We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
In These Times
How
did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of
Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull
and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts
trying to walk?
By Garrison Keillor
Something
has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the
party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles
who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and
supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were
good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their
party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and
Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial
Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it
OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War
to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to
rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of
peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters
flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of
plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared
to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a
Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the
years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward
down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public
service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against
the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that
diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the
misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew
bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long
Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by
a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
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