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A New Political Party

Republican Radicalism

The midterm elections have brought us a sweep of both houses of Congress by the Democrats. Just what this means in terms of the war in Iraq or specific legislation is still unknowable, but it now seems undeniable that we are living in an age of radicalism. Republican radicalism, that is.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who followed reports of a September Oval Office press conference George W. Bush gave for a group of selected columnists. “I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a culture,” President Bush asserted, according to the conservative journalist David Brooks, who was in the audience. Bush went on to reiterate his conviction that he was at the forefront of “a series of long, gradual cultural transformations,” including a new “religious awakening” and “a generations-long struggle” against international terrorism. “He said the events of weeks or months were just a nanosecond compared with the long course of this conflict,” Brooks reported admiringly.

A cultural transformation and a war that will make weeks and months seem like nanoseconds: Has any American President ever set so ambitious a course? And not only has President Bush committed the nation to this struggle, he has even decided to fight it in a radically different way, steadfastly backing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of a smaller, more flexible military (at least until the day after the election) and becoming the very first President (and perhaps the first ruler of any nation, anywhere) to fight a war while institutionalizing tax cuts.

President Bush has long backed up such rhetoric with action. Since taking office, this administration has indeed sought radical, cultural change in any number of areas, fighting with varying degrees of success to privatize Social Security and transform other entitlement programs, deregulate much of the economy, end abortion rights, lower some of the barriers between church and state, curtail civil liberties and transfer vast new powers to the Executive branch for the purposes of fighting the war on terror, and disengage from long-standing American treaty commitments, from the Kyoto Agreement on global warming to the Geneva Convention. Others in and around the administration have even talked of being able to create their own “reality” and of the formation of an American “empire.”

Whatever one thinks of such ideas, there is no denying that taken altogether, they would drive a vast reshaping of American society. But then, the Republican party was born as a radical movement and has remained—for better and for worse—the true radical party in American politics since its inception in the 1850s. The very first Republican President would turn another national crisis into a transformative moment, throwing over a series of painstaking compromises worked out in the course of decades—and launching a crusade to give the nation “a new birth of freedom” even if it meant that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” To win his war, he would resort to the suspension of habeas corpus; the first U.S. military draft; the arrest and deportation of an elected congressman; even—most radical of all for the times—the arming of tens of thousands of freed black men. After his death at the hands of an outraged citizen, the original Radical Republicans would push through the first amendments to the Constitution in more than 60 years, ending an age-old American institution (slavery) and endowing African-Americans with full rights.

While all this was going on, the Democrats were relegated to insisting that a house divided against itself could so stand, and they were identified by Republicans as the party of treason. The price they would pay for their conservatism would be to spend the better part of six decades in opposition.

But this was not all that surprising either. The Democrats had already established themselves as the more conciliatory or ameliorative national party, a characterization that is accurate to this day, again for better and worse. Democrats have often taken more liberal or “left” stands than Republicans over the years, but the fact remains that ever since the passing of Andy Jackson, with his populist crusades to expand the franchise and crush the Bank of the United States, every major liberal/populist movement has begun outside the Democratic party and only then been co-opted or enticed inside the two-party system.

After the Civil War, Democrats would attempt to recoup by catering to the hordes of new immigrants pouring into the country and by building urban political machines that were the very embodiment of wheeling and dealing. The GOP, by contrast, often became the home of more uncompromising, radical theories that supposedly had the blessing of both God and science, such as laissez-faire economics and social Darwinism.

William Jennings Bryan broke out of this mold by running the nation’s first great populist campaign, but populism was an authentic grass-roots movement that Bryan and the Democrats had swallowed up only belatedly, after witnessing its enormous power. And for all its bold new proposals, populism was at heart a conservative movement, animated by nostalgia—an attempt to alleviate the country’s perennial agricultural crisis and runaway corporate and political corruption by forcing a return to a more egalitarian, rural America. Republicans, typically, would respond to this challenge with progressivism, a political philosophy much better suited to the urban, industrialized country that America was rapidly becoming with its emphasis on technocratic reforms, such as replacing urban machines and mayors with professional “city managers” and attempting to regulate (rather than necessarily break up) the massive new industrial trusts.

Teddy Roosevelt would eventually follow this path almost all the way to the corporate state, with his backing of a New Nationalism that would have barely differentiated between the public and private sectors. His Republican successors in the 1920s, many of whom had once considered themselves progressives, presided over a conservative variant of TR’s big idea, one that was designed to put an end to almost all societal conflict. The GOP’s manufacturing backers sought to institute “the American plan,” a system of “company unions” that were supposed to sweep any labor unrest under a carpet of corporate paternalism. Thrifty workers were encouraged to invest in the flourishing stock market, while Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the first supply-sider, liberated the incomes of their bosses with massive tax cuts. Just to make sure that no discretionary income was being wasted in the nation’s saloons, Republicans, with some Democratic allies, pushed through what was perhaps the most radical idea in all of American history, Prohibition. Surely, under the progressive “Great Engineer,” Herbert Hoover, a brave new world awaited.

The Depression put an end to the bull market of the twenties and drove the country back to legal drink. But even then the solution the Democrats offered was no single new philosophy but rather a crazy quilt of nostrums that had been around for years: populism and progressivism; Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Louis Brandeis’s New Freedom; scattered ideas plucked from Socialists, Communists, even Fascists. Thanks to the political talents of the Great Improviser, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it worked, and the Democrats would largely hold sway for the next 50 years. During this period of liberal hegemony one liberation movement after another— civil rights, civil liberties, women’s rights, gay rights, et cetera—would find a home in the Democratic party. But none of them began there, and they were invited in only after much handwringing.

