The Old Granfalloon Party

What, if anything, does it mean to be a Republican?

granfalloon — n. a proud and meaningless collection of human beings.

The trailer of the new film Dinesh D’souza film Death of a Nation opens with what looks like a prescription drug ad. Abraham Lincoln is walking through a wheat field, eyes on the distant horizon as if he’s thinking about the future.

One out of every four score and seven men suffer from erectile dysfunction. (Youtube screenshot)

Dinesh starts talking:

Lincoln was elected to unite a country and stop slavery. Democrats smeared him. Went to war against him. Assassinated him. [Gunshot] Now their target is Trump.

A video of Trump’s inauguration plays followed by a college student from one of those “triggered lib” memes, who screams:

“Nooooooo!!!”

Dinesh continues:

They say he’s a racist. A fascist. But who are the real racists? Who are the real fascists?

On the word “racist,” it jumps to a Movie of the Week recreation of the whipping scene from Roots.

OVERSEER: “Whatchu say to me, boy?!?” — SLAVE: “I said… one day …my people will be free to voluntarily agree to the fair market value of our work without interference from meddlesome union fat cats and oppressive labor laws. One day, we will leave your Democrat plantation!!!” (Youtube screenshot)

No one really buys this whole “Party of Lincoln” shtick, so why do Republicans keep doing it?

One reason is that they’re hard up for heroes. You have to go back more than a century to find someone from the party with any semblance of decency or claim to righteousness, so the result is always some desperate reach, like calling Harriet Tubman a “gun-toting Republican.”

They announce the party affiliation of abolitionists and black politicians from the period as if it were some amazing revelation.

#TheyKnowThatAlready

One could chalk it all up to bad faith — hacks misrepresenting history to serve a partisan agenda — but there are many who do genuinely believe there is continuity between the party of the 19th century and Republicans today.

In the book Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut introduces a religion called Bokononism. One of its key concepts is the karass, a team of people spiritually linked together to “do God’s will.”

Then there is what Vonnegut calls a granfalloon, or a false karass.

His examples: “the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company — and any nation, anytime, anywhere”

A granfalloon is a group whose sense of shared identity is based on something entirely meaningless. Vonnegut’s favorite example was Hoosiers.

Charlie Googled “Good things Republicans did for the blacks”

If Vonnegut were alive today, he’d get a kick out of seeing some reactionary goober like Charlie Kirk bragging about how the Republicans “freed the slaves.”

Kirk, who punctuates most tweets with the hashtag #BIGGOVSUCKS, fails to see any contradiction in being proud of the fact that Republicans “deployed the 101st airborne to end school segregation.”

Part of it is self-delusion, but at the same time, it also says something about the superficial way conservatives view politics.

For the GOP, ideals are just a set of hollow words to rally around. Being a “Republican” who loves “liberty” and “small government” has about as much substance as calling oneself a “Hoosier.”

‘Republic’-ans

“America is a republic NOT a democracy”

You might see this phrase in some article about how the Founders didn’t trust the plebs with too much democracy because they feared the masses would get duped into electing some unqualified, authoritarian demagogue. Thankfully, republican institutions like the electoral college prevent this from happening.

But you’re more likely to see the statement made in random arguments online apropos of nothing — as if that fact in itself is a victory because the word “republic” is in the party’s name. That’s the level most are working on, which explains why so many conservatives (like Dinesh) think fascism is leftwing because Nazi is short for National Socialist Party.

Try to imagine a liberal Dinesh D’souza from a parallel universe. B’zarro B’souza would write books like “Irish Republican Army: The Conservative Roots of Irish Terror.”

Words like “republic” and “liberty” don’t meaning anything to Republicans and neither do the historical figures these necromancers resurrect to fight in their undead army. What anyone in the past believed or why they believed it is inconsequential so long as Republicans can cop some greatness by association.

Conservatives want to lay claim to some kind of pedigree through the most tenuous connection with someone who symbolizes those vague ideals they claim to stand for. They don’t care that Thomas Paine literally wanted to give everyone in the country free money just for being born. Republicans use him for their Twitter avatars anyways because he was a Founding Father.

Though today it is mostly just a label, people used the word “republican” all the time in 19th century discourse with a definite sense of what it meant.

Here’s an excerpt from a speech Congressman Thaddeus Stevens gave to the House:

No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless.

He was making the case for expropriating 70,000 former slaveowners and awarding their private property to freedmen.

As the leaders of the Radical Republicans, Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner believed in the need for a strong federal government to redistribute white wealth to black people. You know, “republican” stuff.

So much for the tolerant left. (Wikimedia Commons)

Radical Republicans had a grasp on the Southern political economy. They knew phrases like “equality of opportunity” or “equality under the law” were meaningless so long as economic power remained concentrated within the hands of a wealthy white elite.

If Dinesh D’souza made a movie about the great “conservative” abolitionists, the only mention of the Radicals would be Charles Sumner’s famous caning by Preston Brooks:

[ Fife and drum band playing “Yankee Doodle” in the background]

Dinesh starts to narrate the story like he’s telling it to a 5 year old:

One day, Republican Charles Sumner was giving a speech to the Senate about how freedom was good and everybody should have it — even black people. As he listened, Democrat Preston Brooks grew incensed. Sumner’s Republican passion for liberty awakened rage inside Brooks’ cold, racist Democrat heart. But historians say what ultimately drove him to violence was Sumner’s exercise of free speech. Of the many freedoms Democrats hate, this is the one they truly can’t abide. Today, not much has changed.

[“O Fortuna” abruptly starts to play]

A montage of someone stomping on a MAGA hat, protestors shouting down Ann Coulter, obligatory black-clad antifa and a clip of Trigglypuff. Then Dinesh would move on to how Sojourner Truth actually thought private prisons were a smart way to reduce the deficit or something.