Update 8/8/2024 (Finally I have been given a name to what has inspired me to write and be active in politics for the past 60 years. So, excuse my self-indulgence in putting this in a FB post. Thanks to Gov. Tim Walz, I now have a name to what I have been philosophically for the years I have been active in politics and business: I am a kitchen table populist..and, like Harris, earned my spurs in a prosecutor's office as director of the DA white collar crime and consumer affairs unit.. When some 40 years ago, I ran for mayor with a platform of combatting Denver's brown cloud, protecting neighborhood quality of life, and safe from being a commuter's freeway through them with alternative transportation and mass transit. I did not win, but came in 2nd in a field of 13, and still continued advocating for consumers and neighborhoods (taking a view protection case to the US Supreme Court,) a radio talk show host, and as Denver's Clerk and Recorder, part of duties as an election commissioner, expanding voter access to minority neighborhoods. Later, I was an executive with a non-profit debt counseling service. I was inspired by having married an immigrant with no command of English and had to take over the family's financial management.. It was a wake-up call to learn all I could to be competent. I wrote a book on the subject, The Colorado Consumer Handbook, which is now out of print.)
Mike Pence has begun an important discussion in his criticism of the current MAGA-dominated GOP, which he called "populist". Mike Pence warns Republicans against 'populism' threat | CNN Politics Populism is not conservativism, he contends. Others have struggled to tag this MAGA party as radical, fascist, extremist, right-wing, anti-democratic, autocratic, dictatorial, or tyrannical. and more. I will add "totalitiarnism" to the list. Whatever you call MAGA, the discussion is very important.
I prefer calling MAGA"radical" because it is certainly not conservative, striving to radically depart from the kind of democracy I have lived under and supported my entire life. They have proposed throwing out or revising the Constitution with its checks and balances and protection of civil rights, and in the meantime, they are defying, ignoring, abusing, subverting, and distorting it. That is not conserving democracy but ending it and making governance into something totally different.
In fact, MAGA does more closely resemble fascism than any conservative form of government in my lifetime. I have written about it as a major theme of the blog and columns since 2012. Calling someone a fascist evokes the ovens of Auschwitz and has become a term of insult used by both sides as inflammatory, but fascism can exist without a holocaust. Nonetheless, in 2012, my column published in the local Sky Hi News, I saw the changes to the GOP that made me wonder what my parents would be thinking about the political party and conservatism to which they were devoted. This was before the rise of Donald Trump, who rode his search for power on this radical streak to his domination today. In 2012, I perceived the beginning of the radical roots of what became the MAGA movement, though I traced its origins to Newt Gingrich..
As a political science major, I remembered the various definitions of the political spectrum soon after I had returned from my junior year abroad in 1959, where I had viewed the Russians converting a fascist country, Germany, to their ideology. Fascism and Communism were off the opposing ends of the political philosophy spectrum, but both had in common " totalitarian" control of the mind, thought, and actions.of populations they, the rulers, governed. Desantis' ant-woke revisionist history of slavery is a tiny example of a current attempt to shape minds regarding racism, but controlling education content has always been key to maintaining power of totalitarians. Dissent was forbidden or suppressed by various tactics, including violence. So let me throw the 1950's term "totalitarianism"to the MAGA tags.
What I also realized that my parents' Republicanism was closer to my more liberal views than either of the radical ends. My parents and I were both devoted to democracy and the institutions of American democracy, national defense from the totalitarians, and that never has been truer than it is in 2023. I cannot help but keep wondering for whom my parents would have voted if they were still here to cast a ballot. In 2012, even Mitt Romey would not have passed muster as a conservative, but now he in 2023, he is considered the outlier rock of an old-fashioned, traditional Republican.
September 7, 2023 update: Thirteen presidential libraries, including those associated with conservative Republicans issued a warning to the Republican party in fear democracy was in danger. Presidential centers from Hoover to Bush and Obama warn of fragile US democracy | AP News "The bipartisan statement was signed by the Hoover Presidential Foundation, the Roosevelt Institute, the Truman Library Institute, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the LBJ Foundation, the Richard Nixon Foundation, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, the Carter Center, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the George & Barbara Bush Foundation, the Clinton Foundation, the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the Obama Foundation."
My published thoughts in 2012:
My column in the Sky Hi News March 6, 2012
For a political junkie like me, this Republican contest for the presidential nomination has been like watching a hard fought game to determine who goes to the Super Bowl, yet the players do not resemble any team members I recognize. I wonder whatever happened to the GOP I used to know.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) concluded there is no middle road and has announced she will not run again. It appears the Senate has no room for a moderate Republican. Republicans are not my late father's party, either. There are new meanings attached to the GOP, the Grand Old Party's initials.
To my father, the Republican party was indeed Grand and that was his team. To him conservatism was looking at any extreme deviation from a policy he perceived had been successful, with skepticism and a “show me the policy will make things better” attitude. He supported the interests of private enterprise and promoted fiscal and self-responsibility, but not to the extent that he failed take into account societal and national needs. He voted for FDR twice and accepted Medicare as a necessity. He was solidly pro choice and he resented religion using the political process to advance theological missions.
Compromise was not a dirty word; it was what a rational democracy should do. Sen. Snowe and he would have been mostly on the same page.
The Grand Old Party is no longer constructively working with opponents to solve the nation's problems in the most economical and rational way. It has become the “Get Obama Party.” After all, the GOP opines, Obama alone is responsible for the size of the debt and he has failed to fix the worst crash since the Great Depression that George W Bush left him. The answer to all is to repeal Obama.
The reason they give is that the Obama future is causing the present woes. Their irrational position: We need to roll back the future to solve our current problems. They blame high unemployment and the faltering economy on Obama's health care plan, which will be implemented in 2014-2020, and Wall Street reform, which also not yet been implemented. The low tax structure carried over from the prior administration is not yet revamped and the Keystone pipeline (which Obama signals future approval) is years away. Funny: Somehow the jobs and GDP are mysteriously improving in spite of a president who the GOP claims is clearly a failure.
Mitt Romney, who sees himself as the Good Ol' boys Party standard bearer, just threw fiscal responsibility under the bus in his rush to dominate the Get Obama Party. His retooled tax plan is a tax cut chicken for every income bracket's pot. Unfortunately he failed the “show me” test of what government programs would be cut to pay for it, which loopholes would be closed, or how much revenue would be generated.
The rest of Romney's proposals are changes for the worse, not for the better. His panacea for 30 million unable to afford health care: Shove the responsibilities to states, which have not even the wherewithal to pay for traditional responsibilities of education, crime, or infrastructure. To deal with the excesses of Wall Street that led to the biggest financial sector failure since the Great Depression, Romney wants to gut the protections provided us in Obama's reform legislation and to return to the practices that caused the crash of 2008. Like gas prices now? He advocates aggression and intervention in Iran, jeopardizing the straits of Hormuz and most of the world's oil supply.
At least Romney is not trying to change the GOP into God's Own Party, as Rick Santorum wants, nor is he rocking the boat as Ron Paul proposes in his version of the GOP as Go On-Your-Own party with wacky economics, nor does he share the nihilism underlying mischiefmaking Gingrich's Ornery Party.
Nonetheless, I liked my father's version of the GOP better.
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