Republican Party United States

"President Abraham Lincoln died more than 150 years ago. The "" was so enraged at him for beating them in the Civil War and at his party for ending slavery that they voted Democrat for the next 100 years. Then the Democrats started supporting civil rights for . The Republicans saw the opportunity, courted them and flipped them. The Solid South is now theirs. It has been a long time since the Republican Party has been "the party of Lincoln". Let us put that aside. Is the GOP still the "party of Reagan"? Oh, very much so. And I was recently reminded exactly how much while re-reading a book I wrote during his presidency back in the 1980s: "You Get What You Pay For". As I flipped through the pages, I found myself saying, over and over again, "that's just like Trump". [...] Joe constantly points out that Trump started his campaign with racism, riding down the escalator, attacking Mexicans. Joe thinks this illustrates a difference. Ronald Reagan also started his presidential campaign with racism. He chose to make his kick-off speech in the heart of the Solid South, in Mississippi, quite near where three civil rights workers had been murdered. He said, "I believe in states' rights." It was the biggest dog whistle of the day, code for segregation, and the crowd cheered. He continued: "... we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." It had been the Republican Party that had tried to impose integration after the Civil War. Reagan was making it clear that his party was completely divorcing itself from Lincoln's vision. It was not a one-off. Reagan ran against the "" and against "the strapping bucks" who stood in front of you at the supermarket, buying steaks with food stamps, while you made do with hamburger helper, earned by the honest sweat of your brow. It was a brilliant strategy that turned government programmes into handouts to minorities with money stolen - through taxes - from good white people. It was called the . Reagan did not invent it. But he sold it with warmth, charm, and a smile. [...] Trump may be vulgar, Trump may be abrasive, but in terms of racism, corruption, and destruction, he is Mr Reagan's true heir. Trump's Republican Party is what it has been at least since the 1980s, only more so."

"The 'discovery' is made that although slaves were emancipated, race relations did not essentially change. In this interpretation, slavery becomes the dependent variable in the historical equation. Racism is the independent variable, the enduring value in American politics and society. From this perspective, the motives of the free soil and antislavery movements are questioned on the ground of self-interest and denied genuine moral standing. Defense of the Union is divorced from the antebellum controversy over the extension of slavery into the territories. Abstracted from the ideology and aims of the Republican Party, the goal of preserving the Union is viewed simply as a project for aggrandizing national power; a project that includes permanent defense of existing slavery. Meaningful antislavery motives are attributed only to slaves, who in recent accounts are viewed as principally responsible for initiating the process of emancipation. Lincoln and the Union high command, their vision clouded by racial conservatism, stand in need of instruction in the ways of genuinely higher moral purpose by the slaves themselves, whose flight to freedom transformed the war for the Union into an abolitionist crusade."

"The Republican party of the north hates slavery... The Republican Party is the permanent, dominant party at the north, and it is vain to think that you can put it down. It is true that the Republican Party hates slavery, and that it is to be the permanent, dominant party at the north; and the majority being equivalent to the whole, as I have already stated, we cannot doubt the result."

"We got a real clear picture of what they all value. Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, 'unchain Wall Street'. They're going to put y'all back in chains."

"The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change."

"To blacks, the GOP was the party of emancipation and opportunity."

"He (Ronald Reagan) was pro-free trade and pro-immigration. He believed in limited government at home and American leadership abroad. That's what I believed in too — and that's what I thought the Republican Party stood for."

"Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump."

"I won't vote for Trump. My hope is that he will lose by a landslide, and the Republican Party will come to its senses, rejecting both his ugly, nativist populism and the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz."

"It’s hard to know exactly when the Republican Party assumed the mantle of the "stupid party." ... After decades of masquerading as the "stupid party," that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter."

"There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the "party of ideas," because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks. ... In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers."

"It is genuinely terrifying that someone (Donald Trump) who advances such offensive and ridiculous proposals could win the nomination of a party once led by Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote more books than Mr. Trump has probably read."

"The Republican Party was once the party of small government, free trade, traditional values, principled foreign policy leadership and, most important of all, adherence to the Constitution. Republicans spent decades fulminating against activist judges like Earl Warren and activist politicians like Barack Obama, claiming they were undermining the founders' vision of limited government."

"We went into the little meeting held in a school house Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans and we were the first Republicans in the Union."

"Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy. The play that game because they have no other game. They have no love and no joy. They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them."

"The Republican Party has stood for a certain free market version of America, an America that's about openness, that’s about markets, that's about opportunity, and a definition of what this country is."

"You used to have John McCain and a lot of Republicans with climate change legislation. And once it became a Democratic issue, the Republicans had to go on the other side."

"Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group. One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.” As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right—the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey. Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.” The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, “but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!” She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet. I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party."

