The GOP is in
tatters. After losing two presidential elections to Barack Obama, the party is
deeply worried that even a sluggish economy, a schizophrenic and ineffective
foreign policy, and the snafu which is Obamacare will not deliver the Senate
back to the GOP in 2014 and will not help them to prevail over a likely Hillary
Clinton juggernaut in 2016. The GOP was soundly thrashed by the Democratic
Party when the Republicans nominated the RINOs Senator John McCain and Governor
Mitt Romney as its presidential candidates. There is already a long list of
RINOs to potentially battle for the nomination in 2016—Christie, Ryan, Rubio,
Bush, etc. Before the Republican Party can move into the future, it needs to look
to its past. One of the gloomiest periods in GOP history was the period between
1940 and 1952. This lost decade plus was the result of nominating RINO
candidates as presidential hopefuls. The GOP has already lost eight years. If
the likes of Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush face off
against Hillary Clinton or some other Democratic candidate, there will be 12
lost years. And the potential for even more.
In 1940, the United
States was a mess. FDR’s fascistic New Deal
had failed to lift the Republic out of the Great Depression even as nations
with lesser economies were showing definite signs of recovery. Europe
was at war, and it seemed inevitable that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was
going to get the United States
entangled in these European and Asian conflicts and waste American blood and
treasure to help communists like Stalin and Mao and to help decadent colonial
powers like France
and the United Kingdom.
The United States
was at a crossroads and so was the soul of the Republican Party. Would the
party stand up for its conservative ideals or would it lose its soul?
The conservative
soul of the Republican Party was represented by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio.
Taft was a staunch opponent of FDR’s unconstitutional and corporatist New Deal.
He vowed not to merely prevent the further growth of the welfare state or to
manage it more efficiently; he vowed to eliminate it. Senator Taft was also an
opponent of labor unions, the KKK, prohibition, socialism, deficit spending,
farm subsidies, government bureaucracy, the military draft, and nationalized
health insurance. What Robert Taft did favor was economic growth, individual
economic opportunity, a strong national defense, and non-intervention in
European wars. Senator Taft would also later rightly criticize the Nuremberg
Trials as the illicit use of ex post facto laws to demonstrate arbitrary “might
makes right” justice.
In 1940, instead
of Taft, the GOP nominated Wendell Willkie. Willkie was a former Democrat who vowed
to keep the New Deal policies of FDR but merely manage them more efficiently. Willkie
also favored military aid to allies. Willkie lost badly to FDR in the 1940
election.
In 1944 and
1948, instead of Taft, the GOP nominated Thomas Dewey. Dewey was an
internationalist who supported the New Deal. Dewey became what would be the
prototypical RINO. He was a “liberal Republican” who would later influence the
“Rockefeller Republicans.” As a result of selling out the conservative soul of
the party by supporting Dewey, the GOP lost again to FDR in 1944 and to the
incompetent Harry S. Truman in 1948. While the more conservative war hero
Dwight D. Eisenhower did appear to right the ship by 1952, his interventionist
policies marked the beginning of the end of true conservative foreign policy.
By the end, as evidenced by his remarkable warnings about the
Military-Industrial Complex, President Eisenhower regretted his folly, but it
was too late. Conservatism was already mostly dead in the United
States. While many Republicans will point to
President Ronald Reagan as having resurrected the soul of conservatism, did he
really? What part of the welfare state did he or his successor George H.W. Bush
eliminate during those 12 years in office? Other than very RINOesque deficit
spending and temporary tax cuts which were eventually rescinded by necessity,
what conservative policies did they enact? And what influence did they truly
have over the recent history of the GOP? In what sense was George W. Bush, John
McCain, or Mitt Romney truly conservative? In what sense is the current
mainstream wing of the GOP conservative?
The 2016
presidential election is going to be difficult for the Republican Party to win
even if it nominates a strong conservative and even if everything goes right.
However, if the GOP nominates another Deweyesque RINO, it is a foregone
conclusion that President Hillary Clinton or even President Joe Biden—UGH!—will
be sitting in the White House following Inauguration Day 2017.
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