The Democrats have sailed a steady course for two centuries from Andrew Jackson until the present. Their mission has been consistently the subjugation of other people's life, liberty, and property to their government based on race or class or whatever else they want. This steady course has taken them from slavery to racism, socialism, and our welfare state.

     The Republicans have been the anti-Democrat party through most of its existance. Anti-slavery, anti-eugenics, anti-Klan, anti-racism, anti-Progressivism, anti-Communism, anti-socialism, anti-fascism, and anti-eco-scares. Without actually shrinking our ever-metastasizing government, the Republican party has pushed back on government control and funding of education, health care, the arts, and regulation. There have been a few bright positives in the Republican history including actively ending slavery, getting American Blacks and women the right to vote, and the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, Jr.

     When I was a child in Phildelphia we had a championship basketball team, the 76ers, with Wilt-the-Stilt Chamberlain whose performance was legendary. (Not all of that legendary performance was on the basketball court, or so they say.) The question comes up: Were the 76ers a great team with an especially great player or were they just another basketball club bouyed by the awesome talent of one member?

     Franklin D. Roosevelt was a giant, not one I admired, but a giant nonetheless, and he would have been reelected again and again and again even after four terms. His posthumous fifth term was his vice president Harry S. Truman just as Ronald Reagan was succeeded by his vice president George Bush. Let's look at the party pendulum from 1949 through 2020.

Democrat             Republican Franklin D. Roosevelt 1945-1948 Harry S. Truman 1949-1952 1953-1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower 1957-1960 Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy 1961-1963 Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1968 1969-1974 Richard M. Nixon 1974-1976 Gerald R. Ford Jimmy Carter 1977-1980 1981-1984 Ronald Reagan 1985-1988 Ronald Reagan 1989-1992 George Bush Bill Clinton 1993-1996 Bill Clinton 1997-2000 2001-2004 George W. Bush 2005-2008 George W. Bush Barack H. Obama 2009-2012 Barack H. Obama 2013-2016 2017-2020 Donald J. Trump

     It's like a professional sports league where the organizers make sure the games stay close so people can root for their teams in close games and the winner trophies move around. There have been periods of one coach or team winning championships and one player dominating a sport, like Jonathan E in "Rollerball." Rules are adjusted to minimize that in favor of a more competitive and contentious season that sells more tickets and gets more television viewers.

     Similarly, our United States political environment seems similarly manipulated. "No matter how you vote, the government gets elected." From 1950 through 2020 it was the Democratic-Republican Party doing the same thing whether it was a donkey or an elephant in office. Government grew and our liberty shrank. Both Democrats and Republicans got us into wars, the so-called Patriot Act was supported by both parties, and the huge federal bureaucracy has kept increasing. For seventy years political, moral, and ideological victory has been sacrificed for a more exciting political game.

     From 1932 through 1950 that was not the case. Frankin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was bigger than life as he dominated the American political scene. He was the true Democrat with his fascist economic policies that prolonged a depression for eight more years, his racial and ethnic hatred, and erosion of civil liberties including requiring employers to withhold taxes from employees' wages. Most of his changes are still in place. Like him or not (and I don't) he was a major political force, more than the presidents on my list above from 1950 to 2020 up until Donald Trump.

     Two presidents come to mind who stood on the strengths of the Republican Party without really fitting in.

     His accomplishments include establishing national parks and monuments to preserve natural resources and starting construction of the Panama Canal. He saw our government as a peacekeeper both domestically and abroad, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

     A century later we have Donald Trump, well known in the New York Bight for a long time. In my college years 1974-1978 there were three tycoons in my view of "the city" (as we called the island of Manhattan), Malcolm Forbes, Harry Helmsley, and Donald Trump. He led a large and public life and managed to build his own Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City and his own skyscraper in Manhattan. He started rich, once a billionaire, and multiplied that by five with dollars that shrank about the same amount, so he more-or-less broke even over the past forty years. He was known as a tough negotiator, "The Art of the Deal" and all that, and for philanthropic moments.

     I always pictured him as a big bragging boistrous billionaire who would bend the rules his way without breaking them. If I were negotiating a deal with Donald John Trump (so that's what the J stands for), then I would figure he's going to take whatever we sign the way that most favors himself but that he would follow the letter of the contract. I would have an army of lawyers, attorneys, and barristers on my side of the table to make sure what we sign is something I would be happy with even if he pressed hard to make it work for him.

     As President of the United States he started off with a list of things to do in one hundred days, or something like that. I feel he lived up to the letter and spirit of this with two major exceptions. While he dramatically reduced the ravages of regulation and let the United States become a more productive nation, he did not stop the growth of government spending and consumption. Second, he did not "drain the swamp" and he allowed the Democrat infestation and infection to grow and to fester. This includes the criminal Clintons and their friends, the Obamas, the Bidens, Black Lives Matter, et cetera, the largest blight ever upon our political landscape. (Do you get the feeling I'm not fond of the current wave of Democrats?).

