On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> You could read this as saying that the Dems have pretty much always
> sucked, but the trope of their rightward move needs some closer scrutiny.
As does the story of the Republicans' rightward move. This has become the standard story ever since Rick Perlman's book, but it's just not right. Goldwater wasn't to the right of the Republican Party of Robert Taft and Josephy McCarthy; he was to their left. And the "old guard" these men represented, which had controlled the party since the 1930s, continued to control it until they handed over to the Reaganites who believed exactly the same things as they did. Nixon was McCarthy's right hand man, was the leader of the party when Taft died and McCarthy was censured, and he and his coterie stayed the party leaders and standard bearers up until Reagan. And in term of personal beliefs, Goldwater was always to the left of Nixon. If Nixon had a not-so-conservative program when he was president, it was because he had no choice. Reagan did the same thing when he was elected governor during the same period. It was political realities that determined programs. If Goldwater had won, it would have happened to him too.
And if you trace the Repug party father back, they were even more right wing. They were were rabid and nutball in the isolationist 1940s. They were more nutball in their FDR bashing 1930s. In the 1920s we had the Palmer raids and corporate giveaways that make the Bushits look positively demure.
Things didn't change in the 1980s because the Repugs suddenly decided to dismantle the new deal. That had been their declared program ever since it was built, even while it was being built. What changed in the 1980s were underlying political realities that finally made that possible.
The same goes for confrontational rhetoric: the Repugs were even more confrontational in the pre-Goldwater decades than they were post-Goldwater decades. (You think Rush Limbaugh is bad? Go listen to Father Coughlin.) It just didn't do them any good back then.
The whole idea that the Repug party was once under the control of country club civilized types comes from drawing a curve through one point, and one point that was an extreme outlier: Eisenhower, who was parachuted in on the party for one reason only, because he was so popular that whichever party nominated him would win. The Democrats actually offered him the nomination first on the same reasoning (which was correct reasoning -- he was the most popular man on the planet). Party convergence didn't produce Eisenhower; Eisenhower produced (temporary) party convergence. (The second reason people make this mistake is that they confuse the New York State republican party with the national Republican party. They were completely different then just like they are completely different now.)
The long story of how we got where we are is an extremely important one. But party rhetorical style, IMHO, plays a very subordinate role.
Michael