The Republican Party was not founded as a vehicle for Trumpism or Cheneyism. It was a radical party that advocated economic, social and racial justice.
Kamala Harris walks with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney during a rally at Ripon College on October 3, 2024 in Ripon, Wisconsin.
(Jim Wondruska/Getty Images)
Big mistake many media outlets made in covering them last week a visit from Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney in Wisconsin, home of the Republican Party, came the assumption that Cheney, one of the most famous names in modern Republican politics, was giving Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, a connection to the historic roots and values of the Grand Old Party.
In fact, it was the other way around.
Cheney, the former leader of the Republican Party in Congress, has a history of taking far-right positions on war and peace, corporate power, labor rights, immigration and a host of other issues that would be anathema to the people who founded the Republican Party. In addition, she is the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, who dragged the party into the neoconservative camp and made her name synonymous with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate pandering.
It is Harris—the daughter of immigrants who advocates for proposals to strengthen the federal government’s ability to fight monopolies, tax the wealthy, improve the lot of the working class, and advance the cause of economic, social, and racial justice—who is far more likely to inspire the people who founded the Republican Party. from a school in the Ripon campus in eastern Wisconsin.
While she may not be as left-wing as the Ripon Republicans of 1854, Harris has views that closely match those of the first candidate they elected for president. Republican Abraham Lincoln denounced the “horrible injustice of slavery” at a time when most Southerners and many Northerners accepted the original sin of the American experiment; he supported extensive land reforms; he sided with immigrant workers; and he engaged in militant propaganda for the working class. “Labor precedes and is independent of capital,” Lincoln declared in his first annual address to the nation in 1861. “Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never exist if labor did not exist in the first place. Labor is superior to capital and deserves much more attention.’
The line is often quoted by the unions, which are now some of Harris’s staunchest supporters and have been opposing the anti-union policies of Cheney and their corporate allies for decades. But politics creates strange alliances. That makes Cheney, a former Republican congressional leader who fell out with the president in 2021 after he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, becoming Harris’ most prominent Republican supporter.
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Harris and Cheney came to Ripon with the goal of encouraging more Republicans to join the former Wyoming representative in supporting the Democratic presidential nominee. It’s a politically important effort at a time when Harris is in a competitive presidential race with former President Donald Trump, an authoritarian extremist who has spent the better part of a decade working to turn the Republican Party into a personality cult.
Even as the former president tightens his grip on the party machinery, millions of party members reject what Cheney said Thursday is described as “Depraved brutality” of Trump. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley received 4.3 million votes in her primary challenge to Trump, earning significant support in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and other battleground states. Although Haley is now reluctantly endorsing Trump, her supporters have organized a well-funded Haley Spokesperson for Harris campaign that is actively trying to sway disillusioned Republicans to Harris.
Cheney appeared with Harris at a packed rally where banners read, “Country is more than party,” and where the former Wyoming representative told wavering Republicans: “In this election, patriotism over partisanship is not an aspiration. This is our duty.”
Trump’s response to this threat was to label Harris as “leftist radical man.” Like most Republicans today — along with many Democrats and members of the media — Trump believes the Republican Party has always been conservative. But this is a political mistake.
What Trump fails to understand is that the label “radical left” better describes the policies of the Republican Party’s founders than the label “conservative” that Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney and their ilk so successfully attached to the party during a time when it was their patrimony.
The first Republicans were true radicals—men who sought to turn the country’s politics around at a time when the existing parties were capitulating to the demands of Southern slaveholders and their political patrons.
When you visit The Little White School in Riponemblazoned with the words “Birthplace of the Republican Party,” you’ll be introduced to the story of how Alvan Earl Beauvais “convened a meeting of 53 electors … to form a new party.” Historical records tell us that the meeting was organized “to protest the Senate’s passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the extension of slavery beyond the Missouri Compromise. The protest led to the formation of a new, albeit local party, drawn from the ranks of disaffected Whigs, Liberals and Democrats.’
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Among the applicants were many such people as Jacob Woodruffwho moved to the Ripon area as part of the Wisconsin Phalanx. And Hiram S. Towne, another Phalange member. And Robert Mason, another member of the Falange. And William Dunham, founder of the Phalange, who served as moderator of the first of the meetings that gave birth to the Republican Party.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency that advises the President and Congress on national historic preservation policy, describes the Wisconsin Phalanx as “Experimental Socialist Community” founded by followers of Charles Fourier, a French philosopher, one of the founders of utopian socialism. Fourier’s ideas were popularized in the USA by Horace Greeley New York Tribunewhich employed Karl Marx as its European correspondent for a number of years.
Beauvais, Greeley’s friend and associate, had moved to Ripon a few years before he called the meeting in 1854. A veteran organizer who led militant land reform movements — with the slogan “Vote for the Farm” — Beauvais has long advocated the creation of an independent political movement to gain control of legislatures and Congress to enact sweeping reforms.
At Bowie’s urging, Greeley promoted a new party that united supporters from many political camps in common opposition to the extension of slavery. Among the first republicans were v many allies and associates in the cause of socialismincluding Josef Weidemeyer, a former Prussian army officer who continued to correspond with Marx as he rose through the ranks as a military officer during the Civil War.
Decades after the founding of the new party, the great trade unionist and leader of the Socialist Party, Eugene Victor Debs, would reflect on this story in his speeches. Although he dismissed both major parties of the early 20th century as “wings of a single bird of prey,” Debs allowed as as “The Republican Party Was Once Red.”
Perhaps there was a touch of hyperbole in that remark. The Ripon Republicans were not all socialists, and they did not agree on all ideological issues. Still, there is no doubt that they were united in their radical belief in the need for a political party that would respect the Declaration of Independence with its promise that all men are created equal, and that would defend the Constitution. The first national platform of the Republican Party invited “the affiliation and co-operation of men of all parties, however different from us in other respects, in support of the principles here declared; and believing that the spirit of our institutions, as well as the Constitution of our country, guarantees freedom of conscience and equal rights of citizens…”
It is in this spirit that Kamala Harris, a fairly progressive Democrat, invites today’s Republicans to support a presidential candidate who is in keeping with the spirit of the original Republican Party; while Liz Cheney, an unreasonably conservative Republican, urges her fellow party members to abandon their partisanship and put “Country over Party.”
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