What has happened to the Republican party?
What has happened to the Republican party?
Writing to his brother in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower said that the factions in the Republican Party who would seek to eliminate Social Security and other New Deal reforms are comprised of “a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Decades later, Eisenhower’s “negligible” oligarchs emerged in the visage of David and Charles Koch, right-wing oil and gas billionaires. The former actually ran for the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential ticket in 1980 on a platform of completely eliminating the Social Security and Medicare programs.
This system of political financing from a handful of millionaires and billionaires has corrupted both major parties, but its influence is almost total in the Republican Party.
[Eisenhower] laid out the vision of a political party that “detests the technique of pitting group against group for cheap political advantage,” calling the Republicans the “Party of the Future.”
This set of values, balanced between economic prosperity and social consciousness are the Republican party that I grew up with in the 1950's. That set of balanced values still defines my viewpoint today -- but neither party any longer represents me, or people like me.
Read more here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/18/the-long-sad-corrupted-devolution-of-the-gop-from-eisenhower-to-donald-trump/