With the new year 2024 coming tomorrow, it will mark 170 years since the Founding of the Republican Party in 1854, dedicated to opposition to the expansion of slavery, and including abolitionists in its midst, who committed themselves to the total end of slavery.
For many decades after the end of slavery, Southern Democrats promoted discrimination against African Americans, including lynchings, Jim Crow segregation, and denial of voting rights, and also a nativist attitude toward Catholic and Jewish immigration.
Sixty years ago, the Democratic Party under Lyndon B. Johnson finally liberated the party from this racism and nativism, only to have these Southern Democrats rush en masse to the Republican Party.
There was still a great deal of resistance by many Republicans, until the rise of Donald Trump, but now, the Republican Party has become an openly racist and nativist party without shame, and has also worked against women’s rights and voting rights.
The Republicans of the founding era would be shocked at how the Republican Party has repudiated its basic principles.
The Presidential and Congressional Elections of 2024 give decent Americans the opportunity to repudiate the disgraceful Republican Party, which puts Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and decent Congressional Republicans who contributed to American history on a totally different level than the modern disaster the party has become!