"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Damn Your Eyes, Johnny Democrat!
Posted 8:46 p.m., June 16, 2004
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I had an interesting exchange with the noted historian Lewis Gould last weekend. He had just published an interesting column in the Washington Post, which essentially says that, despite all the efforts last week to stamp Ronald Reagan's image of greatness into the collective conscience of the nation, the final word remains to be written about the Great Communicator's place in history.
In other words, his greatness, or lack thereof, has yet to be acsertained. (Which, some of you will recall, is how I concluded my own Reagan tribute last week.)
This isn't really what I want to dwell on, but let me digress just a moment to pass on the pivotal paragraphs from Gould's Washington Post column.
In the case of Ronald Reagan, the past week has seen an exceptional effort to use the prolonged period of mourning to shape the historical picture of the former president for the next generation.
If journalism is the first rough draft of history, this presidential funeral week offered a second draft. In this process of interpretation and reinterpretation, the media and Reagan's admirers have tried to fix in the popular consciousness the portrait of a president on the threshold of, or fully inducted into, the pantheon of great White House occupants.
For Reagan partisans, the motives are obvious. This will be their last chance to make the case for their hero's greatness before a national audience. The same team that stage-managed Reagan's most famous moments in office choreographed last week's "legacy-building event," as one former official was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as calling it, from handing out 50,000 American flags to bystanders to timing the seaside sunset backdrop for the late president's interment. For the media, sensitive always to the charge that they are too liberal, the Reagan obsequies provided a superb opportunity to demonstrate fairness, or perhaps latent conservative sympathies, by showing that cable channel and network anchors could also envision a fifth face on Mount Rushmore or a new visage in place of Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill.
Among the general public, the outpouring of affection for Reagan may be more a snapshot of our collective frame of mind than a judgment on his presidency.
-- Lewis Gould,
Washington Post, June 13, 2004It was a great column, though it would probably upset people like the guy who rhapsodied to my girlfriend last week about how we have "buried a saint." But it wasn't what drew me to communicate with Gould, professor emeritus of American history at the University of Texas at Austin. What motivated me to e-mail him was the tag line at the end of the Post column, which related that he has published a book called "Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans."
That got my attention because I am in the process of researching a book on third-party politics in the United States, and it occurred to me the professor might have some tips on source material, and maybe a few insights. He was very helpful and within several hours we had swapped e-mail three times.
In one of them, we discussed the polarization of today's politics, and Gould described to me part of the theme of his GOP book. "My thesis," he wrote, "is that the Republicans still view Democrats as potentially traitorous in light of the Civil War and therefore inherently less legitimate than the Grand Old Party."
Woah.
I was fascinated, but dubious. I've known a lot of Republicans, I wrote him, and I've known some who absolutely hated Democrats. But I've never heard any of them invoke the Civil War. That elicited this response:
The Civil War implanted the notion that the Republicans were the party of patriotism, victory and national honor. That assumption, suitably changed to meet new circumstances, has endured over the years (Red Scare of the Wilson era, McCarthyism, Vietnam era, Clinton). Democrats are regarded as less than patriotic on most counts. One could see it in the implicit assumptions of the [Reagan memorial] ceremonies last week.
-- Lewis Gould,
e-mail exchange, June 13, 2004So it's finally out. Still, after all these years, Republicans unconsciously represent Union blue, Democrats the moral gray zone of the Confederacy, in our political collective mind.
If old Professor Gould is even remotely right, maybe someone ought to remind the GOP that the War Between the States is over. We've got other enemies than Democrats to worry about these days.
