My last post praising David Frum quoted a long passage from his Daily Beast article entitled "Will the Republican Moderates Please Stand Up?" In the interest of balance, I should point out that the paragraph following immediately upon the ones I quoted approvingly is a lot of hooey. Here it is:
The Republican party is a party of people who have invested deeply in America and who have the most to lose if the American experiment fails. Republicans are the party of married parents, of business and property owners, of the settled and established. Republicans are the party of people who weren't born yesterday, the party of people who've earned their gray hairs the hard way. They're the party of the great middle of the country, of people who don't adopt fads, of people who can afford to worry more about tomorrow because they worry less about today. Will such a party really force a default on national obligations?
Everything Frum says here that's specific applies to me but--God forbid!--I am no Republican. His formulations raise such questions as: If Republicans are indeed "the party of the great middle of the country," then why has a generation passed since its presidential nominee carried Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Minnesota? Does "middle of the country" mean "middle of the old Confederacy"?
Which leads me to another complaint. Frum indicates that Republicans, being "settled," by which I think he means "rich," have more leisure than liberals to worry about the future. But today was once the future. What did Republicans do in the past that has had a positive impact today? As Hendrik Hertzberg point out, you have to go back to Lincoln and the period of the Civil War, when Republicans championed "a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive end of slavery"--all made possible because the backwards part of the country had seceded and therefore couldn't block all this forward-looking legislation.
In more recent history, however, Republicans and conservatives have opposed virtually everything that has advanced our country. The Social Security Act, against. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, against. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, against. Medicare and Medicaid, against. In our own time, gay rights: against. There's never been a proposal to reform national health care that they supported; indeed, the principles underlying what they call, derisively, "Obamacare" were forged in conservative think-tanks back when the party was railing against "Hillarycare." While the federal government has been partially shut down, a new climate change study rang the alarm perhaps louder than any of its predecessors. On this question, we all know the position of the party of sober, gray-flecked wise men who are sufficiently "established" to worry about tomorrow. Climate change is a hoax. Drill, baby, drill!
Frum's notion of this Tea Party gang representing a deplorable departure from the recent, golden past of the Republican party is a bit much. In 1980, Reagan began his general election campaign for the presidency by delivering a states rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where some civil rights workers had been murdered by the Klan in 1964. All these "responsible Republicans" whom Frum is calling upon now to make their voices heard were not making their voices heard then, either. You kiss the collective ass of these troglodytes for thirty years, they get the idea you're on their side, and it's not all that convincing to hear Mr Frum's "No, that is not what we meant, that is not what we meant at all."