Eric Rauchway: The GOP has spent more than a century demonizing Democrats
[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ]
Last month National Public Radio listeners said they were shocked when former House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay explained why he wouldn't talk to Democratic lobbyists: "Why would I meet with an enemy?" But in saying that anybody "who wanted to make me the minority whip" was not just a political opponent, an American with legitimate if differing interests, but rather an enemy to be shunned, DeLay wasn't speaking some strange, new, fanatical language, he was using the vocabulary Republicans have traditionally relied on to rally support.
The Republican Party began as a crusade against the enemy within, and it has never strayed far from its origins. The early Republicans deserve full marks for identifying and waging a war to expunge a real domestic threat to the United States--the institution of chattel slavery. Slaveholders really did constitute a mortal threat, not only to the United States, but to the cause of liberty generally, and Abraham Lincoln rightly identified the establishment of a racial caste of bonded labor as "one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove."
We less often remember that those mid-nineteenth-century Republicans found slavery only about as threatening as the possibility that marriage might occur among people other than just a man and a woman. The first Republican Party platform considered it the "imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism--Polygamy, and Slavery."
This generous definition of enemies within became a staple of Republican rhetoric. "In all quarters ... this country is becoming honeycombed through and through by disintegrating forces," presidential candidate James Garfield said in 1880. He meant labor unions, debtors, and Francophiles who were "letting 'the red foulfury of the Seine' run riot among our people." His successor as Republican nominee in 1884, James G. Blaine, picked on the Mormons for their multiple marrying ways: They "must learn that the liberty of the individual ceases where the rights of society begin."
Americans could only keep their unruly fellow citizens in check if they elected Republicans, who easily identified their party with the nation. As Calvin Coolidge said in 1924, "We had better stick to the American government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American." Back in 1880, Garfield had put it well: "In a time like this, more than ever before, this country needs a body of law-givers clothed and in their right minds."...
Read entire article at New Republic
Last month National Public Radio listeners said they were shocked when former House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay explained why he wouldn't talk to Democratic lobbyists: "Why would I meet with an enemy?" But in saying that anybody "who wanted to make me the minority whip" was not just a political opponent, an American with legitimate if differing interests, but rather an enemy to be shunned, DeLay wasn't speaking some strange, new, fanatical language, he was using the vocabulary Republicans have traditionally relied on to rally support.
The Republican Party began as a crusade against the enemy within, and it has never strayed far from its origins. The early Republicans deserve full marks for identifying and waging a war to expunge a real domestic threat to the United States--the institution of chattel slavery. Slaveholders really did constitute a mortal threat, not only to the United States, but to the cause of liberty generally, and Abraham Lincoln rightly identified the establishment of a racial caste of bonded labor as "one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove."
We less often remember that those mid-nineteenth-century Republicans found slavery only about as threatening as the possibility that marriage might occur among people other than just a man and a woman. The first Republican Party platform considered it the "imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism--Polygamy, and Slavery."
This generous definition of enemies within became a staple of Republican rhetoric. "In all quarters ... this country is becoming honeycombed through and through by disintegrating forces," presidential candidate James Garfield said in 1880. He meant labor unions, debtors, and Francophiles who were "letting 'the red foulfury of the Seine' run riot among our people." His successor as Republican nominee in 1884, James G. Blaine, picked on the Mormons for their multiple marrying ways: They "must learn that the liberty of the individual ceases where the rights of society begin."
Americans could only keep their unruly fellow citizens in check if they elected Republicans, who easily identified their party with the nation. As Calvin Coolidge said in 1924, "We had better stick to the American government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American." Back in 1880, Garfield had put it well: "In a time like this, more than ever before, this country needs a body of law-givers clothed and in their right minds."...