When it meets for its national convention, the Republican Party might consider changing its name. It’s outdated. Under the leadership of President Bush, the party no longer stands for anything that might be considered republicanism.
The republicanism imported from England in the 1700s was, in its time, a radical political philosophy counterposed to autocracy and aristocracy. It valued independence, simplicity and civic responsibility. With few exceptions, that philosophy has fed all the major streams of American political thought, both left and right–at least until now.
Perhaps most emblematic is the commitment to equality.
The small-r republicans of the American Revolution opposed empire, monarchy and hereditary privilege; they viewed excessive economic inequality as a threat to political democracy.
While Hamiltonians viewed inequality as the natural order of things and sought to stabilize government by ensuring that it served “the rich and well-born,” their republican rivals sought stability in a large middle class of farmers and artisans, and they promoted measures to broaden property ownership.
James Madison proposed encouraging civic unity by “reduc[ing] extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity and rais[ing] extreme indigence toward a state of comfort” and “by withholding unnecessary opportunities for a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.”
Thus by 1800 the states of the new republic had begun breaking up large estates by abolishing primogeniture and entailment.
By contrast, the Bush Republicans are abolishing the estate tax, a tax designed to be a modest safeguard against an aristocracy of wealth (and affecting only the top 2 percent of the wealthiest families) by targeting precisely the kind of unearned windfalls Madison cited.
Income inequality
America has the greatest income inequality since the Great Depression and the biggest income gap of any developed country in the world.
Driven by aggressive Republican policies (with the acquiescence of timid Democrats), income inequality has grown dramatically since 1980. Those at the top of the income scale have reaped enormous gains–for the top 1 percent, average after-tax income has nearly tripled–while middle incomes barely rose and the poor fell further behind, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Capping this are extremely regressive tax cuts pushed through by Bush Republicans, weighted most heavily to the very top income levels.
This surge of inequality follows a post-World War II period when mainstream Republicans and Democrats established a far more progressive tax structure to fund social investment policies–such as subsidies for homeownership and free higher education for veterans–which succeeded in dramatically enlarging the middle class and giving the nation a solid basis for extended prosperity.
In today’s economy, in sharp contrast, the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed as housing, health-care and education costs rise much faster than wages and salaries.
Old-school republicans saw economic independence as requisite for the free exercise of citizenship; their paradigm was owning the land you worked or the tools you used. Indeed, the current Republican Party was founded in 1854 as “the homesteaders’ party,” opposed to “the slavocracy’s control of the government against the interest of the little enterpriser, whether farmer, worker or merchant,” according to Wilfred E. Binkley in his book “American Political Parties.”
In 1862, they passed the Homestead Act to distribute public lands to small farmers. (The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln also revived the name of Thomas Jefferson as a political hero; after slave interests took over the Democratic Party in 1844, they dropped all mention of Jefferson, who had advocated restricting slavery in new territories.)
Today, over a century after the closing of the frontier, we might recognize that lack of access to housing, health care, employment and education severely restricts people’s potential to be active citizens–and constricts our society’s potential as a democracy.
Of course, the earliest republicans differed on issues such as slavery (Thomas Paine viewed abolitionism as a natural extension of his republicanism), and that fed into differences over whether sovereignty ultimately lay with the states or in a national conception of “we the people.”
Federalists and Populists
In the early days of the nation, Federalists sought a strong central government in part to protect the interests of wealthy creditors from the mass of debtors. But the federal government would become an agent of equality, abolishing slavery, regulating corporations, providing a safety net to “raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort” and building the middle class by broadening wealth.
The Populists of 1892, inheritors of the best tradition of republican egalitarianism (including support for equal voting rights for blacks in the South) called on the federal government to take over ownership of railroads, institute a progressive income tax and enforce an eight-hour workday.
When today’s Republicans talk about shrinking government, they mean cutting programs that help working and poor people stay afloat and get ahead. And they mean less regulation of corporations. But that isn’t republicanism: it removes checks and balances from these powerful organizations, which are created by government, since corporate privileges flow from their state charters. And the extent of corporate political influence today renews the old republican fear that excessive concentration of economic power could undermine democracy.
Other current GOP policies would trouble the old-time republicans.
Public education was always a republican priority, promoting both economic equality and democratic citizenship. Jefferson and Benjamin Rush developed plans for free, state-supported primary school systems; Rush and George Washington developed proposals for a national university; and Jefferson worked tirelessly to create the state-supported University of Virginia.
The state land-grant colleges of the 19th Century, teaching agricultural, mechanical and liberal arts, were pure republicanism. Today’s Republican Party is promoting privatization schemes to divert tax dollars from public schools to religious and for-profit programs; its tax cuts are shifting costs for higher education onto a fast-growing debtor class.
Because monarchies by definition are based on divine mandates, early republicans opposed religious establishment, which designated certain denominations as official and eligible to receive public revenues. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom held that no one “shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.”
Government-chosen ministries
Today, Bush’s faith-based initiative requires all taxpayers to support government-chosen ministries, no matter what kind of discrimination they may practice, and Republican Party positions on gay marriage, reproductive rights and other issues are attempts to enshrine particular religious beliefs as the law of the land.
The old republicans abhorred standing armies (Jefferson wanted to include a ban in the Bill of Rights) and the deficit financing that made them possible. You can’t say that about Republicans today.
Finally, early republicans viewed the separation of powers with built-in checks and balances as a guarantee against arbitrary authority, and they defined republicanism as “government of laws and not of men.” They insisted on the Bill of Rights, and they opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave the president sole power to imprison his critics and to deport aliens he deemed dangerous.
Today’s Bush Republicans have sought to dismantle checks on the government’s power to hold suspects indefinitely and in secret, without hearings or access to attorneys, and to allow surveillance of lawful dissent and searches without judicial review. The administration has established off-shore interrogation centers to hold individuals beyond the reach of the law. And it has put forth the proposition that the might of military force trumps the right of international law.
Republicans of the old school would be aghast.
For them, such unchecked power was the definition of tyranny.
The strictures of Sen. Edward Livingston of New York against the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 sound distressingly contemporary: Legislative and judicial power given to the executive; “no indictment; no jury; no trial; no public procedure; no examination of the witnesses in support; no counsel for the defense.”
He pronounced the measures to be “a refinement upon despotism.”
