Headline, September20, 2013

''' !!! THIS MAN OF CONVICTION​S : !!!

 PROFESSOR ERASTUS HAVEN !!! '''

A great privilege to recapture before you, one extract from the sweep of history. I need hardly add a word to the author's analysis and brilliance:

This Tale unfolds in the year  [July] 1854,  when a man by the name of Erastus Haven,  - a Professor of English and Latin at this great University : the University of Michigan, dared every dare to rise up and speak at the first convention of a new American Political Organisation.

For his convictions and trouble, he was hotly denounced by the Detroit Free Press,  which condemned the event as an exercise in  '' fanaticism and political charlatanry ''   and called for the ouster of the professor.

The Professor's sin was to address the just-born Republican Party, founded on the platform of  ''stopping the spread of slavery,   -and should The Professor care to return from the beyond,  he will just not recognize the party's  21st century descendants, the strong words used to describe its founding pedigree do not seem out of place today.

In recent decades the Republican Party has become something it really has not been since the Civil War: a radical insurgency bent on upending the prevailing practices of the national government seemingly at any cost whatsoever. For most of its history the Republican Party was something else entirely; a steward of the status quo. It was the Democrats who were historically on the barricades in the fight for radical change. 

But the democrats these days have turned into the stewards   -beleaguered defenders of the government and country that America has evolved into. The two great national parties have, in some fundamental sense, switched roles during the past 50 years or so. This inversion, -the loop- isn't neat or exact, but it's a substantial reality and it's substantially complete.

After their bang-up debut, successfully fighting to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery, the Republicans settled into a long run of comparative placidity and stolidity. From the gilded age to the Dawn of the Reagan era, it was the Republican self-assigned task to keep the country from changing too much or too fast   -to preserve the settled virtues and verities of national life and the natural order. To this end, the party promoted a social  Darwinian benefits free enterprise against the predations of collectivism.

Its elevating impulses waxing and waned, but it did not reflexively shrink from all use of activist government to achieve its ends. From time to time the Republicans suffered themselves to support such practical, progressive ideas as the eight-hour workday. Ulysses S Grant, the inheritance tax  (Theodore Roosevelt), anti-trust enforcement (Herbert Hoover), the inter-state highway system ( Dwight D Eisenhower), and environmental protection (Richard M Nixon).

The Republicans were never much for labor unions, social-welfare programs, or income taxes, but they displayed a general tendency over the years to accept measures once they had been enacted. BOTH parties had to cope with extremists in their ranks, of various social persuasions, but radicalism was not part of the governing ethics. Eric F Goldman, the historian who was many years of the mid-20th century the most popular lecturer at Princeton, used to say that it was his university's job to take the sons of conservative supporters of   Senator Robert A Taft of  Ohio, long known as :

''Mr Republican,'' and turn them into moderate Eisenhower Republicans.

Eisenhower himself was contemptuous of those of his party who would make radical changes in the fabric of American life. He wrote his brother Edgar, who was a right-winger, ''Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.'' He acknowledged that ''there is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things,'' he added, ''The number is negligible and they are stupid.''       

The thing about the stewardship of a slowly changing environment is that, given enough time, the ground under your feet can change completely. Beginning with Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign   -''Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice''    and accelerating with Ronald Reagan  -''Government is the problem'' - Republicans decided that the enterprise they had been stewarding all these years  -that is, life in the United States-  was no longer agreeable, or even acceptable, but instead required radical remaking.

This attitude became even more pronounced with rise of hotheaded backbenchers such as Newt Gingrich, who were candid about their goal of undermining public confidence in government so as to radically reshape it. It then blossomed into a flower mode when the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky,   -that perpetual partisan obstruction of Barrack Obama   as his only real goal, even if that means opposing legislation that he and the rest of the G.O.P. once actually agreed with.

Conservatives, are no longer, as William F. Buckley Jr. famously put it in the founding credo of National Review, simply standing

''athwart History, yelling stop.'' 

They are, instead, eager to roll history back, and are prepared to destroy the national village in order to save it. Privatize Social Security and Medicare! Eliminate inheritance taxes! Abolish the Federal Reserve! 

Once, ideas like these would have been sideshows under the Republican Big Top. Now they center the ring 

This post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Zimbabwe. See ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : '' !! Hold Tight !! ''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless