Revive the Free and Rowdy Party, hurrah!
Apr 26, 2006    Georgia Political Digest   Opinion

Revive the Free and Rowdy Party, hurrah!
Rusty Tanton | www.radicalgeorgiamoderate.org | Bio

Starting with Moses Formwalt in 1848, Atlanta's first three mayors hailed from the Free and Rowdy Party, a rough-and-tumble gang of brawlers and booze traffickers. Formwalt beat out Jonathan Norcross of the Moral Party, a group of anti-liquor crusaders who continued to oppose the Rowdies until Norcross finally won the party's first mayoral election in 1851 (the city had two-year mayoral terms until 1929). The fledgling city of just a few hundred citizens was both brimming with optimism and seething with angry tension between free-spirited and behavior-policing factions.

Does that last sentence sound familiar?

Apply it nationwide today, and you wouldn't be far off from a primary source of tension between modern political factions. Well, you'd be halfway there.

There is an obvious analogy to be made between the Moral Party of the 19th Century and today's Republican Party. But where are today's Rowdies? They're not among the Democratic Party's elected officials, that's for sure.

I contend that churning restlessly in America's underbelly is a massively underrepresented constituency of Rowdies desperate to stick a thumb in the eye of the faux morality of today's "Moral" party.

I'm not so much advocating a platform of booze, gambling and hookers (although I personally would vote for that candidate) as I am asking the Democratic Party to adopt the swagger of the Rowdies and kick the thieving scalawags running this state in the teeth.

Philosophically, I consider myself a split ticket voter. If there's a Democratic Legislature, I think there should be a Republican governor. And vice versa. Good governance occurs in the center of conflict between two opposing forces. When one of those forces is too weak to counter the other, the resulting dominance of one force ends up being bad for everyone (see: decades of post-Reconstruction Democrat-dominated rule, last few years of Republican rule).

Neither of the parties of Atlanta's early formative years were timid in expressing their beliefs, and neither should Democrats be if they want to put up some real opposition.

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