October 3rd, 2024.

Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming

joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage

hung with red, white, and blue bunting

and signs that said country over party.

As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted,

Thank you, Liz. The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon,

Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in

that then tiny town in 1852 that Alvin E. Beauvais, who had recently emigrated

from New York, called for a new political party to stand

against slavery.

The idea of a new party took off in 1854, when it became clear the Kansas Nebraska Act, permitting the

westward expansion of human enslavement, would become law. When they met in

February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy.

Rather than standing against slavery alone,

those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system,

opposing the small group of elite enslavers

who had taken over the US government

in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite

clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men

were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation's majority,

whose labor produced the capital that Southern leaders believed only elites

...