Happy Birthday, GOP

It was on this day in 1854 that the Repub­li­can Par­ty was organized.

His­tor­i­cal­ly the GOP has stood for some very laud­able ideals and has fought effec­tive­ly for them. Some of the ideals of the Repub­li­can Par­ty may seem strange to mod­ern read­ers who read the news of the Repub­li­cans of today, but the ideals are worth embrac­ing even though today’s exe­cu­tion falls short of those ideals.

There is no vice in falling short of one’s ideals. The only vice is achiev­ing them, because that means that the sights have been set too low. The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca is a nation of failed ideals, and I would­n’t have it any oth­er way. We should always be try­ing to to bet­ter and always set our goals high­er than we can achieve. Let those who will accuse us of hypocrisy live with their own low stan­dards, but it is an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion to declare the way it ought­ta be as some­thing dif­fer­ent from the way it already is.

So lets take a moment to cel­e­brate the Grand Old Par­ty, the par­ty of lead­ers who warned us about the dan­gers of the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex (Eisen­how­er), pre­served our nat­ur­al won­ders with the estab­lish­ment of our Nation­al Parks (Ted­dy Roo­sevelt), fought for the abo­li­tion of slav­ery and the equal­i­ty of all Amer­i­cans (although he deserves cred­it for a great many things, it’s too easy to just say Lin­coln… the Repub­li­can Par­ty was formed by abo­li­tion­ists), who secured a wom­an’s legal right to choose abor­tion (check vot­ing records from the six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties. The GOP was the pro-choice par­ty up until Rea­gan took office), and cre­at­ed the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (Nixon).

The GOP may be hard to rec­og­nize today, but if you look past the dem­a­gogues who fill the spot­light and look to the core of “Red State” vot­ers and yes, even some of the elect­ed offi­cials, you might be sur­prised to find a core of Amer­i­can val­ues that too often gets forgotten.