On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:32:53 -0500 (EST) Michael Pollak
<mpollak at panix.com> writes:
>
> > [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.
But Taft could never get nominated as president. Indeed, from 1940 on, starting with the nomination of Wendell Wilkie to oppose FDR, then to Thomas Dewey, and then Ike, the Republican nominess were all moderates to liberals. The "Old Guard" was never able to get the nomination for one of their own. That seems to me, to have a shift that was of some significance.
> 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.
Well the fact is that from Wilkie to Ike and indeed to Nixon, the Republican standard bearers were all men committed to upholding the New Deal, not to reversing it.
>
> 2) Ike had almost the same ideology as the old guard in domestic
> policy. He
In what respects? He said outright that he was not interested in overturning the New Deal, but rather was going to attempt to consolidate it, which is what he did as president. Indeed, certain programs were expanded during his presidency.
> 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
Well that's a change that the New Right of people like William F. Buckley Jr. and his friends had worked at throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They paved the way for Goldwater, then Reagan.
>
> 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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>
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