Greatness, Again

The Republican party has reached bottom and in their few moments of sobriety, conservatives know it.

Republicans began as the anti-slavery party in direct and vocal opposition to Southern Racism and the Know Nothings. They fought a civil war in order to change the world for the better.

Today it is the Klan and the John Birch Society cheering the Republican candidate on.

The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln who gave his life to hold the Union together with the power of the Federal government.

Today Republicans talk openly of secession and burning Washington to the ground.

The Republican Party began with one of the greatest orators in American history, a man whose words continue to ring down through history sharp and pure as ruby laser light, Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…. I don’t even have to look it up. Like many Americans I know the words by heart and more than a century after they were first spoken on the field at Gettysburg they still resonate with raw power and the promise of a better world.

Today republicans nod and cheer when their candidate says, We have to come up, and we can come up with many different plans, in fact, plans you don’t even know about will be devised because we’re going to come up with plans, health care plans, that will be so good.

Trump is no Lincoln. He’s no Ronald Reagan. Hell he’s not even George W. Bush.

This is the nadir of the Republican Party.

And this may be where it ends. This may be where the Republican Party finally drinks itself to death, a withered ruin in a wheelchair.

Or…

Perhaps this is the point, the bitter and terrible rock bottom, that finally turns things around.

This is the crucible in which greatness might be reborn.

America is not well served by the destruction of the Grand Old Party.

Growth, innovation, ingenuity, vigor, are all the products of stimulating competition and intellectual challenge. America needs both conservatives and liberals of reason and intellect and a willingness to work together.

And it’s ironic indeed that those spitting blood right now over recent national outrages such as the flag and the pledge of allegiance forget that they themselves put the words “one nation” into those vows. If they don’t mean it, what the hell are they so mad about?

Here’s the bottom line: Republicans don’t need to take back America, for they never lost it.

Instead they need to take back their party.

The descendants of Abraham Lincoln do not need to make America great again, for America has never lost the greatness described by Lincoln’s words.

Instead America needs to make the Republican Party great again.

Not great in some grand gesture, some fantastic achievement, but instead great in a thousand small ways. Great in the ways which make America great for all of its citizens – indeed all the citizens of the world.

Now is the time for Republicans of good intention, of reason and moderation and compromise, to wrest back their party from the bigots and the fanatics and the lunatic fringe and send them back into the margins, isolated and powerless, where they belong.