How the GOP stopped caring about you

In 1862 , in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Justin Smith Morrill stood in Congress to defend his party’s invention: an income tax . The government had the right to demand 99 percent of a man’s property, the Vermont representative thundered. If the nation needs it, “the property of the people . . . belongs to the government .” The Republican Congress passed the income tax — as well as a spate of other taxes — and went on to create a strong national government. By the time the war ended, the GOP had invented national banking , currency and taxation ; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s 4  million slaves.

A half-century later, when corporations dominated the economy and their owners threw their weight into political contests, Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Insisting that America must return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him,” the Republican president called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes.

In the mid-20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower recoiled from using American resources to build weapons alone, warning, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He called for government funding for schools, power plants, roads and hospitals.

How did the progressive Republican Party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower become the reactionary party of Ronald Reagan, the tea party and Paul Ryan?

In three decades, the Republican Party had taken the nation to opposite extremes. Once the driving agents of economic opportunity, Republicans had become the engineers of economic ruin.

After 1980, the government slashed taxes and social welfare spending, even as it boosted defense spending, and once again, wealth stratified. Between 1979 and 2008, the after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans grew 275 percent. By 2007, the top fifth of American earners made more than the other four-fifths combined.

Financiers impressed upon President George W. Bush that it was imperative to bail out the big banks; their collapse, they claimed, would destroy the world economy. Bush, along with most members of Congress, got behind the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but movement conservatives in Congress opposed it as yet another big-government program. They insisted that mitigating the crisis was not the proper role of government, and that the only way to boost the economy was to cut taxes and spending and reduce regulations on business.

As unemployment climbed, housing prices fell and the stock market plummeted, erasing Americans’ retirement savings, the GOP completed its third cycle, witnessing the abandonment by the party of its founding principles, the precipitation of an economic crash and a transfer of power to the Democrats.

The history of the Republican Party shows why, since the Civil War, the nation has been caught in cycles of progressivism and reaction. Is it possible for the party — and the country — to resolve this tension? Surely the original Republican argument that economic opportunity must be advanced by an active government, the idea conceived by Lincoln and adopted by Roosevelt and Eisenhower, could work in the modern global economy as it did in the era of industrialization and in the nuclear age. But can the party shed the opposing argument, developed in the conflicts of the late 19th century and recycled ever since, that government activism is tantamount to socialism?

Perhaps with the influx of young people, immigrants and minorities into the voting population, the cycle can finally be broken. These voters are too young to remember the Cold War and are more comfortable across ethnic lines, making it harder to rally them with the specters of socialism or racial conflict. Forced to adapt to a changing nation, in this century, perhaps, the Republican Party will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders.