We hear it again. After a Republican loses the election, moderates (with every encouragement from the left-wing Old Establishment Media (OEM)–wonder whose side they’re on) tell us that the problem is the social issues.

Copyright © 2012 by P. A. Ritzer

19 November 2012

We hear it again. After a Republican loses the election, moderates (with every encouragement from the left-wing Old Establishment Media (OEM)–wonder whose side they’re on) tell us that the problem is the social issues. Republicans need to stop standing up for the defenseless unborn, for the Sacrament of Matrimony, for the aged and disabled, for religious liberty, for free-market healthcare, for decency.

If the Republican Party, the party that has stood up for the rights of individuals from slaves to women to the unborn when the Democratic Party refused to recognize those rights, drops the social issues, it loses its soul, and then there is no point for it to exist.

The Republican Party was founded in reaction to the passage of Democrat Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act that would have allowed slavery to spread into the territories. When Abraham Lincoln was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1860, he did not shrink from the issue of slavery but held firm to the commitment he had made in his famous House Divided Speech of 1857 “to arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Standing up for what was right, ending slavery, was not easy and may have often looked hopeless, but the Republicans stood up for it nonetheless. And what happened? The Democratic Party split, and Lincoln won the election.

But the Democratic split was not accidental. It was at least partly attributable to Lincoln standing firm on his convictions. As the Democrats pushed their “pro-choice” on slavery argument, called popular sovereignty–basically if the people of a territory wanted to have slavery, they could have it. (Those wonderful Democrats: yesterday pro-choice on whether some people should have freedom taken from them, today pro-choice on whether some people should have life taken from them.) During the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the 1858 campaign to be a United States Senator from Illinois, Lincoln point-blank asked Douglas whether or not a territory could prohibit slavery before the territory framed a state constitution. With the prospect of losing the U. S. Senate seat before him, Douglas agreed that a territory could prohibit slavery before framing a state constitution. He won the Senate seat, but lost support for the 1860 presidential race in the South, for which Democratic popular sovereignty meant territories could not prohibit slavery until the formation of a state constitution, which would then throw the issue to the United States Congress, where Southern states could wield influence (so much for the states’ rights argument).

Republicans did what was right. Of course, a bloody civil war resulted, but finally Republicans won freedom for the slaves and legal recognition of their rights. The Democrats did not give up. For another 100 years they fought against the rights of African Americans with the black codes, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow. Finally they settled on the welfare state as a means of keeping as many people as possible dependent and under control.

But the Republican Party of Lincoln, Grant, Coolidge, Eisenhower, and Reagan must continue to stand on principle and oppose entitlement slavery, abortion, euthanasia, attacks on matrimony, attacks on religious freedom, and attacks on healthcare freedom. To win by abandoning basic principles would make the Republican Party no better than the Democratic Party. Though it presently looks bleak for Republicans, there is the precedent of the Republican revival after the Democrats’ opportunistic promotion of government dependency during the depressions of the Franklin Roosevelt New Deal years. And if you think Democrats will ever tire of blaming President George W. Bush for the disastrous results of President Obama’s policies, keep in mind that Democrats still blame President Herbert Hoover for the depressions that lasted throughout President Roosevelt’s first two terms (unemployment was still some 15% in 1940). And under such circumstances, FDR won four presidential elections; so there is good reason to fear the possibility that the Democrats may find some way around the Twenty-second Amendment, ratified after the FDR years in 1951, to keep Obama in power beyond the constitutional two terms. We have seen too much to give us confidence that the Democrats will be constrained by the Constitution or any other laws (Obamacare, HHS Mandate, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, Benghazi, . . . . )

President Obama and the Democrats have borrowed and spent most lavishly to whet and, to some degree, feed the appetites of many people who thereafter vote for them, as they immorally rack up debt for theirs and our children and grandchildren. When all this decadence crashes down around us, perhaps the Republicans can come in and clean up the mess as they have done in the past.

Meanwhile, we can hope that the folks who vote Democrat will get religion and quit trying to make the state into a godless church to which we are all forced to contribute.