"Donald Trump destroyed the Reagan Republican paradigm in 2016, but he didn’t exactly elucidate a new set of ideas, policies, and alliances. Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines. The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump. They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more. Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality."

"I have been a conservative Republican my entire life. But the Republican Party as a whole has gotten so far out of touch with the American people. I switched my registration so that I could vote for Sanders in the primary, but the day the primary is over I'm going to register as an Independent."

"What we Republicans should stand for is growth in the economy."

"Any suggestion that a segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong. Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized and rightly so. Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals, and the founding ideals of our nation, and in fact the founding ideals of the political party I represent, was and remains today the equal dignity and equal rights of every American."

"Bob Smith] was almost certainly the last person in Washington to discover that the Republican platform is irrelevant to actual politics. Smith was outraged when he found out. “The Republican platform,” he declared in his party-switching speech to the Senate, “is a meaningless document that has been put out there so that suckers like me and maybe suckers like you out there can read it.” Smith’s speech went on like this for close to an hour. Through all of it, he howled like a man deceived, the lone member of the Senate Sucker Caucus. He even read portions of the platform aloud. It was a mean thing to do—as close to a dirty trick as Smith is probably capable of—but instructive nonetheless. “As a first step in reforming government,” Smith thundered, reciting the painfully hopeful words of some unnamed party scribe, “we support elimination of the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Energy.” Whatever happened to that promise? he demanded. Or to the promise to defund Legal Services? Not to mention public broadcasting, the UN, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And where’s the legislation that would “make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children”? After five and a half years of Republican control of Congress, Smith wanted to know, where is any of it?"

"We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans. My country 'tis of thee. Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died. Land of the Pilgrims' pride. From every mountainside. Let freedom ring. That's exactly what we mean. From every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the great Smoky of Tennessee, and from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia; not only let it ring for the minorities of the United States, but for the persecuted of Europe, for the rejected of Asia, for the disfranchised of South Africa and for the disinherited of all the earth; may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

"The party is the party of emancipation, but it has lost its soul. A new constitution and a new state flag offers them an opportunity to regain it."

"The Republican presidential candidate in 1964 also opposed the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater had been an enthusiastic backer of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, both overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats. He was a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He hired many blacks in his family business and pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard. He had a good-faith objection to some features of the 1964 act, which he regarded as unconstitutional. Goldwater was no racist. The same cannot be said of Fulbright, on whom Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom. Fulbright was one of the 19 senators who signed the “Southern manifesto” defending segregation. Okay, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate."

"Former racists of both parties renounced their old views, as Kevin D. Williamson points out, Lyndon Johnson himself voted against anti-lynching laws and poll-tax repeals, and neither party has a perfect record on racial matters by any stretch. But it is a libel to suggest that the Republican party, the anti-slavery party, the party of Lincoln, and the party that traditionally supported civil rights, anti-lynching laws, and integration, became the racist party after 1964. The 'solid south' Democratic voting pattern began to break down not in the 1960s in response to civil rights but in the 1950s in response to economic development and the Cold War. Black voters in the north, who had been reliable Republicans, began to abandon the GOP in response to the New Deal, encouraged by activists like Robert Vann to 'turn Lincoln's picture to the wall. That debt has been paid in full'. In the 1940s, the GOP garnered only about 25 percent of southern votes. The big break came with Eisenhower's victories. Significant percentages of white southerners voted for Ike even though the Democratic party remained firmly segregationist and even though Eisenhower backed two civil-rights bills and enforced the Brown decision by federalizing the National Guard. They also began to send GOP representatives to the House. These Republican gains came not from the most rural and 'deep south' regions, but rather from the newer cities and suburbs. If the new southern Republican voters were white racists, one would have expected Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to be the first to turn."

"The League of Nations had no sooner been created than it received an almost mortal blow. The United States abandoned President Wilson’s offspring. The President himself, ready to do battle for his ideals, suffered a paralytic stroke just as he was setting forth on his campaign, and lingered henceforward a futile wreck for a great part of two long and vital years, at the end of which his party and his policy were swept away by the Republican Presidential victory of 1920. Across the Atlantic on the morrow of the Republican success isolationist conceptions prevailed. Europe must be left to stew in its own juice, and must pay its lawful debts. At the same time tariffs were raised to prevent the entry of the goods by which alone these debts could be discharged. At the Washington Conference of 1921, far-reaching proposals for naval disarmament were made by the United States, and the British and American Governments proceeded to sink their battleships and break up their military establishments with gusto. It was argued in odd logic that it would be immoral to disarm the vanquished unless the victors also stripped themselves of their weapons. The finger of Anglo-American reprobation was presently to be pointed at France, deprived alike of the Rhine frontier and of her treaty guarantee, for maintaining, even on a greatly reduced scale, a French Army based upon universal service."

