How Rich Republican Insiders Help Destroy the Party’s Grassroots Enthusiasm
5th October 2010
Perhaps even more than the fight between Republicans and Democrats is the fight within the Republican Party, which has been simmering (and sometimes breaking out into an open boil) since the time when Teddy Roosevelt decided to become a Bull Moose.
One of the characteristics of the history of organized labor in America is the so-called ‘company union’, an organization of a company’s employees that appeared to be an independent body but was actually created and controlled by the company’s management. Company unions typically served to make it appear that the company was unionized while not inconveniencing management the way an actually independent union would. Grass-roots Republicans have long charged that the party ‘establishment’ were the political equivalent of a company union, having more in common with their Crustian analogs in the Democrat party than with most other Republicans. (The poster child for this situation was Bob Michel, the long-time Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives who was ousted by Newt Gingrich in the same election that brought Republicans to power in the House for the first time in decades.)