RINOs in the Tent – Part I

The Betrayal of American Conservatism by Liberal Republicans

By Publius Valerius

The Theory and Practice of RINO Republicanism

Exactly how long is the Conservative Base of the Republican Party going to tolerate suffering electorally fatal subversion by so-called “moderate” Republicans In Name Only, the RINOs?

How long will they accept the fiction of a party that is a “Big Tent”, when that tent proves to be not only more and more empty of interested members but also more and more full of those who look very much like they would be much happier if they were attending a rival circus – a circus with a set of totally different “acts”, which would be guaranteed to alienate and negatively provoke its most loyal audience if held under their original Big Top?

How long will it tolerate being politically debilitated by a disease caused by an internal enemy consisting of a disloyal collection of ideological subversives who are, for all intents and purposes, looking to either mutate its host body beyond all recognition or to kill it outright?

The RINO betrayal is nothing new.  It has been able to periodically weaken the Republican Party because RINO-ism has been a congenital condition that has existed within the body of the Party since its birth in the 19^th Century.  RINO-ism is like an inherited disease which passed to the Republican Party from its parent, the Whig Party.  The ill-effects of this inherited disease sometimes lay dormant.  But when they become active, they have proved to be historically devastating not only to Republican electoral hopes, but have proved to be spiritually devastating to the very soul of the Party and everything its supposed to stand for.

This legacy of subservience to Plutocratic corporate interests has subverted the desire of the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party for small government since its inception over a century ago and the center of this plutocratic infection is found in the so-called “Eastern Establishment”.

The Eastern Republican Establishment

We must understand that there are really TWO Republican Parties.  At the top is a very small minority group, national in scope but historically based in the Northeast, which is able to exercise great influence on the workings of the party by using both its considerable finances and long established influence and connections with power players in Business, Finance, Academia, powerful Foundations (such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations), the Foreign Policy establishment, which includes powerful organizations such as the Council On Foreign Relations and the most powerful members of the news media.

This group has for years pushed the Republican Party away from being the Party of small government while trying to maintain the fiction that they were its champion.

While it appears to be counter-intuitive that the Party of small government should support increased statist interference in our private and business lives, one must realize that this elitist group of Plutocrats cares NOTHING for the principles of small government and Capitalism because such principles LIMIT their ability to control.  They detest competition and want to control market forces toward their own narrow interests, not allow them to create wealth for a wide section of society in general as they always prove to do if left to work with a minimum of interference.  The Plutocracy would be MUCH happier with a powerful central government, putatively acting in the name of “fairness” and “egalitarianism” and “sharing the wealth” that carries out an agenda that favors them and their interests.  They are not interested in any “principle” other than the principle of controlling POWER behind the mask of a “moderate”, supposedly altruistic policy that favors giving a break to the type of “little guy” they only see in their own lives when they notice the servants waiting on them.

Unlike those modern Liberals who push “progressive” socialist policies from the Left, for whom such change cannot take place fast enough, the RINOs in the Eastern Establishment prefer a slower, more incremental approach, one less likely to produce a backlash which threatens to undo years of patient work operating semi-clandestinely and which tries to avoid the throwing of a wrench into their plans (as happened in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan).

The Eastern Establishment has been around for a long time, working behind the scenes as well as behind a mask which portrays them as simple businessmen seeking the same freedom from Big Government to run their lives and businesses without interference of the type of excessive Governmental control that has been antithetical to the American way of life since its birth.

To understand this one must understand the difference between the mindset of a Plutocrat and the mindset of a conservative.

Let us be clear: we are NOT talking about the average American businessman or corporation.  These people and organizations are the backbone of American Capitalism and the source of the massive amounts of wealth this country has historically produced.  They support a small government, less bureaucracy and low taxes.  They are the very image of the free enterprise system that values individualism, rewards hard work, merit, initiative and innovation.  They are more than willing to take their part – and their chances - in the creative destruction process of Capitalism.  They KNOW no one is “too big to fail”, that along with reward for success there is always the risk for failure and, most importantly, that reality dictates that there ARE NO perfect solutions or social utopias, only options that are less bad than others.

The truth is that in its essence, the statist RINO agenda is exactly the same as that of those Democrats who have openly and actively supported an ever increasing role for Big Government, as fast and as much as possible, in the service of the advancement of the type of socialistic policies an ever larger central government is prone to.

The RINO Establishment is not opposed to this view, but reacts negatively to the speed with which its proponents (now found in the Progressive Liberal wing of the Democrat Party) seek to put it into effect.  The only thing that is “conservative” about this Plutocratic Elite is the rate at which the want to travel the road to the same collectivist goals as their supposed “rivals” in the opposition party.

To understand how we arrived at this confused situation, one must examine the history regarding how RINO-ism came into being, evolved and ultimately came to largely control a Party in which it is a minority and with which it ideologically disagrees.

