Traitors to the American Revolution

Republican traitors
By H. Scott Prosterman

It is not surprising that Donald Trump supporters don’t like the results of the Civil War. Republicans have been going in that direction since the 1960s, with Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 campaign and then the success of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968. The racist agenda was shot up with steroids by Ronald Reagan for his 1980 presidential campaign, and they never looked back. The culmination has been the disastrous events in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Portland and other cities, where right-wing thugs in MAGA hats and Nazi regalia have started riots, in their efforts to challenge the boundaries of “free speech”. This gross misapplication is a lame attempt to conflate constitutional rights of free expression with the freedom to incite riots, assault people and abuse minorities.

Reagan began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the murder site of three civil rights workers, proclaiming that the South’s history of racism and violence doesn’t matter anymore. Many progressive Southerners consider the Battle of Oxford 1962 to be the true “last battle of the Civil War”, when James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss. However, the Freedom Summer of 1964 brought the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, leading to Lyndon Johnson’s signing the Civil Rights Act. Trump’s ascendancy has given “Confederates” the all-clear signal to come out and act out. In the 1960s most bigoted Southerners were Democrats, going back to Reconstruction. Then came Richard Nixon, using a more aggressive brand of the strategy that got Goldwater’s ass kicked by Johnson in 1964.

Republican acceptance of Trump’s sucking up to Putin, while trashing the American intelligence agencies and judicial system, really caught me by surprise. The Republicana anti-communist posturing did not die with Joe McCarthy’s censure, and the House Un-American Activities Committee existed in some form until 1975. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, Republicans trashed many great elected and appointed officials for not being sufficiently “anti-Communist”. But Trump forsaking NATO and other alliances, while selling out to Putin over no objection from any Republican official, dramatically reveals the utter hypocrisy of their pretensions of patriotism.

The traditional Republican agenda has been subsumed by Donald Trump’s personal agenda, and so has the ambition of every Republican in the House and Senate; with the qualified exceptions of Susan Collins (R-ME) and Mitt Romney (R-UT). Represnetative Justin Amash (I-MI) displayed uncommon courage by leaving the Republican Party, in recognition of Trump’s destruction of the party, and an agenda that threatens most life forms on earth. That’s not hyperbolic considering the scope of Trump’s evisceration of all thoughtful and progressive legislation passed from Kennedy to Obama, especially with regard to the environment.

During the House Impeachment Hearings, I half-expected Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or one of the Republicans with presidential ambition to stand up and say, “I can’t defend this treasonous bastard anymore, and I’m running against him…” This fantasy was inspired by Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, but Kevin McCarthy is no Bullworth.

What’s really shocking now is to learn that Republicans decided they don’t like the results of the Revolutionary War after all these centuries. When 51 Republican Senators voted to not hear from witnesses, or even allow the Chief Justice to rule on accepting witnesses and documents, they voted for a Republican Enabling Act. (compare and contract Germany, 1933.) As Adam Schiff (D-CA) said, “Republicans are afraid the Chief Justice will be fair!”

Lamar Alexander’s career arc illustrates the devolution of the Republican Party. He began his career in Tennessee as a “progressive”, walking in every county in the state wearing a red flannel shirt, and was governor during 1979-87. That was so long ago, the Ripon Society was still a valid and viable arm of the party. This was the liberal wing of the party that Reagan kicked out in 1980 to make room for the Moral Majority. My mother, Bert Adler Prosterman, was a Ripon devotee when she was on the Memphis School Board, making unpopular decisions about school desegregation. Lamar was one of her colleagues and political heroes, and that’s why we called him around the dinner table. So did everyone in Tennessee. Sadly she’s in decline from Alzheimer’s, and no longer participating in the political process. But if she were cognizant, I’m sure she’d call and email Lamar to say, “You have betrayed the American Revolution.”


H. Scott Prosterman is a writer and editor in Oakland-Berkeley, USA.

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