So if you look at the history of political parties, the Republican Party is founded in
1854 in Wisconsin and it’s founded by a bunch of people that were exiles from other
parties, which were mostly short-lived parties.
It’s founded by both women and men; it’s the first political party that is founded
by women as well as by men, and it’s founded as “the party of reform” because there’s
a bunch of people that just think the other political parties are not actually reforming
American politics as fast as they ought to.
And chiefly what they mean by that is ending slavery and coming up with a new form of national
unity to replace the brokenness of the American political arrangement under a country that’s
divided (half slave and half free), as people would have described it at that time.
So it’s a pretty significantly important vision that what the party is going to do
is take the religious energy of abolition, which was a movement of Christian evangelicals
who believe that all people under God are equal (men and women, black and white) and
that slavery had to be ended immediately and without compensation to slave owners.
To take that evangelical zeal, but instead of asking people to do that work outside of
electoral politics, to say “We’re going to do this using the tools of party politics,
we’re going to form a party that can achieve these ends,” that’s a pretty substantial
moral commitment and commitment to instituting change using a really important set of political
institutions, mainly the party system (but also newspapers, say).
And so when people say today “the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln” that’s
what they mean, you would say the Republican Party has reinvented itself many, many times
(it’s like Odysseus’s ship at this point, like “What does this Republican Party have
to do with that Republican Party” would be a really interesting question.)
Similarly, the Democratic Party you could tell a completely zigzag-y story about the
history of the Democratic Party.
One of the reasons that the party system isn’t especially inspiring, and I don’t think
either party is especially inspiring as an example of an enduring institution, is that
both of them are pretty willing to trade their constituencies out for short-term gain.
And you can see, I think if you were to do case studies you can see where nonprofits
and for-profit businesses fall apart in that same way thinking very much in the short-term
about an immediate market gain, say, or dividends for their stockholders, some particular new
deal or acquisition or sell-off and they’ve actually dismantled the whole intention of
the institution in the first place.
So the Republican Party, I don’t mean to pick on the Republican Party because you could
do the same dismantlement of the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party is for almost
all of its history the party of women.
It is, as I said, founded by women, it’s the first party to support suffrage, it is
the first party to support equal rights, and the Republican Party in the 1970s, under Ronald
Reagan, says “Let’s just give up on the women because we could get these white men
and it will be better for us.”
And there’s just a deep abdication of the long deep tradition of a commitment to—I
won’t say that the Republican Party delivered suffrage or equal rights because they really
didn’t, women had to do that work outside of the Republican Party—but that continuous
support means that the party is I think quite in a pickle in terms of understanding itself
and its relationship to its own past because it, for various reasons of immediate political
expediency, has forgotten its own past.