Republican Party Has a History of Internecine Warfare

The American people have come to the conclusion both political parties are D.C. centric.  Democrats have made it clear they’re for big, centralized government and their voters are okay with that. If anything, these Marxists are  angry this country hasn’t obtained a Venezuelan-esque paradise.

However, conservatives have had a rude awakening.  The Tea Party movement exposed the GOP for what it is, and it has nothing to do with limited government or the U.S. Constitution.  The Republican establishment thought they could exploit our movement; instead we exposed them.  Now we have internecine warfare where both factions are fighting for the soul of the party.

History has a way of putting things into perspective.  I’m currently reading Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion Tourgee. What an eye opener.  This book is a treasure trove for those seeking information on Reconstruction and its failures from the perspective of a Radical Republican.

Tourgee and his fellow travelers were exasperated by the failures of the Republican Party when it came to securing the rights and safety of freedmen and loyalists in the South.  Here is an excerpt from A Bystander’s Notes: The Afro-American League (1889):

The claim the Republican Party is all the organization the negro requires comes with very bad grace from the organs of a party which has shown itself thus far quite unable to deal  with the questions touching his rights as a man and a citizen - a party with the record of the inconsistency of 1876 upon its shoulders - an inconsistency so glaring that is seems impossible that any Northern Republican of average sensibility could ever ask a colored man to rely upon that party to remedy the evils which attach to his condition, at least until that crime against good faith and common sense has been retrieved.

The simple fact is the Republican Party is just like any other party.  It seeks success and, within limits, it advocates and does whatever its leaders and manipulators believe will secure success and avoids what they believe endanger the result.  This is the very highest merit of the party system, which progress yet devised for a self-governing people.  Strong, resolute, intense men, looking over the field of public sentiment, adjudge thus idea or that to be uppermost in the popular mind, and so order an advance along this or that portion of the line of policy the party occupies, and expect the rest without abandoning their position to remain comparatively quiet in any particular struggle.  It is for this reason that the Republican Party, after twenty-five years of aggressive movement along the line of individual right, thrust again to the front of the old Whig principle of protection and fought its battle almost solely on that issue.  It was not because it had not abandoned the principle of equal right and privilege, but because the leaders believed that success was more probable if the attack was made on another part of the line.  Many of its leaders, both during the campaign and since that time, have favored relegating the question of the rights of the colored man to the background.  They have “had enough of the nigger,” they say.

        

Dare I ask,  has today’s Republican establishment had enough of the Tea Party? I can most definitely say we’ve had enough of them.