Thomas Patterson in the Boston Globe: “The GOP’s moral trap”

Aug 2, 2020News

Professor Thomas Patterson, Harvard Kennedy School, Co-founder of the Boston Global Forum and AIWS.net, is co-author of the Social Contract 2020, A New Social Contract in the Age of AI.

He recently posted his writing in the Opinion Section of Boston Globe, July 27, 2020 with title “The GOP’s moral trap”.

He wrote:

“The Republican Party has shattered the longstanding norm that political power should be used with restraint rather than weaponized and taken to its lawful limits. It’s about to pay the price.

There was a time when the Republican Party had the moral high ground. Founded in the 1850s on the principle of restoring the nation’s governing ideals, it stood for equality for Black Americans. For their part, the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow. Later, when the GOP was hijacked by the robber barons, Theodore Roosevelt and other progressives fought to return the party to its founding principle. Even as late as the 1960s, a moral impulse led Republican lawmakers, without whom the bill would have failed, to support the Civil Rights Act.

Democracies depend on norms — unwritten rules about how leaders and citizens should behave. One norm is forbearance — the idea that political power should be used with restraint rather than weaponized and taken to its lawful limits. Such norms have little standing in today’s Republican Party.”

The original article can be found here.