Wayne O'Leary

The Not-So-Grand Old Party

Like most all the writers for this esteemed journal, I’m sure, my political allegiances skew to the ideological left, which usually means casting a hopeful, if often wary and disenchanted, vote for the Democrats in our two-party system. This is a position arrived at through a combination of thought, analysis, and inheritance.

I come, in short, from a Democratic family, starting with a paternal grandfather who signed on the dotted line for the Great Democracy shortly after stepping off the boat. And, like most Democrats, apparently, I had the proverbial crazy Republican uncle (in my case, a crazy aunt and uncle), who regularly unburdened themselves of distinctly unpopular opinions at family gatherings — to the general discomfiture of all. They’re both deceased now, but I’ll keep them anonymous anyhow; let’s call them Aunt Millie and Uncle Mel.

Millie and Mel provided me over the years with a convenient window into the Republican mind and its bizarre perambulations. One thing I know for certain: they would have loved Donald Trump and been among today’s red-capped true believers at the never-ending Trump rallies dedicated to “making America great again.” They shared all of the Donald’s hatreds, biases and prejudices decades ago.

In other words, GOP partisans have not fundamentally changed despite the passage of time. The only thing that has changed is their increased willingness to be more aggressively belligerent regarding their belief system, an angry stance encouraged by Trump’s crude, abrasive style and reinforced by Fox News propaganda that insists they no longer hold a minority viewpoint, that they’re the real Americans, the true majority, whose popular truths are being denied by the purveyors of “fake news.”

Millie and Mel would have subscribed to that view today, but they lived in the world FDR made, a political world dominated by liberal government and liberal opinionmakers, whose civic mores discouraged unfiltered public expression of one’s darkest, most offensive thoughts. But scratch the surface in a private setting, and the innermost Republican, the Devil within so to speak, would come tumbling forth in all its vitriol.

This produced some awkward and ironic contradictions. Millie and Mel were not rich; no one in our family was rich. But they were more affluent than most — comfortable cloth-coat Republicans in Nixon’s memorable phrase from the 1950s. Their solid middle-class existence was owed to Mel’s good union job (courtesy of the Teamsters) as manager of the loading dock at Bird’s-Eye Foods in Boston, a position that also carried a generous, union-negotiated defined-benefit pension, not one of those chintzy 401(k)s masquerading as the real thing. Still, Mel hated unions; they implied you hadn’t made it solely on your own, and besides, you had to pay dues.

Politically, Mel voted GOP from the start, the exception being the Depression years when, as a young man fearing for the future, he voted once for Roosevelt. With the country saved and on the mend, he quickly returned to the Republican fold, and he goddamned FDR ever after.

A World War II vet, Mel gladly accepted his postwar health care free of charge under the federally run umbrella of the VA, even though as a true Republican, he hated “socialism” and railed against government spending (veterans’ benefits excepted).

Another inheritance from the war was Mel’s lingering dislike for Asians (they all looked like “Japs” to him); this stigmatizing of the racial other extended to irrational rants against Toyotas and other imported Japanese autos produced by the treacherous people who’d bombed Pearl Harbor. (It would have been a short step to endorsing Trump’s animus toward Muslims, Mexicans, and the Chinese.) Nevertheless, through an exercise in mental jujitsu, Mel simultaneously convinced himself Roosevelt had deliberately gotten us into the Pacific war.

When Mel retired in the1980s, he and Millie moved from “Taxachusetts” to nearby low-tax New Hampshire, in order to, as the state motto proclaimed, live free or die. There, they came to associate almost exclusively with conservative evangelicals, whose Christian “religious” principles demanded an adherence to the far right of the Republican party; they were home at last.

The beliefs Millie and Mel lived by — anti-foreignism, anti-unionism, tax phobia, hatred of liberal government, unification of church and state — are all present in today’s Republican party under Trump. There are some modern-day additions, of course, one being a worship of businessmen, heralded in our time as “job creators.” Millie and Mel, products of a wartime environment, tended to idolize generals, especially those on the right of the political spectrum; Patton and MacArthur were particular favorites.

Contemporary Trumpsters love generals, too, but they reserve their greatest accolades for representatives of big business. Why this should be so is dumbfounding. Although business executives are supposedly practical men of the world who radiate leadership qualities and executive skills, our only two businessman presidents, Herbert Hoover and Trump himself, can only be considered political failures.

Hoover was at least personally honest, if politically obtuse, but totally helpless — a deer in the headlights — in the face of the Great Depression. Trump is a heedless con man who uses his office for ego gratification and self-enrichment, while the country and the world spin helplessly into a death spiral — our version of Nero fiddling as Rome burns.

Regardless, Republicans have convince themselves that since (in their view), government is just a business, nothing more, businessmen should run it and impose their narrowly construed values upon it. Having no felt need for an ameliorating government, Millie and Mel would doubtless have agreed and pledged allegiance to the self-proclaimed business genius Donald J. Trump.

Their form of Republicanism, like today’s, was based on a negative view of human nature — that most people, themselves excluded, lacked ambition and wanted something for nothing (Romney’s takers), that the poor were shiftless inferiors who deserved their fate, that problems were individual rather than societal and therefore not responsive to governmental intervention, that success in life accrued to the morally superior as evidence of God’s blessing.

Millie and Mel regularly invoked these themes of Republican pseudo-morality (in less grandiose language) to justify their social position. Look beyond contemporary Republican rhetoric (the Ownership Society claptrap and such), and you’ll find the same fundamental attitudes. The Not-So-Grand Old Party remains the repository of the worse angels of our nature, as it has been since Lincoln’s passing.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2018

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