I am a child of the Cold War; born the same year the Communist constructed the Berlin Wall. For those who are perhaps too young to know or remember the Cold War was a global struggle between the The West, The United States and her Allies, also called the Free World and The East, The USSR and her client states. (If a nation belonged to neither group it was referred to as the Third World and overwhelmingly these nations were destitute, and that label became synonymous an impoverished country.)

The Free World was hardly perfect. At the start of the Cold War the English still ruled their global Empire and the United States remained a heavily segregated nation with its large black population surviving as second-class citizens. How could this state of affairs justify the honorific ‘Free’?

The answer is that the governments of the Free World were accountable to their people. Even with the stain of America’s Jim Crow laws the free, fair, and open elections in America held the government of the United States answerable to its people. The very fact of that accountability held the seeds to the changes that destroyed Jim Crow and to this day drag us further along the road to actual justice and equality.

The Soviets and their client states held no free, fair, or open elections and were immune, until revolution, from the will of their subjects. This is the essence that separated the West from the East, the crucial factor that drove the Cold War, and fuels decades of conflict, open and clandestine, costing lives and fortunes, and held the shadow of thermonuclear annihilation over the entire world and it is this bedrock foundational principle that the Modern Republican Party has abandoned.

Make no mistake about it. The GOP as it currently stands, wedded and inseparable from Trump and his grifters unwilling to issue a party platform in its most recent presidential election favoring instead to commit itself to the ever-changing messages from its leader, has abandoned free, fair, and open elections. The Republican Party, a party that once defined itself by its opposition to the Soviet Block now openly plats to subvert election and dismiss violent attempts to prevent the transfer of authority because of a free, fair, and open election did not produce the results they desired. This, not corporate tax rates, no abortion, nor gun control, is the defining issue of our time and no person supporting the Republican party has any moral justification in calling themselves a patriot.