The Legacy of the Whigs

The Whigs were a 19^th Century political party formed in opposition to the Democrat-Republicans, the ancestors of the modern Democrat Party which at the time championed small government.  The Democrat-Republicans were a Jeffersonian party of “Classical Liberals” (such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and others associated with the rationalist English Enlightenment) that had defeated – and ultimately destroyed – their rivals, the neo-Aristocratic Hamiltonian Federalist Party which favored a strong Federal Government and far more statist policies designed to help the business class (or, as they were known at the time, the “Manufacturer” class).

Whigs sought to promote American business interests by using the power of the Federal Government to advance such policies that they believed would accomplish this.  They believed in protecting American products from foreign competition through high tariffs that put foreign wares at a price disadvantage to domestically produced goods. They preferred a growth-oriented monetary policy set by the type of government sanctioned Central Bank (the Bank of the United States) that their arch-rival, Andrew Jackson, had destroyed as an anti-Democratic tool of rich and powerful elites.

They advocated the Federal Government financing what Henry Clay called the “American System”, which was a vigorous mercantilist economic program of "internal improvements" to build canals, roads, and railroads, funded by the sale of public land. The Whigs also promoted public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural institutions.  They also wanted to preserve the Bank of the United States.

Those who favored the Jeffersonian model of a small, agrarian republic bristled at what they viewed as a push toward a more powerful central government which they saw as a threat by a powerful class of rich businessmen-aristocrats who were subversive to the ideals of the democratic Republic founded in 1776.

Whigs proposed a counter-vision based in the Hamiltonian/Federalist desire to tie banks, industrial interests, railroads and the taxpayer funded public works required to build the infrastructure to support them by deepening the ties between business and the Federal Government.

Abe Lincoln, who came out of the Whig Party, may have had the public image of a rail-splitter, but in actuality he was a railroad LAWYER, arguing for their interests.  His most famous case was HURD V. ROCK ISLAND BRIDGE CO. which was held in Chicago in 1857.  In this case Lincoln defeated the attempt of boat river traffic interests to prevent rail traffic over the Mississippi and thereby opened the West to railroad expansion.

The party generally split along sectional lines as the Civil War drew closer until many of the Northern Whigs, who hated those Whigs that sought conciliation with the South in the name of good business, formed a new party – The Republican Party – in 1854 consisting of Northern Whig businessmen, abolitionists and other reform minded modernizers.

The Northern victory in the Civil War crushed their Democrat Party rivals and opened the way for 50 years of almost uninterrupted Republican Party dominance.  During that time Republicans relentlessly pushed through their program of industrializing and “modernizing” America.  Of course, the backlash against the excesses of this industrialization and the social disruption the modernization process entailed eventually resulted in very serious workers riots (such as occurred throughout the country in 1877).  Worker and Farmer discontent with a central government that was too weak to deal with Big Business but still powerful enough to do its bidding and serve its interests led to radical socialist and neo-socialist attempts to “reform” the power of “Big Business”.  The Democrats spun off a so-called “Populist” party which sought to bring democratic reform and a more egalitarian redistributionist mindset to economics and social policy through the use of Governmental power, this time on the side of the “little man”.

The Republicans reacted by pointing out just how dangerously radical many “Populist” ideas were and assured the public that Democrat / Populist schemes to use the government to enforce “progressive” social and economic policies would result not only in economic disaster but would also result in a dangerous loss of the individual freedom that was considered absolutely basic to the American way of life.

Hence, the Republican Party used the defense of “small government” opposing Democrat-Populist advocacy of “big government” as an excuse for continuing to support the interests of Big Business; any government big enough to enact “progressive” policies was a threat to the Big Business interests that depended on a weak, compliant government, which existed to serve and be controlled by the business interests that largely owned it.

The problem for the Plutocrats was absolutely NOT a problem with government; it was with a government that was NOT dominated by politicians who were their sycophantic puppets.

They understood well the animus and distrust Americans had for a strong central government and they used this animus and distrust to fight those in the Democrat Party who sought a strong central government to serve THEIR OWN interests by using it to buy the votes of the masses and seducing them with socialist egalitarian economic fantasies and promoting class warfare.

BOTH the Democrat Party and Big Business Republicans FAVOR a strong central government it for their own reasons.

The former to finance and enforce the social revolution that justifies the need for the bureaucratic power required control it and dole out its benefits at the taxpayer’s expense to its supporters and the latter so that it can use the government’s coercive power to destroy competition, increase their profits and preserve their dominant position in society.

While neither wants a small government, the Big Business Republicans have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that they do.

This is why the Democrat Party, born of a Jeffersonian desire for small government that allowed independent citizens a maximum of freedom from government interference and the Republican Party, who’s ancestry lies in a Hamiltonian desire for statist intervention on behalf of a quasi-aristocratic Plutocracy composed of “manufacturers”, switched places in modern times to become the advocates for the exact opposite of what they originally stood for!

