I was born in 1969 and I never dedicated any time to studying the 1950’s in detail, but I am pretty familiar with the shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration. If I had to summarize the biggest problem it would be the influence of the Dulles Brothers: John Foster at the State Department and Allen at Langley running an out of control Central Intelligence Agency.
Still, as more time passes and I get a little older, my estimation of Eisenhower as a president keeps going up. Based on my upbringing and my basic outlook on issues, I’m sure I would have been “Madly for Adlai” in both 1952 and 1956. I probably would have been wrong. Our country was better off, I think, having Eisenhower in charge in the 1950’s. He tamed the worst instincts of the right and created a kind of middle ground consensus that served us well domestically. I even think the Civil Rights Era went more smoothly than it would have with Stevenson in the White House, for a variety of reasons including Stevenson’s racial attitudes and the nature of the Democratic Party at the time.
Unfortunately, there is no one of Eisenhower’s stature, either on the home front or the world stage, who can tame the Republican Party today. Instead, we are subjected to a McCarthyite like Ted Cruz calling the president an “unmitigated socialist” without fear of contradiction from anyone in his party who matters.
Now that I can see how the right reacts to Al Gore talking about global warming or Barack Obama adopting a Heritage Foundation/Mitt Romney health care plan, I can really begin to appreciate what didn’t happen in the 1950’s precisely because a Republican moderate was in charge.
I don’t even need to discuss the merits of the socialist charge. The problem is that I don’t really need to discuss the merits of anything the Republicans have to say. There’s no point. These things aren’t offered in the spirit of debate.
So are you saying all we need is eight years of President Clinton and four years of President O’Malley, and then it will be safe to elect a Republican president?
I’m saying that we could use a repeat of the situation where a real moderate is nominated by the GOP and wins and puts their demons on their heels for a good long while. To work, though, the person would need to be the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe who ended the Korean War.
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid you were saying….
It’s hard to imagine, I know, but our country cannot survive for long with one party this out of control. They will eventually win a presidential.
What does it say about our country that we have one part this out of control? And they’ve got majorities in both houses of Congress.
Here’s my dream: I think every Democrat, from Obama on down, should change party registration. We should become Republicans. All of us. With a large part of the tribalism suddenly missing, we’ll see more discussion of actual policies and something-something-something … utopia!
The problem is it’s hard to see the incentives for a saner GOP emerging before, say, 2021.
Barring a Johnson/Goldwater-like Democratic wave in 2016, it’s hard to see Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives this decade.
If Democrats regain control of enough state legislatures in 2020, then there’s an opportunity (nothing more) to undo the 2010 redistricting and create a critical mass of districts that won’t elect hard-right Republicans. That, combined with continuing demographic changes in the electorate, might create the incentives for a saner Republican party.
What I remember about Eisenhower was that he was an avid golfer. I don’t remember any one getting on his case for playing golf.
I think he took a ton of shit for playing golf, which is why everyone remembers that he played so much of it.
Booman, I’ve got a few years on you and although a child in the 50’s, albeit an older child who became a teen at the end of his 2nd term, I don’t remember any grief being given to Ike about his golf. Of course, the news we consumed was from the nightly network broadcasts, which were in their infancy and mostly not even a half-hour long. Maybe he got some grief in some of the print media.
I do remember the foreign policy issues of his 8 years;the deal/crisis with the Suez canal and there was stuff about the Dulles brothers, particularly John Foster. I was old enough to absorb some of that. All-in-all, a very benign 8 years. The sad thing is that you don’t hear anyone in the GOP harking back to those good times;1980 is about as far back as they like to go. And, Reagan is beginning to seem benign, given what’s on offer from the right these days.
One word: comedians. I was younger than you and not so aware of the news, but I remember creeping out of bed when my parents were watching hipster standup on our new TV and it was all about golf and Ike’s amazing ability to say absolutely nothing in intricate long paragraphs.
All that dark money may just take them down. Note how Jeb is trying to put as much distance between himself and the dark money.
I so hope you are right. Golly I was thinking tonight there is an awful lot of it awfully fast, mostly undisclosed. What will it take to wake up the Republican base to the fact that that money isn’t being spent to support their interests any more than ours.
I think it inevitable that the GOP will moderate eventually. Demographics demand it. I just don’t see that day on the horizon. We’ve got a racist rump of a party melting down, getting more out of control with each cycle. At some point the stupid will get so strong that even the media will have to take notice. Meanwhile, old white people continue to die off and young people of color continue to come of age. Eventually we’ll be California and the GOP will be running as fast as it can to regain relevance. Then the space will exist for the next Ike to come along. Four years ago, his name could have been Huntsman.
