The End of the GOP:

Events of this past weekend had made me wonder if the Republican Party can survive as a political entity. I do not say this lightly and remind everyone that it has happened before. The American two party system has existed for most of our history as a nation. However the parties are not necessarily the same after the passage of time. Political parties are after all human institutions and as such change with the changing membership that form them.

I tend to look at American history through the lens of labor / management. That is to say the major turning points in American history can be defined in management terms or labor terms. Southern slavery was to me an attempt to get labor at abysmally low cost. Free labor is after all about as cheap as labor gets. We hear folks speak of how southern plantation owners cared for their black labor element. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact many of the children of these plantations were sired by the white overseers and masters. Yet these children were often sold as though they had worth only as beasts of burden. Ask yourself where else in the history of the world parents have sold their children and you get a much clearer picture of the horror of the American system of slavery.

The political party that changed this was in fact the Republican Party and their first successful presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. So successful did the Republican Party become that it elected every single president from 1860 to 1914 a span of some 54 years. Some remarkable things have occurred in the past several years. When Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law he knew full well that the once solid democratic south would be forever shattered. Events proved that to be the case. I do not think the old guard of the south in the form of the Ku Klux Klan was an all powerful force. But the ideas of black men with no political power certainly remained in the American south alive and well. In fact these ideas were assimilated and in Texas they expanded to include the brown population from Mexico.

Harking back to my earlier proposition that cheap labor is what is at the root of much of the thought processes behind political rhetoric. If labor is too cheap then it becomes abusive. The girls in the electronics assembly plants 100 yards south of the American border make five dollars a day. Just a few steps away the wage rate is ten times that amount. To say that another way a day’s wage for them can be earned in less than an hour by their counterpart in America. Is it any wonder these people will suffer almost any hardship to come to America? The Republican Party has at almost every single juncture opposed increasing the minimum wage. The Republican Party has at almost every juncture opposed better health coverage for the average American. The Republican Party has opposed at almost every juncture more money for education.

And now people ask why the Republican Party is imploding. It is imploding because it is seen to be the voice of reactionary thought. The voice of the Republican Party is no longer the measured tones of Lincoln urging that we bind up the wounds of America. The voice of the Republican Party has become the shrill whine of Sarah Palin and inane ramblings of Rush Limbaugh. Those voices are why I think the demise of the Republican Party is at hand.