Dear Republicans
I know you are nervous. You see it slipping away. That Reagan revolution you rode for 40 years is almost gone. Your kids and mine don’t even know it happened. My kids just look at your tax cuts and efforts to strangle government as strange. With the exception of the College Republican clubs on campus, most young voters feel the same way.
For 40 years you championed “traditional’’ families and opposed child care subsidies from the government, opposed minimum wage increases, opposed birth control and loved your guns.
But as I said last week, the country has moved on, with lots of help from COVID and technology. The next generation cannot believe they have to call the doctor to make an appointment. They can’t believe that we spend 15 percent of the federal budget on the military. They can’t believe there are lead pipes for drinking water.
Since 1980, you won the debate. You were better at it. Federal spending should be cut because government programs don’t work. And single black women - the “welfare queen’’ - were lazy and on the dole. People actually said that. And in quiet places where no one is listening, a lot of people still say it.
But movements die, replaced by the next one, driven by a new generation. This generation wants a better world and they are prepared to vote for it. And THAT is your problem. You have been trained to like low taxes, small government, “traditional’’ families and the freedom to be left alone by the government. From William F. Buckley to Reagan, that was the deal. At the bottom of it all is a system built on environmental extraction and white supremacy. You wanted to keep all the money for yourselves.
What you didn’t bargain for is that your freedom and small government led to all these ills. To make billions and pay no taxes, to shoot up a movie theatre with a rifle, to pay a lot for bad health care, bad roads, to go to a bad school. That all came with a huge cost for humans. And that bill is now due.
Joe Biden is proposing to pay that bill. We are up to $4-$6 trillion depending on how you count. There was the American rescue Plan. Now the Infrastructure bill. And now the American Families Plan to pay for time off for caregivers, subsidized child care, and universal pre-school.
You hate this stuff I know. You think women should stay home and care for the kids instead of shipping them off to a stranger. You think it’s OK to pay a caregiver $10 an hour. And you want people to work - no freebies or handouts - because you think hard work is the essence of a Christian America.
But as the sheriff said to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when they tried to go straight - “It’s over. Don’t you get that?’’
You are struggling now. You don’t know how to deal with the Trump people. You don’t know how to deal with all this government spending by Biden and the Democrats to upgrade the wiring of the country other than to say it’s wasteful or socialist.
The problem is your constituents want child care so they can work. The lightly regulated economic system for which you fought so hard requires that both parents work. If you had regulated the system a bit tighter and not allowed the rich to take all the money, your traditional family might have survived.
There is a way out of this mess for your party. Embrace the future. Get rid of the Trump people now running your state parties. Embrace Republicans like Vermont Governor Phil Scott or Larry Hogan in Maryland. Embrace what your people are asking for.
Follow the lead of people like Randy Brock, a state senator in Vermont who wrote an opinion piece last week about broadband connectivity and how Vermont should deliver that to its citizens.
The state is about to receive millions of dollars from the Democrats to connect every Vermonter to the Internet. But Brock is worried that the legislature doesn’t have the expertise to make the right decisions about who gets the money. He is right.
He worries that the legislature is dithering and might make the wrong decisions. It is great to see a Republican urging us to do the right thing, to act, and to act with speed because Vermonters can no longer wait for high-speed internet.
Brock is a model for the new Republicans - a brake on Democratic spending but willing to embrace the future that has arrived. Now the test is whether the party will run him out of town or see the future.
