Our 1776 Moment: Either a Liberal or Progressive America

American Greatness ^ | 1-21-2022 | Bradley A. Thayer

[Pelham]

“At no time, anytime, in its history was the GOP ever a Marxist party. “

For maybe a dozen years Karl Marx was a featured writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the closest thing that the Whigs and Republican Party had to an official newspaper.

A prominent group within that early GOP were 48ers, expatriate German revolutionaries like Albert Wedemeyer an Carl Schurz, fellow travelers with Marx, who played prominent roles in the Union Army and the Lincoln administration. Some historians give them credit for Lincoln’s election. Lincoln owned a German language newspaper run by 48ers. The Radical Republicans were accurately named.

[nicollo]

Good article.

I’ve always felt that the closing of the western frontier somehow deranged intellectuals who couldn’t conceive that geographic expansion was liberty and individual empowerment into thinking such was the end of liberty and individual empowerment, thus requiring state solutions to replace those opportunities.

The worst sin of the progressives — who were themselves middle and upper class — was their ignorance of the great American middle class. Sure, geography provided the opportunity, but liberty made the great American middle class.