Wow, what a surprise! Have you seen the National Republican Party’s official platform?
Perhaps, like me, you would have expected it to be a mish-mash of Trumpian miasma, laissezfairyland corporate economics, QAnon lunacy, police state authoritarianism, and all the other wackiness that today’s GOP has been embracing. But, no – astonishingly, this 18-page policy statement flat-out rejects the elitism, knownothingism, and nutballism coming out of the White House and out of the mouths of nearly every Republican congress critter.
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For example, instead of the GOP’s usual claptrap about the moral superiority of “wealth creators,” the platform unequivocally hails the egalitarian ethic of the Common Good: “Our government was created for all the people, and it must serve no less a purpose,” proclaim the Republicans. Moreover, they issue an in-your-face rebuttal to recent Republican policies of inequality: “America does not prosper unless all Americans prosper,” they state. ALL Americans!
And, believe it or not, their platform provides the means for a shared prosperity, declaring that “The protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the [Party].” Plus, they profess solidarity with America’s working class: “Labor is the United States. The men and women, who with their minds, their hearts and hands, create the wealth that is shared in the country – they are America.”
Holy Woody Guthrie, let’s all sing “This Land Is Your Land!” With Republicans converting to the principle that we’re all in this together – even adopting it as formal policy – we could become one nation again and join in building a little-d democratic society based on fairness, justice, and equal opportunity for all.
But is this document a fake, a plant, a joke? No, it’s what the Party was before it lost its mind – it’s the national Republican platform of 1956.
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