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.
I thinks that more complicated. On union labor issues, the GOP was always rightwing and changed little, but on issues like civil rights and the environment, there was a full-scale purge of the Rockefeller civil rights and Teddy Roosevelt style environmentalists from the party over the decades. Goldwater himself was actually more of a libertarian, but he ended up being a stalking horse for the southern conservative takeover of the GOP.
-- Nathan Newman