The long history of the GOP has been both glorious - as they argue - and sordid.
From 1860 to 1864, the new Republican party put the federal government to work for ordinary white men rather than oligarchs. It gave out land, provided education, invented national taxation (including what would become the IRS), all while fighting for the nation.
After the war - when Andrew Johnson tried to resurrect the pre-war world, minus the slavery that had supported the rich southerners he hated, and Democrats signed on - the Republicans passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, providing for black male citizenship and guaranteeing black male voting.
If only we could stop right there, all the threads you read about the glorious Republican Party would be true. But as we know, many years have come and gone between 1870 and 2019.
Former Confederates hated black voting, but organizing as the Ku Klux Klan had backfired. So they started to say they weren't racists ... they were "fiscally conservative." They complained that poor blacks elected leaders who promised schools, roads, hospitals, and so on were using their tax dollars for socialism.
In 1872, a GOP faction wanting to replace U.S. Grant sided with the Democrats to argue that protecting black rights was communism. To win reelection, Grant needed to cozy up to Wall Street, which would give him the money to offset the anti-Grant newspapers.
Grant won, and the GOP began to interpret their pro-ordinary man ideology as pro-prosperity, which increasingly meant passing laws to protect business. This meant tariffs, above all, for they protected businesses from foreign competition. But protecting labor was "socialism."
By the 1900s, the GOP worked for big business, crushing ordinary farmers and workers. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was another rhetorical boogeyman that the well-heeled portion of the GOP could use to claim that activist government was socialism and a ruse to redistribute tax money to black people and immigrants who were ruining American traditions.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, FDR's New Deal regulated business and finance, protected basic social welfare, and promoted infrastructure. Even most GOP recognized their old system was a disaster, and backed active government.
But the pro-big business Hoover faction of the GOP, led now by William H. Taft's son Senator Robert Taft (OH), still hated the New Deal's active government and set out to erase it. They were so convinced that US citizens hated this "socialism" they assumed they would defeat Truman in 1948.
When Eisenhower ran for the GOP nomination in 1952, the Hoover/Taft faction blamed the "Eastern Establishment" for stealing the nomination. Moderates had won, but Taft was irate and his men vowed revenge. In Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, they found a powerful figure to carry out their agenda.
The full thread is available here