     He acted all rough and tumble, but he left the White House without fanfare when his election to a second term was stolen from him. He didn't take the furniture and the dishes with him as the Clintons did when they left. Along with allowing government to grow and not removing the growing plague of tyranny, President Trump and his supporters utterly failed to act for the eleven weeks after the election before the monsters took over. That was a responsibility Trump's team had and they shirked it. Shame on them!

     My point here isn't whether Donald Trump was a bad person or a good person or how well he did his job, only that he was an iconic leader distinctly different from American leadership in the past eight decades. He was like Wilt Chamberlain on the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team.

     The Republicans 1945-2016 have little more to say than, "We're not the Democrats." That comes across as, "We didn't hurt the country as bad as they did." We weren't the New Deal, we weren't the Communists or socialists or fascists, we weren't the Great Society, we weren't the Chinese Cultural Revolution, we weren't ISIS or the so-called Palistinians, and we weren't the Klan or the Black Panthers or ANTIFI or BDS or BLM. The generation where our same Republican values actively ended slavery and got the vote for Blacks and women are so long ago nobody associates them with the Republican Party.

     The Republicans without Donald Trump bring little to the table. Most are Republican In Name Only (RINO). Defining a political party or the American conservative moment as not being another political party or another political movement isn't the kind of identity I like to brag about. There are two strong stands Republicans have taken in my lifetime and I'm not happy with either of them.

     The Republican Party was active in the McCarthy witch-hunt trials, not our proudest moments. In an attempt to diminish the threat of communism televised hearings were held where people would be accused of being communists and their only way of preserving their own lives would be to name somebody else. It says here on a Google web page, "McCarthyism is the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manner." This may be a liberal view, but I believe there is a lot of truth to the claim that the evil of communism was being fought by establishing our own evil. These aren't the values we want to promote.

     The other major fault of the Republican Party during this time is a retreat from the tyranny of socialism to the long, terrible history of Christian tyranny. Whether personal religion is the opiate claimed by Marxists, organized religion has been over a millennium of Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. I was so happy to see the Religious Right of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s fading away to a genuine fight for personal freedom and openmindedness in the conservative movement.

     One obvious example of this Christianity-religious abuse is Congress adding "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance on 1954 June 14. If there ever was Congress making a law respecting an establishment of religion (violating our Constitution's First Amendment), then this is clearly it. We're rightly comfortable expanding the literal meaning of "Congress shall make no law" to all kinds of protections of church and news media while flagrantly spitting in its face because we're afraid of the "atheistic commies".

     If you want to see how absurd this religion-in-politics was, imagine if the same enthusiasm changed the Pledge to "Under Allah" and our national motto to "In Allah We Trust."

     Another example of religious zeal becoming Republican politics is the pro-life anti-abortion movement. I can respect their feelings in their personal and religious lives, but even the Book of Genesis articulates a clear message to the contrary. No pro-choice advocate is forcing anybody to have an abortion, at least no conservative pro-choice advocate. This is clearly religion becoming politics, a nasty message all around.

     The whole gay-marriage and anti-gay-marriage controversy is silly. At best it's a distraction from real issues we really should care about like government promotion of racism, regulation, loss of personal freedom, invasion of privacy, stolen elections, and anti-semitism. More to the point, an anti-gay-marriage position takes away personal freedom and invades privacy in precisely the way we conservatives are supposed to be opposing. No pro-gay-marriage advocate is forcing anybody to be homosexual. Opposing gay marriage is a nasty message all around.

     Imposing Christian-religious principles into law is the mirror image of imposing Islam Sharia Law, which conservatives tend not to like. Promoting the Religious Right is a nasty message all around.

     If we're trying to recruit membership in the Republican Party and trying to win the hearts and minds of people to join the conservative movement supporting the values of the United States of America, browbeating them with religion isn't the way to do it.

     Third, get religion out of politics, especially abortions and marriage. (The argument that abortions kill babies is the same social-media stupidity that people who want to keep their own earned wages are greedy and that tax cuts are welfare for the rich.)

     Fourth, we should sell freedom, responsibility, and pride, third in our country, second in our culture, and first in ourselves. We must remember the horrors of Progressivism, socialism, our left wing, and the Democratic Party. We should sell our values of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract and we should be prepared to defend them. Whoever THEY are, church or state, THEY are not our salvation. We must find our own individual and cooperative routes to success. If the differences over the past two centuries aren't compelling, if the difference between 2014 and 2019 isn't compelling, then just look at the difference between 2019 and 2022 here in the United States.

     Fifth, we should call "Bullshit!" when the word-twisting hucksters promote their snake oil and steal our future. We should not be complacent when threats against us are rising like they did ninety-years ago in central Europe.

     Sixth and finally, it's okay if life isn't fair. Everybody should get a shot, some have it easier than others, some were born from wealthier families, some are smarter than others, some are luckier than others, but the important thing is getting everybody a chance to make it. People who worry that Elon Musk gets superior health care should worry more about finding ways for the least-well-off tenth to get less-regulated and, therefore, better and more-affordable care.