Over its 167 year history, there have been different doctrines that have guided the Republican Party. In 2021 Republicans are now guided by a new to them but old to world society doctrine, which also happens to be the doctrine most lethal to the existence of American democracy.
Republicans are no longer legitimately referred to as the “Party of Lincoln” because their Lincolnite days of fighting for equal rights for all America’s citizens are long behind them. It’s astonishing when you consider that Republicans are America’s only political party founded with the goal of ending chattel slavery in America. In 1854 American citizens who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the expansion of slavery into new western American states, formed the Republican Party and the rest is history as far as ending slavery in America is concerned.
Just 6 years later in 1860 Republicans are no longer powerless newcomers. They elect their 1st President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who provided the leadership that won the Civil War that kept America united. And in 1865 while Republicans are in control of the House, Senate, and White House slavery is constitutionally abolished in the United States. Republicans Lincolnite commitment to an anti-slavery doctrine assured American Black loyalty to Republicans for over 70 years, until the Democratic Party administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. However, since the vast majority of politicians representing former confederate southern states during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were members of the Democratic Party, Roosevelt and Truman were the only Democrats supported by American Blacks.
Due to Democratic Party opposition in the U.S. House and Democratic filibustering in the U.S. Senate, the Civil Rights Act could not have become law in 1964 without a large amount of Republican Party votes in both the House and Senate. But 1964 was also the year that Republicans are beginning a transition to a new doctrine. A doctrine that professed that government regulation was the source of all evil, that federal government taxes should only pay for safety and military defense, and all social programs should be paid for by private businesses and charities.
Then Republican Senator Barry Goldwater signaled the start of the Republican doctrine shift with his 1964 opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Speaking from the Senate floor Goldwater said that since the Civil Rights Act required American Whites to treat American Blacks equally in public accommodations and employment practices, the law would “require for their effective execution the creation of a police state.” Goldwater’s very small minority view within the Republican Party grew for 16 years and crystallized into the majority view of Republicans, who evolved into a conservative political force known as Reaganites after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President. In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan summed up the Reaganite doctrine when he uttered the words “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”
Republican Reaganites are responsible for making America since 1980 the world’s largest debtor nation. Before the Republican Reaganites America was the world’s largest creditor nation where American deficit spending was a national emergency or war-time rarity. Because American budgets were always balanced due to pre-Reaganite pay as we go accounting practices, even if that meant raising taxes. Reaganite Republicans started America living on a credit card and borrowing money to pay the credit card bills to achieve its political doctrine of no government spending for social programs. The Reaganite logic was since Republican President Reagan could not convince the Democratic-controlled House and Senate to vote for his social spending cuts in America’s budget. He would force popular tax cuts with the public under the bogus guise of an economic stimulus to the economy.
The reduced tax revenue because of the tax cuts meant the American government would have to deficit spend, borrowing money to make up the shortfall in tax revenue to pay for the popular social programs Democrats voted for. Reaganite Republicans are betting that eventually, the accumulated U.S. debt will grow so large making it no longer economically feasible to keep borrowing thereby reducing the federal government’s ability to fund social programs. The Republican Reaganite doctrine of no federal government regulations and no government spending on social programs held for 36 years until 2016. By 2016 Republicans are showing the first signs that their Reaganite opposition to federal government regulation and social spending was not based on political principle but on political desire.
In 2016 for the first time in its 100 plus year history, the Republican Party nominated a presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who voided the existing Republican platform of issues and political principles and forbade the creation of a new one, who ran a white nationalist campaign for President that encouraged a resurgence of racial and religious bigotry in America, and who ran pledging to be a disrupter of democratic practices and traditions. Trump becoming the leader of the Republican Party, signified that a majority of Republicans are no longer Reaganites who were guided by principals that rejected federal government regulations or federal government expenditures on social programs.
Most Republican Reaganites became Trumpites guided by autocratic political self-beneficial desires but guided by no democratic political principles. The Reaganites who refused to become Trumpites left the Republican Party. The remaining Republicans became Trumpites devoid of any political mores, political character, and political principles which allowed their true motive to reveal itself. For Trumpites it was never about principled opposition to government regulation, it’s about having no government regulation that doesn’t benefit them or having plenty of government regulation that does. For Trumpites it was never about principled opposition to government funding of social programs, it’s about the government not funding the social programs they disapprove of and government funding the social programs that they do approve of.
The Republican Party stripping itself of all principles and becoming Trumpites left it vulnerable to evolving to its current autocratic state. Republicans are now Stalinites, as in Josef Stalin, communism’s most prominent icon. And like Josef Stalin’s autocratic rule over Russia’s now-defunct Soviet Union, the name of the game for Trumpites turned Stalinites is the rule of tyranny not the rule of law. In regards to Communist Party members expressing their will by voting their choice, Stalin once said: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
Stalinite Republicans are applying Stalin’s doctrine to destroy one-person-one-vote-counted democracy in America. Republican Stalinite-controlled state legislatures across America, like in Georgia and Arizona, have now passed laws that give their state elected Republican Stalinite legislators the legal authority to change future vote totals in their state, by disqualifying any legally cast vote for any reason Stalinite Republicans deem necessary. Under Stalinism, a Russian government censorship agency, Glavlit, was employed to eliminate all true and accurate printed materials hostile to communism, and also to generate false-positive propaganda that ensured that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item in Russia.
Republican Stalinite school board members and state legislators who want to hide America’s discriminatory history and propagandize a white-washed version of slavery, are passing rules and laws that ban school curriculums that include teaching the Pulitzer Prize-winning The 1619 Project, which documents the true racial history of America. Republican Stalinite state legislators in Arkansas, Iowa, and Mississippi, claim that 1619 lessons misrepresent U.S. history. The Arkansas and Mississippi bills call the 1619 Project “a racially divisive and revisionist account;” the Iowa bill claims that it “attempts to deny or obfuscate the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded.” The Republican Stalinite-controlled Florida State Board of Education voted in June that lessons that deal with critical race theory and The 1619 Project are not welcome in Florida’s public schools.
And just recently Republican House and Senate Stalinites have adopted the NUMBER ONE Stalinite step that’s antithetical to free-market capitalism, defaulting on debt owed. Stalinite Republicans are willing to wreak havoc on the world’s financial system by defaulting on America’s debt, simply because elected Democrats are structuring the economy and appropriating tax dollars in ways Stalinite Republicans disagree with. The House voted to raise America’s debt ceiling so America could pay its debt with NO Republican votes. Last week Stalinite Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that Senate Stalinite Republicans would follow the lead of the House, by doing the same first thing the Communist Party did when it came to power in Russia, vote to default on debt owed.
Abraham Lincoln is turning over in his grave watching his Republican “Grand Old Party,” which was founded to eliminate chattel slavery, become the main source of racial hatred and division in America. Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave watching his tax cut no government regulations Republican Party become like Stalin’s Communist Party, whom Reagan described as: “the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain” their goal.
Fortunately for 19th-century American democracy, Republicans were a Lincolnite political force that liberated oppressed people and united a divided country. Unfortunately for 21st century American democracy, Republicans are no longer Lincolnites, Republicans are no longer Reaganites, now Republicans are Trumpites who have become Stalinites. The Republican Party has done a complete flip of its script, it began life in the 19th century as a glorious democratic Lincolnite force for the liberation of oppressed people, it persevered into the 20th century and provided the votes necessary in the U.S. House and Senate that made passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act possible, and now in 2021, it has degenerated into a shameful autocratic Stalinite force of political, racial, and economic hatred and division. What a waste of a great human rights legacy!!!