me? \u00c2\u00a0 Turn on Thom Hartmann and you’ll invariably come to the line, as per the repetitive nature of talk radio, about Republicans needing to force the party back to Dwight D Eisenhower’s Republican Party.\u00c2\u00a0 This woud be all good and wll, except that in crucial ways, the party was never Dwight D Eisenhower’s.\u00c2\u00a0 “I’m not going to discuss personalities” was Eisenhower’s line whenever a figure of the media propped up a question about Joseph McCarthy — who was, in 1952, probably the most popular figure within the Republican Party.\u00c2\u00a0 Take a good look at the party platform for that year<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe we were all insane in 1950, hanging onto the seat of our pants forcing a bleached white culture\u00c2\u00a0against the backgrop of Nuclear Annihlation, trying to assemble where the hell the Societ Union found the wherewithall to drop an H-Bomb, and who allowed Stalin to take control of half of Europe.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m jumping around and swarthing together a few years into the future with the 1948 Dewey date there, but we can’t describe an “absence of the lunatic fringe” when arguably the Republican Party was all but made up of such things — busily equating Roosevelt and Truman’s New and Fair Deals with Soviet Communism, and having to swallow Thomas Dewey in the manner they had to swallow the candidacy of Willkie.\u00c2\u00a0 Joseph McCarthy himself backed the presidential boomlet of Douglas MacCarthur, wearily fired by Truman in a “Profiles in Courage” moment<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 The “We elected the wrong General” thought would remain extent for the next half century, and still today I can find you someone saying that.<\/p>\n

This article in the American Prospect<\/a> does a better job of tying post New Deal right-wing ideology and tying to to today’s, though I view it as a bit too straightened into a neat little box.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, we have the “tea-parties”.\u00c2\u00a0 A good poll of where that audience stands would show them as pointed to the politicians of Sarah Palin and Ron Paul — two different politicians described here and abouts as “Jacksonian” and “Jeffersonian”, to which you can roll your eyes and mutter “Yeah, whatever.”\u00c2\u00a0 There are other politicians like that worth a glancing look — Texas Governor Rick Perry, who I suppose might be “Calhournian”?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Throw in Glenn Beck, and I have no idea how to go about Vinn Diagramming their supporters.\u00c2\u00a0 Ron Paul’s crowd is taking to heckling Lindsey Graham and pushing primary challengers in Connecticut and Kentucky — it’s a discordant splinter of the Republican Party.\u00c2\u00a0 Sarah Palin, meanwhile, has just endorsed\u00c2\u00a0the third party candidacy of\u00c2\u00a0Doug Hoffman<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Palin threatened to do this when she formed “SarahPac”, and I’m guessing she may be in the market for a Southern Democratic state legislative candidate to throw her support for to argure a weird sort of “cross-partisanship”.\u00c2\u00a0 But this strikes me as sort of interesting, because it suggests\u00c2\u00a0vague\u00c2\u00a0 rumblings for political party breakdown, what with a Republican Party garnering 20 percent of the electorate, a Democratic Congress with low low approval ratings themselves, and a Democratic President playing a bit too much footsy with marginal Republican Senators.<\/p>\n

To which I have the question — how many Sarah Palins and Ron Pauls would it take for a Congressional breakdown like that following the 1854 Congressional Elections<\/a>?<\/p>\n

The 1854 election was the beginning of the end for both the Democratic and Whig Parties. Party lines were very blurred and a minority government was formed. Democrats lost a huge number of seats in the North due to the impending slavery crisis, but remained the largest party in the House. The American Party (commonly known as the “Know-Nothings”), a faction based on the fears of immigration and Catholicism which had won several seats in previous elections, became the second largest group. The large influx of immigrants from Catholic <\/em>Ireland<\/em>, escaping the potato famine, and from Catholic Southern <\/em>Germany<\/em>, departing due to political and economic instability, shocked many American Protestants and allowed the American Party to grow. The Whigs, divided over the issue of slavery, lost several seats and began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, the newly-formed Republican Party, which was anti-slavery and pro-industry, quickly became a force in the North. In the end, the Democrats and a large number of American Party representatives allied to become the largest faction, although they still did not hold a majority.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Party<\/th>\nTotal seats (change)<\/th>\nSeat percentage<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Democratic Party<\/td>\n84<\/td>\n-73<\/td>\n33.3%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
American Party<\/td>\n62<\/td>\n+62<\/td>\n24.6%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whig Party<\/td>\n60<\/td>\n-11<\/td>\n23.8%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Republican Party<\/td>\n46<\/td>\n+46<\/td>\n18.3%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Totals<\/strong><\/th>\n252<\/th>\n+18<\/th>\n100%<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

That took the two dominant parties not getting anything done, and becoming politically thought of as merely doling out patronage to themselves, ignoring the vital issues of the day and hemming and hawing about the future of Slavery.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The best we can do\u00c2\u00a0in the past several decades (post 1968 and the Wallacites) to disrupt two-partyand baffled the currents of 2\u00c2\u00a0political party harmony\u00c2\u00a0is\u00c2\u00a0to insert Ross Perot into a presidential election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m frequently surprised by this ahistoricality, or this lack of sense of political history, even from sources that seem\u00c2\u00a0 like they should have it who nonetheless betray themselves in a need to make a political pot shot.\u00c2\u00a0 This shot from 1948, to the prominent crooks and liars blog,\u00c2\u00a0fails where the blog generally shows they don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4872,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4870\/revisions\/4872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}