1. Great thread on the 19th century history of the @gop, a party which was quite different from what it is today. It made me think of Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, an alum of my university, who represented a 20th century variety of Republican also no longer welcome in that party.
2. This is an excellent obituary of Mark Hatfield--a pro-environment, anti-war, pro-civil rights, anti-Gingrich variety of Republican who was basically read out of the party in the late 1990s. wweek.com/portland/artic…
3. Hatfield was no leftist, but when he was a college student at Willamette University he brought to campus Paul Robeson (a renown African-American Communist) and Marian Anderson (an African-American singer who the DAR had banned from singing in Constitution Hall in 1939). 
4. Willamette is in Salem, about 45 miles south of Portland, and in the 1940s there was not a hotel in town that accepted black guests. Hatfield later recalled being humiliated on behalf of his state because he had to drive his two guests to Portland for them to get hotel rooms.
5. Hatfield was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, long before the anti-war movement had picked up significant steam.
6. Though he was a devout Christian and a friend of Billy Graham's, he opposed efforts to allow prayer in schools. And though he was a staunch anti-Communist, he worked to de-escalate the Cold War as an early proponent for a nuclear freeze.
7. In the 1990s as the @gop became ever more rigidly anti-government, Hatfield refused to tow the party line. His deciding vote against the balanced budget amendment (the only Republican to vote against it) earned him the perpetual ire of his fellow Republicans.
8. Hatfield had his flaws like every person or politician. His career, however, is testimony to what the @gop decided to leave behind in the 1990s as it became ever more rigidly committed to an anti-govt, anti-environment & militaristic form of white identity politics.
9. Hatfield's version of the @gop was destroyed and replaced by Newt Gingrich's scorched earth, take-no-prisoners obstructionism. This podcast beautifully sketches out Gingrich's history and damaging legacy. npr.org/2018/11/01/662…
10. I often share Hatfield's story with my students at Willamette because it testifies to how dramatically parties can change over time, and how America's egalitarian legacy has been carried forward (however partially & imperfectly) by people of many different political stripes.
11. It says a lot about the modern @gop that someone like Hatfield has been unable to find a comfortable home in that party since the mid-1990s.
12. To put it as simply as possible, in the 1980s the Reaganite version of the @gop decided that government had very little positive role to play in society. Gov't just messed things up and took rich people's money to do it, thus it should be shrunk dramatically.
13. As Gingrich's anti-tax sidekick Grover Norquist put it: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
14. Hatfield (R-OR) believed in the power of government to make the world a better place, and not just through military intervention overseas. That was Hatfield's @gop heresy...his belief that the government could be a force for domestic good.
15. When's the last time you heard a Republican idea about how to make America better that involved enabling the government to do something, rather than preventing it from doing something?
