[lbo-talk] Ike the liberal

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Nov 24 11:32:53 PST 2004



> [People who talk about how the Dems have moved right and how little
> difference between D&R remains should consider this excerpt from a
> post-election piece by Blanche Wiesen Cook. The rightward move of the Reps
> is the real shift in American politics.]

I agree with what I think is your underlying point: that we got a new party system once the South entered into play after the 1965 Civil Rights Act; that wooing the South transformed the social identity of the Republicans into something much less urbane; and that comparisons before and after that line are comparing apples and oranges.

But there are two things wrong with idea of Ike as a liberal.

1) Ike didn't represent the dominant wing of the party. The dominant wing was the "Old Guard" led by his opponent, "Mr. Republican," Robert Taft. And that dominant wing was to the right of Goldwater. On domestic policy, there is a straight line between them and what we've got today. They just couldn't implement it. But that's not a change in what they thought. It's a change in the extra party environment.

2) Ike had almost the same ideology as the old guard in domestic policy. He had a Truman foreign policy and Taft domestic policy.

If you want to draw a straight line like this -- and I don't think we should want to, because of the change in party system -- then real change has been that the old guard changed its foreign policy under Reagan and became Truman/Wilsonian expansionists rather than anti-communist isolationists (a kind of an oxymoron, but their defining belief nonetheless). But in domestic terms, nothing has changed. The Old guard has believed unions and big government were atheist communism since before the Russian Revolution, and they have always been the majority among the party apparat. Ike was the two term exception to their dominance -- and he's the exception that proves the rule.

* * *

It's true that Ike He didn't get to implement his domestic policy ideology. But then, neither did Nixon. The only difference between Ike and Nixon on the one hand, and the old guard on the other, was that when they were presidents and their crazy ideas clashed with reality they gave into reality. It used to to happen to all presidents. Even Reagan as President advanced arms control, expanded the federal government and bragged about how he'd saved social security.

That's the soul of what used to be called moderation: the certainty that reality would constrain people once they got into power. That's what seems to be missing now.

Michael



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