"I cannot control what the Republicans leak and what they are contending."

"During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race."

"Clenching his square jaw, Rockefeller had hit the stage with an immediate task: to speak in favor of a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform denouncing extremism, specifically that of the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the ultraconservative, red-baiting John Birch Society. The platform committee, controlled by Goldwater loyalists, had rejected this resolution. Yet the moderates hadn’t given up. On the opening night of the convention, Gov. Mark Hatfield of Oregon had declared, “There are bigots in this nation who spew forth their venom of hate. They parade under hundreds of labels, including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society. They must be overcome.” That was not the predominant sentiment within the Cow Palace. Hatfield was met with a barrage of hisses and boos. He later called the response “frightening” and reflected, “It spoke to me not merely of strong political disagreement, but of a spiteful kind of enmity waiting to be unleashed to destroy any-one seen as the enemy — domestic or foreign.” The delegates were strident anticommunists — many feared evil reds were subverting the government and the nation’s most revered institutions — and for them, Goldwater was the leader of a do-or-die crusade against leftism. They would eagerly back a resolution reviling commies. And though the Grand Old Party — founded a century earlier by antislavery politicians — was now actively moving to court racist Southern voters opposed to desegregation and civil rights, they might disavow the Klan. But including the John Birch Society in this lineup of extremists to be deplored was a not-subtle-at-all dig at Goldwater and his fanatic followers. Everyone in the room knew what — and who — this resolution was aimed at."

"As soon as Rockefeller proposed adding the anti-Bircher amendment to the platform, the crowd shouted, “No! No!” A rumbling of boos resounded through the hall. Rockefeller pushed on: “It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now any doctrine —” Another cascade of jeers interrupted him. He smiled and waited for it to subside. At least he was now showing the world the true nature of this new Goldwater-bewitched GOP. In Goldwater’s command center, top campaign aides dispatched a message to their delegates: Knock it off. A defiant Rockefeller continued, assailing “any doctrinaire militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher.” The booing got louder. Rockefeller noted that Eisenhower, addressing the convention two hours earlier, had called on the GOP to reject radicalism of the left and right. He quoted himself — from a speech he had given a year before — warning that the Republican Party “is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, highly disciplined” minority that was “wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism.” More boos. He was clearly referring to the Birchers, and he urged his fellow Republicans to heed “this extremist threat” and “its danger to the party.” As veteran political correspondent Theodore White, who was present, later put it, Rockefeller “was the man who called them kooks, and now, like kooks, they responded to prove his point,” and the “kooks” were “hating and screaming and reveling in their own frenzy.” A call for reasonableness, a plea to spurn the paranoid, irrational, and conspiratorial tenets of the far right — this was not what Goldwater’s people wanted to hear. Some reporters feared Goldwater supporters were about to storm the stage and physically attack the governor. Maintaining a wry and cocky smile, Rockefeller told the audience, “This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” and he condemned the “infiltration and takeover of established political parties by Communist and Nazi methods.” He added, “Some of you don’t like to hear it ... but it’s the truth.” He declared, “The Republican Party must repudiate these people.""

"Republicans are very good at propaganda; but there are limits to such strategies."

"The Republicans had fielded an army and navy of more than 2.5 million men, had invented national banking, currency, and taxation, had provided schools and homes for poor Americans, and had freed the country's four million slaves... Republicans have taken the stand that economic opportunity is central to the American ideal and that it is the government's responsibility to make it possible for everyone to rise."

"The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution's protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working... Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble Westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860."

"The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party."

"There are parallels between the 1890s and today in voter suppression laws motivated by white conservatives' fears of growing minority strength at the ballot box. In the 1890s, the suppressors were Democrats. Now they are Republicans... African Americans still supported the Republicans, the party of Lincoln and liberty. Slavery, which almost all Democrats supported before the Civil War, was gone. But, the Democrats were still the party of white supremacy... Abraham Lincoln, the country's first Republican president, led the Union to victory in the Civil War and put slavery on the road to extinction. After the war, the GOP was responsible for constitutional amendments that finished off slavery, made African Americans citizens and put the ballot in the hands of black men. It is one of the great tragedies of our time that that party, the party of Lincoln and liberty, is long gone."

"I confess I secretly suspect the Republicanism of an orator who is more anxious to show his hearers that he respects what he calls the rights of slavery than that he loves the rights of man. If God be just and the human instinct true, slavery has no rights at all. It has only a legalized toleration. Have I a right to catch a weaker man than I, and appropriate him, his industry, and his family, forever, against his will, to my service? Because if I have, any man stronger than I has the same right over me. But if I have not, what possible right is represented by the two thousand million dollars of property in human beings in this country? It is the right of Captain Kidd on the sea, of Dick Turpin on the land. I certainly do not say that every slave-holder is a bad man, because I know the contrary. The complicity of many with the system is inherited, and often unwilling. But to rob a man of his liberty, to make him so far as possible a brute and a thing, is not less a crime against human nature because it is organized into a hereditary system of frightful proportions. A wrong does not become a right by being vested."

