The True Face of - The Republicans

An Honest Admission: The Republican Party’s Shifting Sands (or, The Grand Contradiction)

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Recently, Fogy completed a dispassionate—though appropriately cynical—survey of the Democrats’ slippery history. Now, we turn our gaze to the other half of the American duopoly: the Republican Party, an entity equally skilled at moral rebranding and ideological amnesia.

“Principled conservatism!” is hardly the phrase that leaps to mind. It seems obvious to Fogy—and, I suspect, to any observer capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously—that the GOP is less a coherent ideology than a century-and-a-half-long game of political three-card monte.

The party was founded in 1854 on a moral crusade against slavery, a moment of genuine, high-minded principle. The early GOP of Abraham Lincoln represented the North’s industrial, capitalist, and abolitionist interests, making it the progressive force of its time. To judge today’s party by those original abolitionist standards is perhaps unfair, but then again, the Republicans themselves are quick to drape themselves in Lincoln’s mantle while executing policies he would scarcely recognize.

And is this institutional shape-shifting an isolated case? Hardly. One might look at the transition of the Whig party into the modern GOP itself, or the sudden, convenient conversion of any political class that finds itself on the cusp of power. Principles are easily discarded when proximity to power promises a longer stay at the trough.

After the Civil War, the GOP became the party of big business and tariffs—a friend to the industrialists, a foe to the agrarian populists. Figures like Theodore Roosevelt briefly dragged the party into a “Progressive” movement, fighting trusts and conserving land, only for the party’s soul to return swiftly to the embrace of limited government and market fundamentalism.

The final, decisive pivot—the one that defined the modern grotesque—came in the mid-to-late 20th century. Figures like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan consciously lured the disgruntled conservative Southern Democrats into the GOP tent by opposing the civil rights movement and championing a blend of social conservatism and radical supply-side economics. The party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, became the preferred home for those who had most vehemently opposed emancipation’s legal and social consequences.

Americans themselves, and particularly the modern Republicans, have internalized this contradiction: they advocate small government while demanding massive, unprecedented power for their executive; they preach fiscal austerity while running up titanic deficits. What can be done? Very little, it seems. We are left watching an entity that began by freeing men now obsessively focused on freeing corporations from regulation.

An honest admission, then: the Republican Party has never been old, nor particularly grand—only perpetually reborn in pursuit of power.

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