“At some point the stupid will get so strong that even the media will have to take notice.”
The media may notice after the Republicans start losing election after election and become clearly a rump party with no actual power outside of its fiefdoms in the south and plains. Not before.
And I’m not predicting that the Republicans will lose election after election, just that that is what it would take to make the media maybe realize that the Republican Party is not the natural governing party in this country and is full of clowns. I hope I live to see it.
Yes, the mainstream media are a lagging indicator of public opinion. I fear that many hard doses of reality — not covered by the MSM — will be necessary to pry away enough marginal Republicans to cost them elections.
The MSM is a business. They need the predictable kaching of election advertising to keep the business profitable. As long as the electorate keeps dividing close enough to fifty/fifty, the MSM remains in good shape. Republicans will continue to dump money into POTUS elections with hope they can win, and Democrats will continue to dump money into Congressional races with ho[e they can win.
Current odds favor Republicans hitting the trifecta before Democrats win back the House.
Eight years of mostly peace and prosperity, except for all those pinko commies in the bushes.
And a couple of recessions, conformity and repression reigned.
The truth is the fifties were buried in 1960 and were not spoken of much after that except for later by historians.
That insight is critical. Reality-denying, extremist, dogmatic, rightwingnut ideologues* have no interest whatsoever in “debate” as it is understood by sane, rational, reasonably intelligent members of the Reality-Based Community. Their attitude towards the bedrock principle of all possible honest, rational debate (i.e., that “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts”) is effectively, “What? You can’t be serious!”
Instead, their idea of “debate” is to simply declare their dogma as fact, then declare the “debate” over, and themselves its victors.
Never mind the facts that in the aggregate comprise Reality!
*see, e.g., James Inhofe, OK’s gift to the nation as Douglas Feith’s chief rival to wrest from Feith his well-earned, Gen.-Tommy-Franks-bestowed crown as Stupidest Fucking Guy on the Face of the Planet (not to mention worst waste of space and oxygen ever to occupy a U.S. Senate seat)
How’s the right dealing with Obama’s secret TPP? (I have to rely on reports from those willing to wade over to the rightwing cesspools for my information because I simply can’t do the necessary primary research.)
The GOP is down with it. As Time reports that President Obama is using to sell it: is supported by a wide variety of business groups and most Republicans. His other selling point is: “I love Elizabeth,” Obama told host Chris Matthews. “We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this.” (Note the Obama apologists are strangely absent in today’s dKos TPP threads.)
If I had wanted NAFTA and cuts in capital gains taxes, I would have voted for GH Bush in 1992. Romneycare? Should have supported Romney in 2008 and spared ourselves all the rightwing freakout over it. We could have had TPP by re-electing Romney in 2012. Other than Kucinich, all of them would have blessed us with the NSA spying and various drone warfare programs. All of this crap is very much like what Ike in the past twenty-five years would also have done.
I’ve said it quite a bit here and there, and generally, no one listens to me until after I’ve said it enough that I’ve stopped for lack of attention.
Carpetbag the GOP.
Run as “sane” GOP member, and then act like a real Democrat while in office. Plenty of money for the primary campaign, and then plenty of the rabble liking you for being “moderate”. Trust me.
Good idea, except it’s totally unworkable. Have you ever run for office? You should give it a shot, because many people who don’t know shit about politics think it’s easy to get elected.
I never said it would be easy to get elected, dickhead.
Thanks for your comment, but if you run as a “sane” candidate in a Republican primary, chances are you’re going to lose. The money, the energy, and most importantly the votes in a Republican primary—at least in most districts in the country—won’t be with you.
Democrats are the same. The “sane” blue dogs (sane from the Republican perspective) are primaried out. What’s left are “stronger Democrats”, who don’t compromise as much. Same thing with republicans.
What this article is ignoring is that the “sane” republicans, like Bob Michel who used to represent Peoria, IL, were HATED by the Republican supporters as being too wishy-washy. RINO? Republican in name only? The RAF hate them. So we won’t see them.
Democrats are the same. The “sane” blue dogs (sane from the Republican perspective) are primaried out. What’s left are “stronger Democrats”, who don’t compromise as much. Same thing with republicans.
What is this supposed to mean? Most of the Blue Dogs have been wiped out. So of course what you have left are the bluer districts.
