So this is the little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin.

That's literally its name, which is so quaint, the little white schoolhouse.

Now it was built over 170 years ago back in 1853 and that unassuming little gable roofed

building you see right there is still there today, still standing there today.

Because in 1854, just one year after the little white

schoolhouse was built a group people got together in that little white school house

and came up with an idea that would end up changing the course of history in many ways, at least political history.

I mean at the time America was hotly divided over the question of slavery and the newly established Kansas and Nebraska territories.

And the people who met in that building, in that little white school house,

decided they should actually start a new political party,

a coalition party that brought together members of the Whig Party and the Free Soil Movement and even some

disaffected Democrats who all had very different political visions for the country.

But who were all united around their opposition to the moral crisis at the time of slavery.

Now they decided to call their new political party the Republican Party.

And the rest, as they say, is kind of history.

The Republican Party would of course become the Party of Lincoln,

the party that would end slavery and establish itself

as one of America's two major political organizations for the next century and a half

and still today.

And it's one of a history's greater tragedies that the Republican Party of today is no longer that coalition of people committed to the idea of fighting back against America's worst impulses.

Because today's Republican Party is instead a cult of personality.

That basically revolves around one guy, Donald Trump.

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