Elephants and Donkeys and Whigs, Oh My!

Our nation's Conservatives are enraged. They panic about a "socialist agenda" now being enacted in the White House. And indeed! Who wouldn't panic? Socialism conjures up thoughts of redness, an iron curtain, the forgotten common people and Animal Farm. But what is occurring in D.C. now, and by extension in our nation, is something far more American (and, indeed, far more Republican) than the foreign policies of Stalin, Marx and Mussolini. We are experiencing an internal re-definition of our political parties, representative of our very changing times.

Democrats are not attempting to secretly slip a communist manifesto into our Constitution. Rather, they seem to be taking on the posture of a party long gone - one that helped feed both the Republicans and the Democrats we know today. I'm referring to the Whig party, one of the foundations of our modern political parties.

Once upon a time, between 1836 and 1850, American Democrats' primary political rival was the Whigs. The Dems, those liberal, pleasure-seeking donkeys, were the party of tradition, pronouncing to seek reclamation of the glories of the past. Dems then were the nation's fear-mongers. They opposed federal support of banking institutions and supported the individual's freedom of choice. Dems favored farms, supported rural independence, slavery, territorial expansion through war, and were highly favored in the South.

The Whigs, conversely, were the party of modernization and progress. Rather than speaking to Americans' fears, the Whigs pivoted on the essence of Hope. The Whigs supported using federal funds to promote economic growth, especially through banking and transportation institutions. Whigs advocated prison and public schooling reform, entrepreneurship, urbanization, industrialization, federal rights, commercial expansion, opposed the Mexican War, and were strongly favored in the North. (By the way, Abraham Lincoln was a Whig leader in frontier Illinois.)

And then the Civil War happened: the great destruction of the unity of an American consciousness. The Whigs, the party of hope and forward-thinking, became divided between the "Cotton" Whigs who supported the territorial expansion of slavery and were prominent in the South, and the "Conscience" Whigs, who supported freedom of choice and were prominent in the North. Can you guess which became the elephants and which became the donkeys? Surprise - the Cotton Whigs joined the Democratic party, while the Conscience Whigs joined the Republicans.

So what happened? How did we mutate to become so opposite of our roots?

Believe it or not, there was a "Guilded Age" of American politics, in which we weren't just reaching across the aisle, we were practically spooning over it. Together, we opposed the Populist party and their platform of Big Government for the betterment of Farmers Alliances. When the farmers' situations improved, the Populist party faded into oblivion.

But, like teenage lovers, our relationship grew strained over time. Our angst got the better of us, and we rebelled against one another and the parties of our parents. Republicans found evangelical religion, which was in stark contrast to Democrats' new environmental compassion. Ronald Regan's "New Right" birthed a new breed of Republicans - the Conservatives.

Now, Glen Beck, Rick Perry, and other political/propaganda alliances threaten to destroy the Republican party and its noble heritage. By using slanderous terms like "socialism" for the party with which they were once so close, by talking about states' successions and demonstrations at the Alamo, along with the pet project of "gun rights," the hostility brewing in the country is at an unnecessary peak.

We have reached a fundamental agreement that slavery has no place in the modern world. Now it seems we squabble over anything - Cap and Trade, Abortion, Federal Finance Programs, and whether or not the first lady has the right to hug the Queen of England - just to keep ourselves separate and divorced. Such polarization is unamerican. As humans we came from Adam and Eve (literally if you're Republican; figuratively if you're Democrat), and as parties we came from the Whigs. Somewhere in our development we understood what it meant to compromise. I believe that the Dems of today are available for compromise, which, for instance, is why we're begging the GOP for their alternative to the Climate Change Bill. Republicans, on the other hand, may see a significant cotton/conscience split before the next election.