The Way of the Whigs

10/18/2007

Paul Munnis


According to Wikipedia the Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from 1833-34 to 1856, the party was formed to oppose the policies of President Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Executive Branch and favored a program of modernization and economic development. Their name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776 who fought for independence. The Whig Party counted among its members such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. In addition to Harrison, the Whig Party also counted four war heroes among its ranks, including Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig leader in frontier Illinois.

In its three decades of existence, the Whig Party saw two of its candidates, Harrison and Taylor, elected President of the United States. However, both died in office. John Tyler became president after Harrison's death, but was expelled from the party, and Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor's death, was the last Whig to hold the nation's highest office.

The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories.

Whig Representative Lewis Davis Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slayed. The party is dead--dead--dead!" Increasingly politicians realized that the party was a loser. Abraham Lincoln, its Illinois leader, for example, ceased his Whig activities and attended to his law business.

In today's discourse, the Whig Party is usually mentioned in the context of a now-forgotten party losing its followers and reason for being. Parties sometimes accuse other parties of "going the way of the Whig Party."

That is what could well happen to the GOP come this 2008 election.

Bush has weakened the GOP and split and fractured it several times over. His has been a disastrous presidency for the GOP. An unpopular war, high deficits, loss of American and Iraqi life, mismanagement of Iraq leading to Iraqi Civil War, weakening of our military forces, deficit spending, and attacks made by him and his Party on the Constitution and Rule of Law, combined with Evangelical Christian demands to overthrow Separation of Church and State, these issues have all left the GOP weakened. Now we can see that many in the GOP ranks are choosing to just leave politics. An historic shift is taking place and it is quite likely to spread to State Capitols as Democrats are dragged into State office via national candidates winning on Federal ballots. Note that Southern support of slavery destroyed the Whigs and that Southern support of the neo-cons is destroying the GOP.

At this point the GOP is broke, it has a paucity of candidates and it has many of its elected officials quitting the Party and quitting politics entirely. That is a recipe for a Party headed for extinction.

Note that the Whigs were in favor of a strong Congress over the Executive Branch while Bush and the neo-cons favored a strong Executive Branch over Congress. Note that the Constitution holds both branches to be equal and that Gonzales and Bush / Chaney have done everything possible to subvert the Constitution and to assert new Executive powers not authorized by our Constitution.

Congress has not gone to the Supreme Court for a test because the neo-cons stuffed the Court with Conservatives. Yet Gonzales has been ousted and Bush has been nullified.

Frankly I thought that rather than to let the GOP die and go the way of the Whigs that the GOP Party Candidates and the incumbents would band together and force Bush to resign and then put in place a dynamic Party reform prior to the 2008 election. They haven't done that and time is not on their side.

To my surprise they are preferring to resign as individuals and to retire from politics rather than to oust Mr. Bush and to denounce the neo-cons. Here in Minnesota Jim Ramstad is a case in point. He says he is war weary of Washington and burnt out.

Note that the Republican Party grew out of the wedge issue of slavery and that it is dying over the wedge issue of the Iraq War after the Party itself used various other wedge issues to split the nation and then finally to split the GOP Party into factions thus leaving neo-cons isolated as the 2008 election approaches. More than 70% of the nation is repudiating the neo-con thesis of government. It is interesting that the Southern State embrace of State and Religious Separation has always caused Party destruction when embraced at a national level by a Party.

Note also that Karl Rove and his theory of wedge based politics is now debunked as it was for George Wallace when he tried to use it to oppose the Civil Rights movement. The politics of hate and division do not go down well in America -- we are a nation founded on the ideal of Unity.

Also note that the neo-cons co-opted the GOP, drove out the Moderate Republicans, embraced Evangelical Christians and then the unraveling accelerated. Their first wedge issue was gun control. Then the Flag was used as a wedge issue. Then came the abortion issue and that was negated by the legalization of the “Morning After Pill.”

When Euthanasia became a wedge issue it backfired on the GOP. Then fiscal conservatives broke with the borrow and spend Republicans. The War in Iraq, now widely believed an attempt at seizing oil in the mid-east while building Empire also backfired as it went into its sixth year and people became war-weary asking why we were doing this to others? The answers were foggy then and they still remain so.

In the words of John Edwards commenting on the resignation of Alberto Gonzales and now applied to the death knell of the GOP: “Goodbye and Good Riddance.”