The Republican Convention will begin next week.  Even if one were paid overtime to watch it, it would be difficult.  It will be an extended commercial for the Romney-Ryan ticket, but what a commerical and what a ticket. 

Is one Republican convention different than another?   Here is an unsentimental journey through Republican history to address that question

 Ronald Reagan, patron saint of 21st century Republicans once said to mock environmentalists, "once you've seen one Redwood, you've seen them all."  Can we say that about Republican conventions(with the exceptions of the Republican conventions of 1912 and 1940, we pretty much can for every other Republican convention since 1880)

Sometimes students, particularly young students, ask me this question:  "Were the Republicans ever any good."  I answer it sometimes this way.  My name is Norman Markowitz.  I was born in the Bronx, New York in 1943.  Then the Republicans were no good.  My father's name was Charlie Markowitz.  He was born on the lower  East Side of Manhatten in 1907.  Then the Republicans were no good.  My grandfather's name was Joseph Markowitz.  When he was born the Republicans were not only good, but they were great.  In fact they were by far the greatest organized political party representing progressive and peoples democratic policies on earth when my grandfather was born.  But, my grandfather, Joseph Markowitz, was born in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was running for President and the Republicans were four years old, an anti-slavery party, a land reform party, a party advancing the interests of industrial capitalists against slaveholders, commercial capitalists, and their allies and backers.

The good news was that the Republicans were a revolutionary party for about a generation.  They led the Republic through the civil war, abolished slavery and established national citizenship and supremacy in the 13-15th amendments to the Constitution, major land reform through the Homestead Act, progressive educational reform through the land grant college provisions  of wartime legislation, a national banking system to foster industrial development, a tariff and currency system to attract capital and  "protect" native industrialists, and a greatly expanded national government to advance these policies.

The bad news was that the Republicans were a revolutionary party first and foremost serving the interests of large industrial/corporate/finance capital.  Within a generation they had "betrayed" their commitments to "free labor," and citizenship rights for four million former slaves, used the army to crush early major  strikes, and worked out a "great  compromise"  with Southern plantation owers, former slaverholders, neo white supremacists, to abandon over four million former slaves and their families, for whom the "great compromise" was seen as the "great betrayal,"

That had pretty much happened by 1880 and the only thing that one could say about the Republicans was that  the Democrats were either no better or, when it came to civil rights questions, usually a lot worse.  The Republicans did have a significant progressive wing, but that wing never gained control of the national party as it elected the friends of big business and the enemies of organized labor in election after election.  In 1901, the party of the "great compromise" was struck by the "great accident." 

Vice President  Theodore Roosevelt, a political Jekyll and Hyde personality, that is, a progressive on many  domestic issues and an unabashed war mongering imperialist on foreign policy issues(someone who fit Lenin's definition of a "social imperialist" as well as any European politician) reached the Presidency when President McKinley was assasinated.  But Roosevelt was put on the ticket by the Republican machine in Nw York to literally kick him upstairs, a fact that he well understood since he was the only delegate to the 1900 Republican convention to vote against his own nomination,

Roosevelt both fought with and tried to buy off with patronage the Republican leadership.  When he sought to make a comeback in 1912, winning most of what were the first presidential primaries in U.S. politics, the conservatives stole the nomination from him, leading him and his followers to form a third party ,the Progressive Party

While Roosevelt ran second in the election, the party, organized around his charismatic personality, died with him after he returned to the GOP because of its pro war/military interventionist stand after WWI began

.But 1912 is really an important year in Republican history.  It is the last time that opponents of the conservatives ever had  any real influence over the national party organization.  After 1912, with the exception of 1940, where  advertising men, and representatives of Wall Street and banking interests, having gone down to two crushing defeats at the hands of FDR, rose up at the convention to nominate Wendell Willkie, a credible liberal Republican but also Wall Street lawyer and utilities company CEO, conservatives have been in complete control of the machinery of the Republican party for a century.  What has changed though is the definition of "conservative" and it has gone from bad to very very much worse.

The Harding, Coolidge, Hoover Republicans of the 1920s, sought to preach and practice the doctrine of "the business of America is Business," undermine the limited regulatory reforms of the past, destroy an income tax that was  less than a decade old, fight a "culture war" which set  White Protestant against Catholic and Jew, prohibitionist against anti-prohibitionist, religious fundamental against anti-fundamentalist(sound familar) and identify prosperity with a rising stock market and new consumer goods bought on credit(sound familiar). 

