Reading this article about the potential for the Republican Party to split in two if they lose the 2016 presidential election, I began to wonder how the 20th-Century would have played out differently if the Republican Party hadn’t been able to adopt Dwight D. Eisenhower as their standard-bearer and win two presidential elections during the 1950’s. Of course, that’s an immensely complicated question. How would Adlai Stevenson have handled the Korean War or Iran or the CIA or the Civil Rights movement? Imagine a world without Tricky Dick? Without President Kennedy?
But, the main idea is that Eisenhower moderated the right at a very important time and solidified the New Deal. Conservatives have been trying to undo that damage, as they see it, ever since. Yet, over half a century has elapsed since Eisenhower left office, and they haven’t figured out how to repeal the 1950’s, yet. In fact, they seem to think back on the 1950’s as some kind of idyllic age.
In any case, if the Republicans don’t find some kind of moderating hero in the mold of Ike, they may be locked out of the White House for a very long time. And if they lose control of the House despite the favorable way in which the districts are currently drawn, they may not win it back for many years, particularly if the party undergoes more internal fissures.
Just to put a little geographical context on how that split of the GOP into two parties might play out, here again is:
Ryan Lizza, New Yorker: Where the GOP’s Suicide Caucus Lives
This is not exactly the 144 who voted for default but close enough to see which districts might get which of the two split parties of the GOP.
I haven’t found a useful map of the actual vote to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.
JeffL found one over at GOS.
But, the main idea is that Eisenhower moderated the right at a very important time and solidified the New Deal. Conservatives have been trying to undo that damage, as they see it, ever since. Yet, over half a century has elapsed since Eisenhower left office, and they haven’t figured out how to repeal the 1950’s, yet.
Sadly, Ike would be to the left of many Democrats today. Also, too, anyone want to dig up the quotes of Ike re: Social Security?
The thing is that as a career military man, Ike lived and liked socialism. Perhaps unconsciously. At least for himself, and those like him, as he made use of his free medical care at Walter Reed.
A short history of US National Health Care efforts.
Note:
Well, if you’re going to look at alternate history, suppose Truman had been successful at recruiting Ike as the Democratic candidate in 1952?
Well, yes, it’s a pretty great quote. From a letter Ike wrote to his brother:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
This bit, from his famous speech just a few months into Ike’s Presidency, would be considered radically leftist if Obama said it today:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.”
The House Election of 1946 and the United States Senate Election of 1946 are what put the Republicans back in power after World War II. The issue that dominated that election was Truman’s handling labor strikes during 1946. The symbolic loss in this election was Bob LaFollette’s loss to Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin. In the House, Richard Nixon won over Jerry Voorhis. They would set the anti-communist (and implicitly anti-labor tone) of Congress during the Truman administration.
Barry Goldwater won a seat in the Senate the same year that Eisenhower won. During the next two years, Joe McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee ran wild with their investigations of a “fifth column of Communists” in American, which was a suppression of the institutions of liberal and left political culture in America. And set the stage for the anti-communist mood that the John Birch Society tapped into.
HUAC became a permanent committee in 1945. Instrumental in the uglier political aspects of this country during its three decades long existence – on full display for the first decade until excesses and public disgust led to it operating in the shadows for the next two.
Reading the replies, nobody has mentioned what I consider the biggest reason why the GOP has wanted to take back the Eisenhower years…
Ike appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice.
It was Warren’s Court that decided
Brown v. Board
which is the foundation of everything that the GOP has hated ever since.
Yeah, I remember the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards that used to pepper the main highways down south when I was traveling between Virginia and Florida many years ago.
Inevitably the party that controls Congress for a long time becomes complacent or obsessed with purity. Democrats controlled Congress from about 1930-1994. But a lot of the control of Congress in the later years was predicated on Boll Weevils and split ticket voting. It was almost impossible for a Democrat to win the White House from 1972-1992. It took Watergate for that to happen.
It’s going to be the same, as Democrats should control the White House for the foreseeable future, but the GOP may have made ticket splitting impossible by being lunatics.
Put another way, Wilson can be seen as a partisan outlier in the period from 1888-1932, but a pre-cursor to the progressive triumph of 1932-1968. Clinton was a partisan outlier in 1968-2008, but a precursor to a string of Democratic presidents.
Since both Dems and Reps wanted Ike to run for them, the more salient though experiment would be not what if Adlai won, but what if Ike ran as a Democrat (and in one hundred out of one hundred timelines win).
In this way, the Republicans would certainly not be moderated in the manner you wonder about.
The GOP like the 50s for superficial and cultural reasons, and figure it would be even better if we could do it again without the social safety net and all those lazy poors.
I thought the Sarah Palin faction would split the GOP shortly after the 2008 election was over, but it turned out there was a whole lot more drama yet to go through. If it happens at all, though, I could see it more easily happening before the ‘016 election rather than after, because the greatest tension will be between nominating someone pure enough for the weirdos, and someone less alarming to the establishment GOP and with a better shot of winning the GE.
It’s a lot like watching a bad marriage and hoping a divorce will happen before someone gets hurt. The question is, who gets to keep the house, and who will move out?
In 9 cases out of 10 I’d predict the crazies to form their own party, but who knows? they think the whole country belongs to them by right and that they just need to “take it back,” so there’s no reason to think they don’t consider themselves to be the only genuine republicans too, and the rightful owners of the party and its political machinery.
But even with that, I don’t see them turning down the opportunity to form a new party with a cool name like The Real American Party (which, I just realized, makes the acronym TRAP) to show the rest of us slackers what’s what.
Instinct tells me something super weird and f’d up is going to happen between now and late ‘015 that renders all this meaningless. Might just be residual paranoia from the last decade or so.
Eisenhower had no previous background in politics, and he was so nonpartisan that the Democratic Party tried to get him to run as their presidential candidate in 1948. Truman offered to be his running mate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_Eisenhower_movement
Well Booman…they are not going to find one “in the mold of Ike,” but they can find one who is not like Dwight Eisenhower in any way whatsoever.
Except for one.
He has established himself as an “honest” man in the eyes of the electorate. He has been bluntly “honest” throughout his political career…it is his calling card, his branding device…and he has also managed to brand himself as capable of bipartisan action.
Guess who?
That’s right. Out newly slimmed-down heavyweight political infighter, Chris “Slim” Christie.
And he’s got another coupla years to lose even more weight.
Watch.
He wants it so bad he gave up what seems to have been his only hobby, his only recreation outside of politics.
Gluttony.
Watch.
AG