In the radical 1960s the only radical movement to begin within a major political party took place in the GOP. Barry Goldwater’s capture of the party’s nomination in 1964 was less the populist, grass-roots movement it has subsequently been depicted as and more a confluence of right-wing ideologues and savvy campaign professionals, a pairing that would become a Republican trademark. But their rhetoric of deregulation, privatization, and Cold War confrontation was no less radical for all that, and it was soon empowered by recruits from George Wallace’s neopopulist politics of resentment and by what President Bush rightly sees as one of the great tidal movements in American history, the entrance of Christian fundamentalists into partisan politics. Democrats were once again forced into reaction, trying to organize and reconcile the vastly disparate groups that would take exception to one aspect or another of this Republican agenda.

What will become of modern Republican radicalism depends, of course, on how well it matches the challenges of its time. Abolitionism and progressivism, to name a couple of examples, were ideas that came to suit not just Republican voters but also the needs facing the nation. Social Darwinism, Prohibition, and company unions, on the other hand, were disastrous notions. How will radical, Republican nation-building in Iraq come to be regarded? The verdict is still out, although this past November it did enable Democrats to reassemble a remarkably diverse coalition, pushing an array of ideas that are, typically, both pragmatic and reactive at the same time. If they can find the right improviser to weave them together, the current age of American radicalism may last no longer than a few of President Bush’s nanoseconds.

In Wisconsin The Name Republican Stuck

Every year on this date the residents of Ripon, Wisconsin—population 7,630—recall a historic gathering on February 28, 1854, when several dozen local people converged on the town’s simple one-room wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party.

Called together by Alvan E. Bovay, a local political activist, these pioneers cut a wide swath across the American political spectrum. Some were members of the moribund Free Soil party, which had formed in 1848 to oppose the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Others were “conscience Whigs,” who shared the Free Soilers’ distaste for slavery. Still others were disgruntled Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most economic policy questions but also found slavery socially and politically unacceptable.

These odd political bedfellows were driven to common cause by a bill in the United States Congress, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, designed to organize the last unsettled parts of the Louisiana Purchase. The bill, drafted by Senator Stephen Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, explicitly broke with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which established the 36’30” parallel as a dividing line between free and slave territory in the Louisiana Purchase area.

As Kansas lay above the parallel, it should rightfully have been free-soil. But Douglas needed the support of Southern senators to push his bill through Congress, so even though he privately acknowledged that it would “raise a hell of a storm,” he included in the bill a provision for “popular sovereignty,” whereby the citizens of the new territories would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their midst.

This unexpected turn of events enraged many Northerners, who had come over the preceding decade to view slavery as an insidious institution. They perceived deep social divisions between the North, with its thriving mixed agricultural and industrial economy, an emerging public school system, and impressive public infrastructure, and the South, which they saw as a depressed backwater hobbled by an economic, social, and cultural evil. “It was necessary that I should travel in Virginia to have any idea of a slave state,” wrote William Henry Seward, who served New York as governor and in the U.S. Senate. “. . . An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. Such has been the effect of slavery.”

People like Seward believed that in a free-labor system, workers were naturally industrious, inventive, and ambitious, and that these virtues led to economic progress. By contrast in a slave system, slaves had little incentive to work hard or work smart (“Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, and his capacity,” the newspaper editor Horace Greeley argued), while whites identified manual labor as “slave work” and developed a sense of complacency and idleness. As a result, Seward claimed, “Go ask Virginia—go ask even noble Maryland . . . to show you her people, canals, railroads, universities, schools, charities, commerce cities, and cultivated areas.” The implication was clear: Virginia and Maryland had no such things because they had slavery.

The emerging Northern critique of slavery wasn’t simply an economic one. Henry Adams, the son and grandson of U.S. Presidents, recalled late in life that when he was growing up in New England, “bad roads meant bad morals.” Here is where antislavery sentiment could be slippery. When they spoke of slavery as a great moral evil, antislavery politicians didn’t necessarily mean to imply that they shared with abolitionists a belief in the humanity and equality of African-Americans. Many antislavery politicians were, by the standards of their day, conventionally racist. Rather, they meant that slavery degraded the places where it existed and the people who lived in those places.

What made the Kansas-Nebraska Act so explosive was that it threatened to allow slavery to spread its cancer over vast new Western territories. This scenario had already sounded alarm bells years before when, on August 8, 1846, Representative David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a measure that would have barred slavery from territories acquired during the Mexican War. Party discipline broke down as congressmen voted by region—rather than as Whigs and Democrats—on Wilmot’s proviso. In 1850 Douglas engineered a compromise that barred slavery in some of the Mexican territories but also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.

Still, with new territories yet to be organized, a country that prided itself on “Manifest Destiny” was sure to come to blows over the slave system. In the popular American mind, the West was synonymous with the nation’s future. Many Northerners, believing that “slavery withers and blights all it touches,” were determined to see it confined to the areas where it already existed. The activists who met in Ripon to form a new antislavery coalition were not alone. In fact, it’s clear that Ripon wasn’t really the site of the “founding” of the Republican party at all. No such site exists.

At hundreds of political meetings around the country, Free Soilers, conscience Whigs, and anti-Nebraska Democrats abandoned their political bases for new fusion tickets. In some states these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican, or Free Soil. In Wisconsin the name Republican stuck. Ultimately, national leaders of the movement agreed on this name, and in the November elections they won a plurality in Congress. Two years later they ran their first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, who garnered a respectable number of electoral votes against the victor, the Democrat James Buchanan.

It was far from clear on February 28, 1854, that the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin, were founding a new party. It would take six years and many a firestorm to harden voters’ commitment to the fledgling organization and to attract a majority of Northern votes to the antislavery position. But in November 1860 a prairie lawyer from Illinois carried the party’s banner to victory, and American politics would never be the same.

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