Red, White and Blown: Is the United States of America a Cult? by Guy Rundle

Author:Guy Rundle [Guy Rundle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2023-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Here come the political machines

While all this was going on, there was also the tremendous development of the two main political parties – the Republicans and the Democrats – into the dominating right and left forces we have today. You could pretty much date the mainstream right and left in the US from either the 1896 or 1912 elections, with a final transitional period in between.

In 1896, Republican William McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan for the White House. Bryan has been rendered as a fool in history because he was the lawyer for the party that brought suit against a Tennessee teacher for teaching the theory of evolution, in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. But in 1896, he was a dashing hero to millions, a self-proclaimed socialist who raged against the iniquity of the Gilded Age. McKinley’s victory ended the Democrats’ brief romance with socialism. However, McKinley was assassinated only two years later, in 1898, by an anarchist bomb. His VP, Theodore Roosevelt, became president.

Roosevelt was the last Republican who was a mixture of left and right, introducing pensions, some union organising rights, public education, national parks and a first attempt at socialised health care. But in 1908, his VP and successor, William Howard Taft, broke Teddy’s left–right compromise, and his heart, and sided with the party’s right, the ‘business Republicans’. In 1912, Roosevelt ran against Taft, on the Progressive Party ticket, pushing a full left-leaning slate. His run split the vote and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. He promptly took over a lot of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party program.

Formerly radical and federal, the Republican Party became the party of business. The formerly states-rights Democrats became the party of government action for social improvement. Away the twentieth century went.

For the next half century the Republicans were a largely rational centre-right political party (by US measures). They held the White House through the 1920s and again in the 50s, even as the decades from the 30s to the 70s were dominated by New Deal (Democrat) politics. The New Deal Democrats proposed smaller government, lighter taxes, were probably better on race than the Southern-heavy Democrats and functioned as a loyal opposition. The Republicans did a lot of work to exclude the hard-right elements whose cultish politics had started to develop in the 30s. Paranoid politics, such as the obsessive notion that the mild civil rights demands of Black movements were being driven by communists, was as likely to come from the Democrats as the Republicans.

America’s first Red Scare began at the end of World War I. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had electrified the world in 1917 and showed the large and radical working-class movement what was possible. Across the world, the end of the war had brought millions of troops home, smack bang into the 1919 post-war mini-depression. Strikes shook the West, and the US was no exception, with whole cities consumed by general strikes and a new universal union – the Industrial Workers of the World – making great gains.

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