On this Christmas Eve eve, I thought y’all might to take a look at George Wallace and Curtis LeMay’s American Independent Platform of 1968. It’s interesting to compare it to the rhetoric of the modern GOP and also to see how it has morphed somewhat, in the campaign of Mike Huckabee, into a current campaign.
Huckabee takes the rough edges off…he even manages to get praise for his racial tolerance from idiots like Joe Klein. But the Huckster is just as hostile to brown people as any other candidate in the Republican race. Yet, it adds in doses of Wallace-style populism.
George Wallace was a proponent for states rights, in his case, to safeguard racial bigotry. This is referenced, as the Platform points out, in the Tenth Amendment (States Rights). Wallace, and other conservatives, could (and can) always be depended on to promote the cause of the majority over that of the minority, and majority rule is more readily available at the state level.
One problem with that–the preamble to the Constitution. It doesn’t say: Majority rules. It ‘says’ personal rights, not states’ rights.
“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The United States is more than a bunch of states. It has a national government. Why a national government? This government is necessary to safeguard the basic rights of its citizens, which come from the Declaration of Independence. “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So the function of the national government is to protect the “unalienable rights” of its citizens, considering: justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare and personal liberty.
One can see why Wallace didn’t reference the preamble of the Constitution, but only its Tenth Amendment, because then he’d have to consider the justice, tranquility, welfare and liberty of every citizen, and not just do what the majority rules.
We will see this come up again with abortion. The Supremes will let the states decide to remove a fundamental right of women to control their own bodies, in disregard of the Constitutional right to liberty. Would a return to slavery be next?
The party is best remembered for its state rights stance, but you can see the other elements in the platform. It’s certainly more libertarian than the modern GOP, but calls for safeguarding social security and improving medicare. It says that everyone has a right to work. It calls for free market solutions to accomplish this, but the details reveal it would be a government run program.
It’s a hybrid of Ron Paul’s libertarianism and Mike Huckabee’s New Deal social conservatism, wrapped up in the modern GOP’s overt racism…all targeted to suburban white voters. It’s actually a better platform that the current GOP platform because it takes more account of civil liberties and doesn’t truck with outright corporatism. And the racial appeal is bad enough in the current GOP that it really isn’t all that worse than what the 1968 platform was calling for…if you look at the language.
This one, however, is loony:
Free from ever INCREASING taxation I could understand, but I’d love to see their governmental model for DISCONTINUED taxation.
Hint: It involves a lot of slave and convict labor, import tariffs, and “user fees”…
After all the only really necessary government functions involve keeping the ‘immigrants’ out and the trash picked up.