Though no one takes Communism seriously as a threat to “the American way of life” anymore, not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and China’s entry into the global capitalist market, the Republican Party can’t break the old habit of demonizing its enemies by painting them red. Even Barack Obama, whose financial policy ranks are dominated by the Wall Street elite, has been scapegoated by Republicans as a “socialist,” most viciously for his attempts to drive down costs in the health care market through the Affordable Care Act.
Jilted Republican presidential contender Jon Huntsman now has turned this demonizing rhetoric against the GOP itself. Huntsman said the ideological rigidity and extremism of his party left Republicans in danger of creating an opening for a third major political party to emerge. This candor resulted in Huntsman being disinvited from a major Republican event, prompting him to compare the Republican Party of 2012 to the Community Party of China. “I thought for a moment about what they do in China if you’re off script,” Huntsman explained his comment after it provoked a media firestorm. “The party, they knock you out.”
We implore the Missouri Republican Party, where he may have only a shred of hope for being heard, to consider what Huntsman is trying to tell them. Though in the long run, it must be confessed, we would welcome the further destabilization of the Republican Party, based on its anti-populist and frequently offensive policy stands, in the short term we would welcome a return to the right-center of a party that has drifted so far to the right that it is now talking to, and fighting amongst, itself. This predicament is disastrous in a state like Missouri where the state Legislature is dominated by Republican representatives far out of proportion to the actual numbers of Republican voters, given that we have an elected Democrat governor, one of two U.S. Senators is a Democrat and (putting aside anomalies like Roy Blunt’s devastation of the woefully mismanaged Robin Carnahan campaign) when Republicans do win statewide it is not by super-majority margins.
Let us offer a glimpse of hope from the current session in Jefferson City. A new bill that would in effect silence Missouri youth and their teachers and administrators from discussing sexual orientation will not be heard in committee and therefore can not pass to the floor for a vote. Scott Dieckhaus, a Republican from Washington who chairs the education committee where the bill was assigned, is speaking for the silent majority of Americans and even Missourians who, it is becoming increasingly clear, are not as hateful and punitive on the issue of homosexuality as the GOP’s far right. Given that House Speaker Steve Tilley, also a Republican, likely assigned the bill to a committee where he knew it would die quietly, we expect that Tilley’s leadership was at play here. We commend Tilley and Dieckhaus for their role in protecting the freedom of our youth to discover who they are and their dire need for empathetic teachers and administrators to respect this freedom. We see signs that the U.S. is headed toward equal civil rights extended on the basis of sexual orientation, for many of the same reasons we fought and won the battle for this nation to respect equal civil rights with regard to race.
“We should be accommodating all voices,” Jon Huntsman urged his party. Republicans in Washington and Jefferson City ignore this reasonable call for change at their own peril.
