Heather Cox Richardson: To Make Men Free

“To Make Men Free” (2014) is Heather Cox Richardson’s history of the Republican Party, the main right-leaning party in the US, from 1854 to 2008. She is a professor of history at Boston College and the author of the blog “Letters from an American”.

It is an excellent overview, providing much of the background that is missing from the bits and pieces learned in the US from school and news outlets. And she is not afraid to condemn the party’s mistakes in no uncertain terms.

The Party of Lincoln, as the Republicans still like to call themselves, lasted all of 17 years, tops, from 1860 to 1877. After that Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people” became “of the rich, by the rich, for the rich”. And, with the notable exceptions of Teddy Roosevelt (1901-09) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61), that is pretty much what they have been ever since, the party of naked capitalism.

Crying socialism: Calling anything to the left of naked capitalism “socialism” and therefore a threat to the social order goes back to 1871 when the Paris Commune was big news in the US, when actual radical socialists took over Paris.

In the 1920s the Republicans had a free hand, giving the banks a free hand, leading to the Crash of 1929 and, in time, a world war. And 24 straight years of Democratic presidents.

In the 1950s the naked capitalists began to make a comeback by way of writer William F. Buckley Jr, a thinking man’s Joe McCarthy. Richardson says of the book that made his name, “God and Man at Yale” (1951):

“It demonstrated precisely the sort of inculcation Buckley advocated [for universities]: it defended Christianity and individualism not through a well-reasoned argument but by misrepresenting the opposition, posing as a persecuted minority, and smearing opponents as tools of socialists and atheists.”

In 1955, Buckley founded the National Review, a political opinion magazine, to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story.” But it got nowhere till he began to tell the violated White racist’s side of the story, in 1957, when nine Black students wanted to attend Little Rock Central High School. By joining naked capitalism to Christianity and White racism, Buckley extended its appeal far beyond violated businessmen. In the 1960s this became the Southern Strategy.

By the 2000s, Buckley’s ideologically-driven Movement Conservatism had so taken over the party that it had parted company with “the reality-based community”, as Karl Rove, Bush’s Brain, put it.

Then in 2008 came Obama, the first Black president, a Democrat:

“President Obama might have represented Lincoln’s hopes, but he was also the embodiment of a century and a half of Republican fears.

“Republicans’ single-minded determination to stop this man, this one man, regardless of the actual nature of his policies and regardless of the very real needs of a nation trying to recover from a devastating economic recession, revealed that, having been captured by Movement Conservatives, the Republican Party could no longer engage with the reality of actual governance. Their world had become all image, no substance …”

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• books
  • Books I read in 2020
• Republican
  • The Southern strategy
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates: The First White President
  • AOC on Republican Christianity
• Joe McCarthy
• William F. Buckley Jr
• Elizabeth Eckford – one of those nine Black students
• Lincoln
• Bush
• Obama
  • Obama retrospective

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