Editor:
In 1964, when I was a high school freshman in Phoenix, Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president. He was known as “Mr. Conservative” and, although he was otherwise considered a decent and sensible person, he had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He thought public policy on racial discrimination should be left to the states and to one’s own personal conscience. But, as freshman boys will do, primarily for shock effect, we would jokingly ask, “Are you a Republican or a communist?”
J. Edgar Hoover, the very longtime FBI Director, believed that Martin Luther King had communist sympathies and had him wire-tapped and followed to document his supposedly un-American tendencies. Hoover also was known to equate Democrats with communists by use of the following logic: Democrats are liberals, liberals are socialists, socialists are communists. Therefore, all Democrats are communists.
That was sixty years ago. Things don’t seem to have changed much. Then, George Wallace, governor of Alabama, was “standing in the schoolhouse door” to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama – and was saying, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He also said, on more than one occasion, that “the Government is being run by thugs and federal judges.”
Now, we have a president of the United States who calls federal judges who oppose his policies “radical, left, lunatics” who hate America and are guilty of treason. He has sicced the Justice Department on members of Congress who oppose his policies. In reaction to the recent series of election victories by candidates affiliated with the fringe Democratic Socialists of America, the president has equated the DSA with all Democrats – who are really communists. And, he said on the 4th of July in a rally speech, “We will never let America become a communist nation.”
Even though the Constitution did not provide for the establishment of political parties, the fact is that since Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist policies of John Adams who was then president, there have been two dominant political parties in the United States. The Federalists gave way to the Whigs who evolved into the Republican Party – while Jefferson’s Democratic Party hangs on. Third parties – and various reform movements – come and go, but the “democracy within a republic” that is the American form of government is based on the existence of a two-party political system.
In 1964, the Republican Party had its liberal wing and conservative wing – with Eisenhower Republicans in the middle. And the Democratic Party still included the Southern Democrats as well as northern liberals. Somehow, they came together to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and also in 1965, the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid which provide basic health care to tens of millions of Americans.
Now, Republicans are home to all things conservative and anti-Democratic, while Democrats struggle to define themselves as being the anti-Republican party.
Now, government programs that have been an essential part of the fabric of America for sixty years are under attack – as being “woke” or progressive, or socialist, or unnecessary. Poor people and the disenfranchised should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and try harder – and stop expecting the federal government to help them.
Public opinion polls show that most Democrats and Republicans agree the nation is on the “wrong track,” but they don’t agree on what the right track should be.
Unless a functioning two-party system is restored, there isn’t much hope for a successful resolution to these issues.
Jay Miller
Hillsboro
