It's been a week since the presidential election and the back biting recriminations among the Republicans has been going on non-stop ever since they were apparently blind sided by Barack Obama's re-election.
Losers tend to reflect on why they lost. But not this crowd; they seem incapable of that sort of intellectual activity, and prefer to remain in denial of why they came up short. Maybe that's understandable considering the "evolution" (oops, wrong word) "creationism" that has occurred within the GOP since its inception.
So let's take a short stroll down memory lane considering the current plight and reality that is today's Republican Party.
There was a time when Republicans actually represented true conservatism as in preservation of the existing order. The party of Lincoln was about "preserving the Union" and the Constitution.
Early in the 20 th century Republican President Teddy Roosevelt initiated the national park system, conserving federal public lands from being exploited by commercial interests. Even Nixon brought about the EPA in 1972. While two decades earlier a conservative President Eisenhower proposed the progressive interstate highway system. Ike's farewell address in 1961 warned against the growing influence of the military/industrial complex and the dangers it would pose to our democracy.
And let's not forget the Republicans were anti-war isolationists in the 1930's and opposed "foreign entanglements" that could lead to war.
But such sentiments were before Pearl Harbor and ended with our entry into W.W. II. After the war, the U.S. became the so called "free world" superpower in a cold war standoff with the Soviet Union particularly when that country acquired the A bomb in 1950 and we "lost" China to the Communists. This ushered in the era of Senator Joe McCarthy and his "red baiting" tactics which all but transformed the GOP into anticommunist zealots and accusing anyone who didn't buy into their brand of "patriotism" as socialist "pinko's" and Communist appeasers.
By 1965 with Democrat Lyndon Johnson in the White House, the "Domino" theory was in vogue I.e. if one country falls to the Communists, then that will lead to a neighbor becoming Communist. And Johnson's greatest fear was his certain belief he'd be attacked by the Republican right wing for being "soft on defense" if he didn't forcefully repel the Communists from taking over South Viet Nam. We have since learned that fear was the primary reason which propelled him to escalate the Viet Nam war.
So now with the GOP's favorite bogey man Communism no longer around with the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union most of their ideological attention is on the domestic front.
Let's look at its ideological makeup.
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