Dear Republicans: Will You Salute the Tyrant or Save the Republic?

History will remember the cowards — will you be one of them?

Dear Republicans,

When I was a kid, my dad was a Republican activist. He gave me John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason when I was around 10; the summer I was 13, I went door-to-door with him for Barry Goldwater, even though he insisted on calling himself an “Eisenhower Republican” or, when he was feeling expansive, a “Lincoln Republican.” My younger brother was a Republican political consultant in the 1970s before abandoning the GOP.

I know what the Republican Party used to be — for both better and worse — and there’s very little of it left today.

And yet it may well be the only institution that can save democracy in America, if a few of its members can begin to show some courage.

Trump and a handful of white supremacist rightwing billionaires have turned GOP into a death cult that resembles the old Dixiecrats, embracing racism and oligarchy while only giving lip service to working class people and the poor.

But it was once a real, legitimate political party.

Barry Goldwater was deeply suspicious of the morbidly rich and never would have tolerated a liar like Trump or an egomaniacal billionaire like Musk. When he accepted his party’s nomination in 1964, he told the delegates:

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.”

He added:

“Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.”

In his book Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater wrote:

“The enemy of freedom is unrestrained power, and the champions of freedom will fight against the concentration of power wherever they find it.”

President Reagan famously said:

“Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed.”

And:

“Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?”

Yet today, the richest man in the world — without a single vote from anybody — is running amok in our federal system, shutting down the agency that kept China at bay in the Third World and prevents people from starving; stopping scientific research to cure cancer and other diseases; and rooting around in the private medical and financial details of American citizens and our intelligence resources around the world.

All, apparently, to free up money to fund the next round of tax breaks for billionaires like himself and his tech broligarch buddies.

Is it possible to more clearly define a “dangerous concentration of power”?

Right now it appears that Trump and Musk are ignoring court orders, in violation of the law and the Constitution, putting us on the verge of a constitutional crisis that could break our nation.

Most importantly, right now the few honest Republicans left are the one group of people who can most easily, quickly, and effectively stop Trump and Musk from tearing apart our republic.

But what has happened to them?

Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan all vigorously opposed communism; Trump now bows and scrapes before Communist Chinese President Xi, accepting gifts from him for Ivanka and killing off the US Agency for International Development that Xi has been competing against with his trillion-dollar Belt and Road program.

Every Republican president of my lifetime has opposed Russian expansionism and the brutal form of tyranny that both the old Soviets and today’s Putin represent — until Trump came along. Yesterday, he suggested that Ukraine “may be Russian someday…” and has apparently been in regular secret contact with Putin for years (as, reportedly, has been Musk).

Every Republican president of my lifetime supported a free and open press in America — until Trump came along. Now he uses Stalin’s old “Enemy of the people” phrase to describe the Fourth Estate that Jefferson said was even more vital to democracy than government itself.

Every Republican president of my lifetime (except Reagan) supported quality secular public schools and higher education — until Trump. Now Trump’s Christian nationalists are forcing bible readings and the Ten Commandments on schoolchildren across the country, Republican governors are dismantling public school systems with vouchers, all while Republicans go to the Supreme Court to block efforts to reduce student debt.

The Republicans I remember were big fans of law and order; they cringed at the idea of openly corrupt or criminal people acquiring public office. Now we have a president who’s been convicted of 34 felonies, credibly accused of rape and sexual abuse by almost two dozen women, found liable for business and tax fraud, broke his marriage vows with each of his three wives, and told over 30,000 documented lies in his first term.

Those Republicans also believed that committing crimes carried consequences. Now Trump is embracing and pardoning convicted criminals like Rod Blagojevich and Charles Kushner, making the latter our Ambassador to France. And in an ultimate spit-in-the-face to law-and-order, he freed and pardoned 1,500 convicted violent criminals, including multiple cop-killers.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to send troops into the South to enforce antidiscrimination laws and Supreme Court decisions. My Republican dad, when a white girl in our neighborhood married a Black man and her father refused to attend the wedding, walked her down the aisle. Now we have an openly racist Republican president whose billionaire henchman delights in throwing a Nazi salute at a GOP audience — which then applauds wildly.

Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes were advocates for democracy around the world, speaking out and fighting to defend any nation embracing a republican form of government. Trump, on the other hand, regularly disrespects our democratic allies and embraces dictators, autocrats, and authoritarian regimes. He’s praised Russia's Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and China's Xi Jinping, while often criticizing leaders of democratic nations.

When Democrats were fighting against the right to vote in the South, Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon defended the right of Black people to vote (and Reagan and both Bushes gave them lip service). Trump openly champions voter suppression, particularly when it’s focused against Blacks, Hispanics, and women.

There was a time when Republican presidents were against bribes. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), introduced into Congress during the presidency of Republican President Gerald Ford (and signed by Carter) outlaws American companies giving bribes to corrupt foreign governments for business deals. When I was working in the international relief field in the 1980s, I visited Haiti where the minister in charge of health and welfare openly solicited a bribe from me and my organization; because of FCPA I could tell him to screw off. Trump’s suspending this law is going to open a floodgate of harassment and bribe demands against American companies, NGOs, and their representatives. Is there no bottom for this man?

Republicans used to fiercely defend the right to privacy in the Fourth Amendment and elsewhere. Trump has Musk and his teenage hackers rummaging through our personal details — and those of every business leader (including Musk’s competitors) and elected official in the country. Blackmail, anybody? And let’s not forget Republican appointee Earl Warren, on a Republican-majority Court, authored the Roe v Wade decision that made abortion a private matter between women and their doctors.

Republicans used to refer to and recite the Constitution like a tic. Now they’re openly attacking it, arguing that Trump and Musk can ignore orders from federal courts and shut down agencies that were lawfully created and funded by Congress.

I remember when Republicans were the most vigorous defenders of the environment, embracing wild spaces and the national parks created by Republican President Teddy Roosevelt and expanded by Eisenhower and Nixon. Today, they’re gutting the EPA and selling off drilling rights on public lands to their wealthy donors in the fossil fuel industry.

When five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled that billionaires could dump unlimited money into elections to buy or destroy any politician they wanted, the GOP jumped up with hands out. Now, unelected billionaires give marching orders to Republican politicians all across the country, even writing their legislation for them.

But there may be a few Republicans left who remember the values their party once espoused; perhaps the most effective activism we can do right now is to reach out to them and remind them of the principles they have abandoned.

The Adam Kinzinger/Liz Cheney Republicans, genuine conservatives, who have simply been keeping their heads down. Who may discover that they actually have a spine and care more for their country than for the next election.

If you are one of those Republicans, I’m speaking to you right now. Look at your colleagues. As a member of Denmark’s conservative party told the press this week of Republicans cowering in terror of Trump:

“If these people can’t see how absurd they appear, they are out of touch with reality.”

If you fail to stand up and our republic falls, history and our children will ask you how you could have allowed it to happen.

Why didn’t you stand up? Why did you choose to kneel to a frankly pathetic tyrant? Were you always a coward?

Somehow, if you fail America at this critical moment, I doubt you’ll have a good answer…

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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