Every party has a reason for being. The Republican Party was formed in the mid-19th century to achieve a specific historical goal: the end of slavery. From there it became the party of Lincoln, the party that saved the Republic and, ultimately, the party that gave a natural home to those who felt enslaved by big government, high taxes, big regulation.
Though the abolition of slavery was indeed one of its primary goals, the early Republican Party was not the anti-statist jewel Miss Noonan makes it out to be. In fact, that's a rather recent development -- about the time of Warren Harding.
Up to the 1896 Presidential election, the Republican Party was the more statist of the two major parties. Its platform included high tariffs, Prohibition, massive "internal improvements" (i.e., public works projects), and deliberate inflation through a monopoly central bank. Its overall orientation was toward regimentation of the citizenry and a pro-regulation, proto-fascist attitude toward domestic business, which essentially incorporated the largest industrialists and rail barons in the ruling fold. (Regulation was seen as a tool by which to assist the largest companies in warding off competition, then as now.)
The 1896 capture of the Democratic Party away from the libertarian Grover Cleveland faction by the Jennings Bryan Progressive wing caused a mass migration of liberty-oriented Cleveland Democrats to the GOP. To accommodate them, the GOP dropped its inflationism and embraced the gold standard (a Cleveland priority), muted its emphasis on public works projects, and dropped Prohibition from its agenda as well. This made it into the embryo of the modern Republican Party, in which emphasis on personal liberty and low taxes are married somewhat uneasily to a degree of indulgence toward large domestic corporations. (The Democratic Party simply became more and more statist, as the Progressives were displaced by American Socialists under the influence of John Dewey.)
All of this is summarized in a brief but incisive history of the late 19th Century that Ron Paul included in his book The Case For Gold. Paul Johnson also covers some of it, and the developments that proceeded from it, in his 20th Century history Modern Times.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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