How far have we come?

I have said this before, and I am saying it again... revisionist history is bad.

Since losing my job at the casino, I haven't had the opportunity to listen to the battery of talk radio programs that I used to hear on a daily basis, but I did hear a blurb about how "conservatism" today is the same as it was in 1980, 1900, and even 1776. The insinuation is that the GOP maintains the core principles of conservative politics now just as it has since the inception of the nation. I do not feel this is true at all.

Now, before I go any further, I'm NOT suggesting the same isn't true of the DNC. No greater degree of ideological change can be shown than that of the DNC over the last 100+ years... but those changes are ones we have discussed at length here at the Bund, and I want to focus for a minute on the GOP's changes over the same period.

In 1912, the GOP split its allegiances between Taft (the RNC candidate) and the "Bull Moose" Progressive Teddy Roosevelt. Most people attribute the scope of the Democratic candidate's (Wilson) overwhelming victory to the split in the GOP vote... but I'd say the numbers and results from the national election results don't entirely back that up. Wilson won by a margin of very nearly 5 to 1 in the electoral college, and carried the popular vote by more than 2 to 1 over both his rivals. The standing Democratic majority in the House was increased by 21 seats, and the Senate saw the first Democratic majority (51/96) in nearly 20 years.

If one takes the time to read the platforms of each of the three parties involved in the 1912 election, one sees a surprising association with today's political platforms.

Here are those platforms:

The 1912 Progressive Party

The 1912 Democratic Party

The 1912 Republican Party

The most glaring difference between the GOP of '12 and the modern incarnation is in "protectionist economics". Since 1868, the GOP had maintained a stated goal of protecting American production (industrial and agricultural) by means of tariffs, and the 1912 convention re-asserted that goal. In point of fact, protectionism was a mainstream fact of GOP policy right up until the Reagan Administrations, and then came back in vogue with the elections of George H. W. Bush and G. W. Bush (whose 2002 import steel tariff still stands as a model of repressive protectionist economic policy).

Other planks that stand out today as "counter-conservative" are the Party's support of large national (meaning Federal) works projects aimed at building interstate commerce and business opportunities through the developed control of the Mississippi River Flood Control projects. Removing that responsibility from the States and placing it in the hands of the (even then) overly-large and tangled Federal system sounds an awful lot like what we hear today in regards to health care. The GOP (and Progressive) plans thoroughly regulate such interstate commerce fields as the railroads, inter-coastal waterways, and "post road" systems (we didn't have interstate highways then) also smacks of rather "liberal" planning.

The DNC platform focused a lot on the "general welfare" of the working class and poor in America (as it does now), and some of the phrases raises even my eyebrows as sounding remarkably "socialist" in nature... but the main planks of the DNC were a re-affirmation of States rights over the Federal authority (as is the modern 10the Amendment movement), lower taxes for the majority of wage earners (granted, they favored the graduated income tax as the primary means of government funding... but it was the GOP-majority that passed the legislation enacting the Federal Income Tax in 1908), the removal of tariffs and limits on free trade, and the popular election of Senators over the House elections. They looked to increase the amount of natural resource development in places like Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico (the latter two the latest additions to the star field on "Old Glory") over the "protection and preservation" of such lands and resources by the GOP and Progressives... meaning the "tree hugger" crowd were originally Republicans, not Dems.

I am the last person here to say that the Democratic Party hasn't seen a shift in focus over the last 10, 25, or even 100 years... they have, and dramatically so. But I refuse to listen to anyone that says that the GOP hasn't seen the same changes in attitude over the same periods of time. To argue to the contrary is pure revisionism, in my opinion.