Republican Lunacy- It Isn't a New Thing
I have something more to say about a remark from the late 1940's that I quoted in a post below, about a speech made by that great Republican, Herbert Hoover:
"Former President Herbert Hoover said last night the "gigantic" increase in government spending could end only in socialism or fascism...A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents."
I originally mentioned this remark to indicate how little has really changed in the Republican party line over the last century or so. There is a strong perception among liberals that the current Republican lunacy dates from the Reagan era, or maybe as far back as Nixon. The truth is that the last Republican president who subscribed to rational beliefs was Teddy Roosevelt, and he left the Republican party when he saw what it was becoming. Here we have, from a man who became president in 1929, one of the stock tea party lies- that government domestic spending is going to lead to socialism or fascism. I see this every day in the right wing blogs, but this utter nonsense obviously did not start the day Obama was elected, or Clinton or JFK for that matter.
However, there is another point to make about this remark. Did the increase in government spending that Hoover was talking about result in socialism or fascism? No, of course it didn't- it preceded two decades of the greatest capitalist expansion this country has ever seen, just as the Republican strategy of tax cuts for the rich and to hell with the rest of you has now led to two total economic disasters. Yet here we are, sixty years later, still forced to listen to the same old Republican lies. They never stop lying, and they never take a second to reflect on the damage that their lies have done.
After Hoover's Republican cant produced the greatest economic collapse the world has ever seen, you would think he would have been too embarrassed to push it on us ever again, but no, he was perfectly content to steer the country right back into the disaster with which his name will be forever tied.
Look around you- nothing has changed.
A Little Addendum: It's about ten minutes later, and I found this great new article in the Village Voice, by Roy Edroso: "Rightbloggers' Latest Enemy: That Leftist Bastard Teddy Roosevelt" It's a great indication of the truth of my thesis that Teddy was the last sane Republican.
"Former President Herbert Hoover said last night the "gigantic" increase in government spending could end only in socialism or fascism...A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents."
I originally mentioned this remark to indicate how little has really changed in the Republican party line over the last century or so. There is a strong perception among liberals that the current Republican lunacy dates from the Reagan era, or maybe as far back as Nixon. The truth is that the last Republican president who subscribed to rational beliefs was Teddy Roosevelt, and he left the Republican party when he saw what it was becoming. Here we have, from a man who became president in 1929, one of the stock tea party lies- that government domestic spending is going to lead to socialism or fascism. I see this every day in the right wing blogs, but this utter nonsense obviously did not start the day Obama was elected, or Clinton or JFK for that matter.
However, there is another point to make about this remark. Did the increase in government spending that Hoover was talking about result in socialism or fascism? No, of course it didn't- it preceded two decades of the greatest capitalist expansion this country has ever seen, just as the Republican strategy of tax cuts for the rich and to hell with the rest of you has now led to two total economic disasters. Yet here we are, sixty years later, still forced to listen to the same old Republican lies. They never stop lying, and they never take a second to reflect on the damage that their lies have done.
After Hoover's Republican cant produced the greatest economic collapse the world has ever seen, you would think he would have been too embarrassed to push it on us ever again, but no, he was perfectly content to steer the country right back into the disaster with which his name will be forever tied.
Look around you- nothing has changed.
A Little Addendum: It's about ten minutes later, and I found this great new article in the Village Voice, by Roy Edroso: "Rightbloggers' Latest Enemy: That Leftist Bastard Teddy Roosevelt" It's a great indication of the truth of my thesis that Teddy was the last sane Republican.
Comments
Eisenhower? Was he not relatively sane?
Hoover was a lousy president exactly because he was an activist not because of some imagined refusal to act or some rhetorical obfuscation.
Policy differences are one thing -- what's actually crazy is stuff like rejection of established scientific facts like evolution and global warming (Bush rejected evolution, and so do Palin and Paul), and the whole effort to impose religious taboos by the force of civil government that (in modern times, at least) started with the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.
Goldwater had some very scathing things to say about the Moral Majority and the theocratic mentality. It's hard to imagine a present-day Republican saying such things.
As you did not grow up in the U.S. you would have no reason to know this, but Eisenhower had never been a member of either political party. They both courted him to run for president in 1952, and eventually he decided to run as a Republican. For this reason, I don't consider him to be a true Republican in the sense that other political figures are.
Anomnymous:
Hoover was a lousy president because he followed the Republican party line about how to deal with the depression. I can't possibly go into chapter and verse with you on a blog, but I suggest that, if you really believe what you are saying, you should read a little more about the period. A good place to start is John Kenneth Galbreath's short and very entertaining book about the 1929 crash.
I will agree with you, however, about Hoover's forced choice between keeping jobs and keeping wages high. Given the economic forces in play at the time, either decision was going to result in the same thing: If a company has only so much money for wages, it makes no difference to the economy if it splits it up among ten or a hundred workers- the same amount of that money is going to enter the system.
Infidel,
The enforcing of religious taboos as a right wing political ploy goes back at least to the Republican exploitation of the prohibition issue, which was exactly contemporaneous with the disastrous Harding-Coolidge-Hoover economic rule. This is the point I am trying to make- the phenomena we are seeing today, while clearly way out of control, do have their parallels in Republican behavior since the time of Taft. And let us not forget, while not actively religious, the red scare of the late teens and early twenties, and the later eruption of McCarthyism both involved a degree of irrational self delusion that is not that dissimilar to what we see today.
I agree, on the other hand, that the boiling point in this craziness does seem to be fast approaching- the point where irrational words turn into malignant action. I hope I'm wrong.
I would add though that Eisenhower did not move against McCarthy when he could have, for base political reasons. He may have wanted to, but he didn't. He failed innocent Americans whose lives were thus destroyed.
Maybe now you could call that his "Republican moment".