"And as I understand the Republican party, while it steadily holds that slavery is in itself a wrong, it does not forget human conditions and the actual state of things, and, therefore, that the questions of planting slavery in fresh territory and of removing it where it is in wrought in a system of society are very different, as different as the prevention and the cure of disease. The question of the moment, then, is simply whether the most unrelenting and permanent despotism can be justified by the Constitution of the United States. That is, whether the makers of the government meant that the democratic-republican principle should gradually, but surely, disappear from that government. There are, therefore, but two parties, one holding that a system of free society, the other that one of slave society, is the real intention of the government. These parties are sectionally divided in situation, but they both aim to have their idea become the national policy. The party of slavery, indeed, is divided in its own camp, but only upon a minor question."

"We believe the strength of our nation lies with the individual and that each person's dignity, freedom, ability and responsibility must be honored... We believe in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless or race, creed, sex, age or disability... We believe free enterprise and encouraging individual initiative have brought this nation opportunity, economic growth and prosperity... We believe government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn... We believe the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations and that the best government is that which governs least... We believe the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people... We believe Americans must retain the principles that have made us strong while developing new and innovative ideas to meet the challenges of changing times... We believe Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights throughout the world."

"The Republican Party was born in the early 1850s by anti-slavery activists and individuals who believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of charge. The first informal meeting of the party took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, a small town northwest of Milwaukee. The first official Republican meeting took place on July 6, 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. The name 'Republican' was chosen because it alluded to equality and reminded individuals of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. At the Jackson convention, the new party adopted a platform and nominated candidates for office in Michigan. In 1856, the Republicans became a national party when John C. Fremont was nominated for President under the slogan, 'Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, Fremont'. Even though they were considered a 'third party' because the Democrats and Whigs represented the two-party system at the time, Fremont received 33% of the vote. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House. The Civil War erupted in 1861 and lasted four grueling years. During the war, against the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. The Republicans of their day worked to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth, which guaranteed equal protection under the laws, and the Fifteenth, which helped secure voting rights for African-Americans. The Republican Party also played a leading role in securing women the right to vote."

"In 1896, Republicans were the first major party to favor women's suffrage. When the 19th Amendment finally was added to the Constitution, 26 of 36 state legislatures that had voted to ratify it were under Republican control. The first woman elected to Congress was a Republican, Jeanette Rankin from Montana in 1917. Presidents during most of the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were Republicans. While the Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt tended to dominate American politics in the 1930s and 40s, for 28 of the forty years from 1952 through 1992, the White House was in Republican hands, under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. Under the last two, Reagan and Bush, the United States became the world's only superpower, winning the Cold War from the old Soviet Union and releasing millions from communist oppression."

"Republicans have a long and rich history with basic principles. Individuals, not government, can make the best decisions. All people are entitled to equal rights; and decisions are best made close to home. The symbol of the Republican Party is the elephant. During the mid term elections way back in 1874, Democrats tried to scare voters into thinking President Grant would seek to run for an unprecedented third term. Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly, depicted a Democratic jackass trying to scare a Republican elephant, and both symbols stuck... For a long time Republicans have been known as the 'GOP', and party faithfuls thought it meant the 'Grand Old Party'. But apparently the original meaning, in 1875, was 'gallant old party'. And when automobiles were invented it also came to mean, 'get out and push'. That's still a pretty good slogan for Republicans who depend every campaign year on the hard work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get out and vote and push people to support the causes of the Republican Party."

"Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican. That's just a fact of life."

"This... must inevitably raise a few questions—principally, whether or not the GOP remains a gaggle of thieves willing to sell each other’s grandmothers out at a moment’s notice to save their own skin politically, an end-of-times spectacle of an increasingly unstable oligarchy too drunk on its own material excess to save itself from its own decadence and corruption? Another question that springs to mind is whether it’s now in fact degenerated even further into something even more horrible again — a raging collective psychosis of pathological entitlement, collective narcissism, hypernationalist tribalism and jingoism, and death-cult supremacism."

"I hate Republicans."

"The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us."

"Gentleman, I am a republican, a radical republican, a Black republican, a republican dyed in the wool, and for one I want the republican party to live as long as I do… It is the party of law and order, of liberty and progress, of honor and honesty, as against disloyalty, moral stagnation, dishonest voting, and repudiation."

"For colored men the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea."

"I knew that however bad the Republican Party was, the Democratic Party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican Party was composed gave better ground for the ultimate hope of the success of the colored man's cause than those of the Democratic party."