Gingrich 'actively lobbying' to be Trump's running mate: report

But the Republicans were not the sole party of “leftism” of the latter half of the 19th century, however that could be defined at the time. The Democrats had their populist uprisings as well. It is a complicated subject.

Unfortunately, not ridding the nation of the yoke of slavery at our founding (as warned by John Adams, who could be described as “Conservative”) set us up for the disaster of the future Civil War. With the States’ Rights folks deciding to make that their live or die cause, it would be hard to disagree now that it was an institution that had to be brought to an end. Of course, the price of doing that was planting the seed for an ever-growing tyranny at the federal level.

However, if things remained as they were pre-Civil War, where each state was viewed as one’s own country, it may have become harder and harder to deal with the challenges for a united front in the 20th century. The key, of course, is trying to find a happy medium where there is balance between the levels of governance while being able to rise to those aforementioned challenges.

Not rolling back overreaches at the federal level over the past century has been the single worst development, and both parties bear the responsibility for allowing this to happen.

Nixon was a liberal Republican, though anti-Communist (back when one could be such a thing). It was only because he was the latter that he was mistakenly labeled as being a “Conservative” (when liberals became less and less interested in fighting the Communist threat after the 1950s).

Unfortunately, during the 20 years of FDR/Truman, the GOP became transformed into a Democrat/Socialist-lite party, presuming the American public was happy with a larger, more activist federal government, instead of the Harding-Coolidge small government of the 1920s, which was arguably the greatest economic success in the past century (although falsely smeared by the left as having precipitated the Great Depression, which began under the left-leaning Hoover and exacerbated under an even more leftist FDR, whom ironically ran to Hoover’s RIGHT in 1932 in preaching a more austere method to deal with the problems. Ironically, had FDR followed his campaign rhetoric, he probably would’ve wrapped up the depression before the end of his first term).

Your commentary regarding the Civil War reminded me of several visionaries from the past:
* Indeed Adams warning about slavery recalls the wise Greeks, in particular Pericles, who asserted that the most critical attribute in leaders is Prudence: the ability to discern the impact in the future, of actions taken/not taken, in the now.
* Another visionary was the now forgotten Rowan Helper, a self-taught economist and South Carolinian, who authored the “Impending Crisis in the South.” Helper saw slavery as an economic catastrophe rather than a moral crusade; arguing that the real victims of slavery were non slave-holding whites, as it severely retarded economic progress across the South. Producing Cotton was land, manpower and water intensive, crowding out manufacturing but the Plantation Class, which owned Southern politics wouldn’t abide any change. Further, the South depended on one buyer for its product, Great Britain. Then post-Civil War, two events occurred. Britain converted many of the rice paddies of East Bengal to lower cost higher yield cotton production and the Suez Canal opened, causing the South to lose its market virtually overnight.
* Indeed the wise Madison saw war for what it always was (in paraphrase), “The most deadly enemy of liberty as it concentrates power in the hands of the ruling class who will always use it to any extreme in order to preserve their power and survival.”
Indeed the Civil War was a watershed event for the United States and in my judgment, hardly for the better.

It’s truly unfortunate that even by the time of the Revolutionary War, the South had become so addicted to slavery that it couldn’t see the folly of it. Haiti should’ve been an enormous wake-up call. Seeing counties with demographics of upwards of 10-to-1 slave to White was a recipe for disaster. How they expected to fully control that situation for the long term, rationalizing it that the “superior intellect” of Whites could control “Black cattle” is just dumbfounding.

Either way, via Civil War or via massive uprising, this was not going to turn out well. A political and socioeconomic system of oppression, statism, corruption and immorality cannot continue indefinitely, something we face today under different dynamics.

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