Lincoln's Republican Party
Letter to the Coaster Editor, Dec. 10 2009
Not mine but, it's the 2nd one worth saving.
==========================================
Repeating History
Editor, Coaster:
We've been through this before in these very pages of The Coaster. Like the characters in an old episode of the Twilight Zone, we seem to be forced to relive what has already happened whether we like it or not. We're forever cursed to have to revisit the same old refuted takes on history by people who pretend to know all about it. Michael Fornio has implied that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican by today's standards and that Republicans were responsible for the Civil Rights Act being passed. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
While Lincoln was indeed a Republican, the Republican party of Lincoln's day was something that today's Republicans wouldn't recognize. Lincoln wouldn't be accepted by today's Republicans for the simple reason that he was a liberal by today's standards. Today we hear incessantly from the Republicans about states' rights while Lincoln used the full force of the federal government to coerce states to comply with a federal standard regarding slavery. The Southern states didn't agree, so we fought a war over it. Can you imagine the uproar from the Right if that happened today? They'd be calling the President a "liberal" and a "socialist" at the top of their lungs! The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Northern liberals over the objections of Southern conservatives. Members of both parties voted on both sides of the issue, but it was most definitely opposed by conservatives, and today's Republican party is completely conservative except for a few moderates that the party won't support. And when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he said that by doing so he had lost the South for the Democrats for a generation. That's why the base of today's Republican party is in the South.
So it's clear that conservative politics has been on the wrong side of the issue yet today's ultra-conservative Republican spin doctors think they can trick its unsuspecting rank-an-file into promoting a revisionist history that portrays them as Good Guys even as they continue to support the politics of the Old South.
RS, Ocean Grove
With permission
Not mine but, it's the 2nd one worth saving.
==========================================
Repeating History
Editor, Coaster:
We've been through this before in these very pages of The Coaster. Like the characters in an old episode of the Twilight Zone, we seem to be forced to relive what has already happened whether we like it or not. We're forever cursed to have to revisit the same old refuted takes on history by people who pretend to know all about it. Michael Fornio has implied that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican by today's standards and that Republicans were responsible for the Civil Rights Act being passed. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
While Lincoln was indeed a Republican, the Republican party of Lincoln's day was something that today's Republicans wouldn't recognize. Lincoln wouldn't be accepted by today's Republicans for the simple reason that he was a liberal by today's standards. Today we hear incessantly from the Republicans about states' rights while Lincoln used the full force of the federal government to coerce states to comply with a federal standard regarding slavery. The Southern states didn't agree, so we fought a war over it. Can you imagine the uproar from the Right if that happened today? They'd be calling the President a "liberal" and a "socialist" at the top of their lungs! The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed by Northern liberals over the objections of Southern conservatives. Members of both parties voted on both sides of the issue, but it was most definitely opposed by conservatives, and today's Republican party is completely conservative except for a few moderates that the party won't support. And when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he said that by doing so he had lost the South for the Democrats for a generation. That's why the base of today's Republican party is in the South.
So it's clear that conservative politics has been on the wrong side of the issue yet today's ultra-conservative Republican spin doctors think they can trick its unsuspecting rank-an-file into promoting a revisionist history that portrays them as Good Guys even as they continue to support the politics of the Old South.
RS, Ocean Grove
With permission
posted by Mario | 5:43 PM
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