The real problem is that the parties have become more ideologically sorted. The Democratic Party at this time was also infected with its own share of crazy right-wing delusions such as white supremacy and imperialism and anti-communist hysteria.
What happened is that after Nixon smashed the New Deal Coalition into a million pieces, conservatives coalesced into one organization rather than being split across the two parties while being ‘tamed’ by the moderates. You might consider the former arrangement ideal, but then again this sort of ideological splitting the difference gave us the Jacksonian Ages, the Gilded Ages, and the laughably ineffectual Progressive Era. So it’s hard to say whether things have even really regressed. I mean, even at the height of the NDC the ‘sane’ American parties came pretty close to permanently fucking up the planet.
It’s also infected with lunatic left-wing delusions, like everything is racism, and so forth. These left-wing lunatic delusions are more delusional in many ways.
Psssht. The ‘everything is racist’, like the blogosphere’s obsession with SJW, is a canard intentionally fluffed up by moderates to discredit specific claims. I’m not denying that there are people who fit the strawman, but it’s intentionally blown way out of proportion so that people don’t actually have to grapple with the underlying issues.
Nick? Is that you?
Booman, I am trying to understand why a troll like this dude here Rover-boy is tolerated. He/She appears to believe that he/she can out me for some reason. Is that a tolerable activity here? I sure find it annoying. I don’t do that sort of thing. Do you tolerate it? I’d like some help from you in banning this turkey Rover-boy.
I strongly suggest that anyone reading this read the Perlstein trilogy about Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. I am reading the Nixon book now, and will get the Reagan book soon.
If you want to understand conservatism of today, read the Goldwater book immediately.
Once you read these, you will realize how ridiculous this notion of moderation in the Republicans is. It’s not happening. Period.
Well, Ike may have tamed the crazy right in his party, but he failed to permanently discredit it and kill it off inside the GOP, when he had the stature and, eventually with some bully pulpit grandfatherly teevee talks, the public support to arrange it. It survived to live another day and was soon resurrected with Goldwater, then enough to satisfy it with Nixon, the corrupt water boy for the anti-communist right that Ike failed to get rid of twice when he could have done so with political impunity. Yes he temporarily tamed the right, but he gave us Nixon for twenty years.
Colin Powell is probably as close to another Ike as the Repubs have offered, but he sort of sold out to the Bushes to add another big feather to his resume cap, and was either too naive or stupid to recognize the manipulation behind junior’s war plans and so became a discredited national figure.
The other potential Ike, John McCain, sold out even more to junior, lost his maverickness and independence, and just became a cranky old man longing to send others to war.
Meanwhile, while there are some interesting things to consider in the thread post, I’m not normally inclined to easily give much credit to the passive/negative type of presidency that Ike represented. Still just an above average president, not in the near-great or great categories. But indeed far more to be preferred by Dems, if we have to have a Repub in the WH, compared to the crooks and crazies who came later and currently control that party.
Essentially, Ike was a coward.
Especially since we’re talking about Republicans, we should not be ignoring the elephant in the Eisenhower GOP’s room, and that was Joe McCarthy. He was a dominant force in American politics throughout much of the Eisenhower years, and his influence remained years after he was gone. A few Republicans had the courage (eventually) to speak out against him. Where was Ike?
Where was Ike in 1964, as Goldwater was rolling toward the GOP nomination? Nelson Rockefeller put in a desperate call to the former President, the one force who perhaps could still keep Goldwater from getting enough delegates to win the nomination. Ike told Rockefeller that he wouldn’t get involved because he wanted to preserve his influence in the party. Rockefeller acidly inquired, “For what?”
This Best of All Republican Administrations dragged its feet on civil rights. It deposed Mossadeq and Arbenz, plotted to overthrow Lumumba, drew up the plans for the Bay of Pigs, and sowed the seeds of the Vietnam War.
And the best thing that Eisenhower ever did? Well, it was a mistake. If Ike had had an inkling of what kind of jurist Earl Warren would become, he never would have appointed him.
Your comment is the most factually correct assessment of Ike in this thread. Facts as opposed to historical revisionism and nostalgia for what never existed. The rightwing pines for their vision of what the 1950s never were. And for years partisan Democrats have been pining for imaginary Ike.
Wait — I thought Obama WAS Ike. He is performing the same function: he is solidifying the ‘reasonable’ strand of conservatism, while shoving the lunatic fringe back where they belong.
We all think that today’s right-wing takeover is here for good and that’s that. I’m not so sure…