Letters to the Editor
To the editor,
This year’s farm bill should significantly increase federal funding for cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It has the potential to dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, our pandemic risk, and the suffering we inflict on animals.
While the product is currently sold in a few high-end restaurants, further research is needed for cultivated meat to achieve price parity with slaughtered meat, which is crucial for widespread adoption. If you’d like to help pressure legislators to support this research, visit SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com. Jon Hochschartner
Granby, Conn.
To the editor:
Decline and Pending Downfall of Our American Republic: Pat Buchanan (Part 2)
The pathetic non-leadership of Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Party’s titular Speaker of the House of Representatives, came to an embarrassing but merciful end on Oct. 2, 2023, after only 9 months. Eight members of the Republican lunatic wing (Trumpistas/MAGAs) fired him for the unpardonable sin of working with Democrats on two occasions to keep the government operating. For a constitutional democratic-republic with a two-party system to work, it’s essential for each party to be a loyal opposition with which compromises can be made to at least partially achieve necessary goals.
How did the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower descend into an anti-government, anti-democracy, dysfunctional, authoritarian cult that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other party? As I’ve mentioned before, Barry Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan drew divisiveness from the segregationist campaigns of Alabama’s George Wallace. They were strongly influenced by the “southern strategy” proposed by Kevin Phillips, who at 28 published “The Emerging Republican Majority” hoping to southernize the party nationwide. During Nixon’s 1968 campaign, Phillips told conservative columnist Gary Wills, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who(m).”
Among the party’s many other consequential steps that ultimately produced the cult of Donald Trump were the presidential campaigns of Patrick Buchanan in 1992, 1996, and 2000. Buchanan considered Reagan’s extremism to not be reactionary enough and too accommodating with Democrats so as to prevent Republicans from getting rid of programs like Social Security and
Medicare. He chose to adapt the more extreme campaigns of Louisiana’s David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Buchanan was critical of the four-year record of BushQuayle at the 1992 Republican Convention, where he delivered his “culture war” speech in which he blatantly described a terrifying, divisive “religious war going on in our country for the soul of America.” It was a forerunner to Trump’s bizarrely apocalyptic and inventive inaugural address in 2017. He advocated immigration reduction and social conservatism, opposing multiculturalism, abortion, and gay rights. There were still moderates in the Republican Party at that time, and they were alienated by Buchanan’s intolerant ravings. The late, great columnist Molly Ivins described his speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German,” alluding to the days of the Third Reich.
One of our longtime proudest achievements was having the longest unguarded border in the world. But thanks to Buchanan’s strong showing in New Hampshire’s primary, the Republican Party has been promoting a border wall separating us from Mexico since 1992.
The year before, in 1991, he expanded Reagan’s anti-government message into an anti-democracy one. He compared corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?” Following Kevin Phillips’ goal of one-party rule, Buchanan preceded Karl Rove (A.K.A. George W. “Bush’s Brain”) and his quest for a permanent Republican majority by way of a minority of voters. David Offutt El Dorado