Unfortunately, the depression was the end result of these policies and the Republicans went down with Hoover, AlF Landon who warned that social security would lead to state regimentation, Thomas E. Dewey twice, until the cold war policies of the Democratic Truman administration  gave them the opportunity to push back the labor movement, block a social security based national health care system, along with federal full employment, education, housing and energy legislation that would have made the U.S. today far more advanced than any other developed country with a better quality of life for all of its people.

The Republicans then  gave us Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon(whom Adlai Stevenson famously called a "white collar McCarthy") and then , with the help of the Truman administration's war in Korea,finally regained the presidency with General Dwight Eisenhower, about whom might can only say that he could have been much worse. 

Red-baiting was a postwar bipartisan issue, but the Republicans were the champs at it and they set the standard.  But they never became the national majority party they were before the depression. 

 Their conventions were now on TV, ugly, often hate filled even when they tried to be "moderate," warning of "creeping socialism," "spend and tax liberals" who were "soft on communism," radicials and intellectuals who were somehow "un-American" because they didn't share the Republican philosophy. 

 There still were a small number of progressive Republicans, but they now were in deep cover, referrring to themselves as "moderates.  I remember watching the Republican convention of 1964 after Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of the robber baron of robber barons, governor of New York, and leader of the  encircled "liberal Republicans" was insulted and booed.  A reporter afterwards asked him why he put up with such things, given his position, and, I thought, the implication that he could buy and sell all of the delegates who attacked him.   He smiled and said "Haven't you ever been to a Republican convention.?"

But 1964 was another turning point year for the Republicans, the year that Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat  racist presidential candidate in 1948, leader of Southern Democratic segregationists in the U.S. Senate, crossed the isle and was welcomed by Republicans with open arms as their presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, voted against the hall mark civil rights act of 1964

Even though Goldwater went down to a crushing defeat and took the whole Republican party with him, making the Great Society program(Medicare/Medicaid, Federal Aid to all forms of education, housing reform, expanded civil rights legislation, environmental legislation) it was dejavu all over again as Johnson's Vietnam War intervention destroyed the great society program and brought the "white collar McCarthy" Richard Nixon to the White House.

Although the Goldwater right Republicans had gone down to a crushing defeat in 1964, they were the "vanguard " of the Republican party after 1968. 

 With Nixon , the Republicans became a "triple threat" party, adding white supremacist Southern segregationists, people influenced by racism everywhere, along with male chauvinists and religious rightists to their usual anti-labor  anti-urban, anti-social welfare policy constituencies.  The party that in the late 19th century boasted that it had freed the slaves now became the party that sought to roll back the civil rights that their descendants gained, along with women all all other religious and ethnic minorities. The party which betrayed four million former slaves by letting their enemies disenfranchise them in the late 19th century was now the party of voter suppression against their descendants and millions of other people The party which strengthened the separation of Church and State in the late 19th century now worked to undermine that separation in the late 20th and twenty-first century. 

Nixon, Reagan, and the family Bush, nearly forty five years of "white backlash," thirty nine years of "abortion is murder," thirty two years of "supplyside economics," detaxation, deregulation, privatization, "greed is good," "God is On Our Side," posturing. 

 If Theodore Roosevelt came back and discussed his environmental legislation and anti-trust policies, he would be denounced next week as a Communist.  If Wendell Willkie came back and talked of accepting the New Deal reforms but moderating them in the interests of business, he would be called a sellout and a traitor.  If Dwight Eisenhower came back to the convention, some would probably denounce him as a general for not marching to Berlin in 1954 before the Soviets got there and as a President for not using nuclear weapons and "winning the cold war"  If Lincoln returned and put the 13th amendment abolishing slavery up to the convention, I am not sure that it would pass and in any case, it would be a close vote.

  Nixon would be hailed as a "victim" of the liberal media.  Reagan would be treated as the equivalent of a Roman God emperor 

 George Bush of course will be cheered and compared favorably with Barack Obama.who will probably be accused of everthing the Republicans have been accused their opponents since the Harding administration.

 So you don't really have to watch the Republican convention at all.  You can write the script that it will follow.  The old definition of a "reactionary," those who learn nothing and forget nothing, and do the same thing over and over again.  Except in modifying that tactics of division, the Republicans continue to be poster boys for that strategy