While the problems connected with the Democratic switch are manifold and extraordinarily dangerous, they are not the subject of this article; the legacy of Big Business control of the Republican Party and their desire to control it through RINO “moderates” is.

Teddy Roosevelt and The New Nationalism

There is much to admire about Theodore Roosevelt: his vitality, his patriotism, his courage, his fortitude, his concern for protecting the natural environment and his devotion to the idea that all Americans deserve a “Square Deal” regardless of their class status.

Roosevelt was crucial to the creation of the modern United States Navy, which has been critical in preserving, protecting and advancing American interests all over the world.

However, there is a dark side to Roosevelt which fully emerged after his term as president, a period during which he identified with the so-called “Progressive Movement” that influenced the direction of both the Democrats and Republican parties.

Seeking to contain the abuses of Big Business caused by their long hold on the levers of political power after the Civil War, a movement of workers and farmers who suffered because of the exercise of that power formed in the late 19^th century.  It was aided by reform minded intellectuals who were heavily influenced, as they are today, by the ideas of European Socialism and Marxism, which they saw as the key to a more egalitarian future society.

These groups sought to expand governmental power and use it to limit the power of the rich as well as ameliorate the bad conditions suffered by the poor when the Industrial Revolution came to the United States after the Civil War.

The Democrats responded with Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” movement which claimed it was going to bring about a “second emancipation” of the workers and farmers from the clutches of corporations and trusts just as the “first emancipation” freed the slaves from the slave owners.

The Democrats, sought to co-opt the Populist Movement which was powerful in the West and (for racist as well as economic reasons) in the South and to move away from its individualist Jeffersonian roots and become the Party of activist big government working on behalf of farmers, workers, the dispossessed and the powerless (that is, as long as they were White).

Wilson said: “While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America.  You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible… but that time has passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

Teddy Roosevelt had a slightly different view.  He was so concerned that his hand picked successor, William Howard Taft had abandoned his policies of vigorously using government power to intervene with what Roosevelt saw as excesses of Plutocratic influence and power as well as the pervasive lawless violence caused by radicals in the Labor Movement, that he decided to seek the nomination of the Progressive Party to run for president in 1912 in order to prevent the Democrats from seizing the issue for themselves.

Roosevelt was the advocate of what might be called “the Omni-competent State”, which would guarantee new social benefits to the American people but would also make new demands for sacrifice that would impinge on traditional American concerns for their individual liberties.  He saw government as the square dealing arbiter between the Corporations and the Workers.  While he would use government power to protect workers from Corporate attempts to pay subsistence wages and prevent the formation of unions, he also strongly maintained that he would not allow the kind of riot, disorder and possible socialist revolution that threatened the country in the late 1870s (1877 saw widespread industrial violence across the nation; it is the reason so many fortress-like National Guard armories can be found all around the country, which were built as a defense against worker violence).

He would protect the owner’s right to their profits, but insisted they “deal fairly” with the just demands of those who worked for them.  In essence HE, and the government he ran, would make sure that in the class war between Capital and Labor, the NATIONAL INTEREST – as HE saw it – would take priority.

Roosevelt would protect the Nation from BOTH radical Jacobin demagogues in the Labor Movement as well as reactionary Conservatives in the Republican Party, which he saw as heirs to the pro-Confederacy “Cotton-Whigs” who cared more about their private profits than those “true Republicans” that followed Lincoln and joined him in giving priority to the national interest of maintaining the Union.

Roosevelt’s ideas were most influenced by the American social philosopher, Herbert Croly.  In Croly’s 1909 book, “The Promise of American Life”, we find the ideas that made up those which Roosevelt supported in speech after speech when discussing his “New Nationalism” ideology.  Croly believed that Jefferson was a panderer to the masses.  He felt Jefferson was wrong to advocate a government of and by the people when he should have advocated, according to Croly “a government for the people by popular but responsible leaders”.  He went further to contend that the worst mistake Jeffersonian political philosophy made was that it supposed that “the people were to guide their leaders, not their leaders the people”.

He castigated Jefferson and Jackson’s concern for individual rights as fetishism which held back reform and modernism; Lincoln, according to this view, instead CORRECTLY used the power of government to rally the country to a sense of its responsibilities, regardless of how implementing this view trampled on the rights of private citizens or individual states.  Croly saw the Civil War as a great opportunity to end provincialism and outdated concepts of individualism so that it could be replaced with a NATIONAL purpose run by a much more powerful Central Government, but was stymied by the subsequent class warfare that ensued in the industrialization process that swept through society after the war ended.

This was the essence of Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” – using the power of government in a way that was not accepted by those corporate interests who championed (at least in principle) the idea of a small government that didn’t interfere in private enterprise.  Plutocrats were very happy to have a compliant government just strong enough to do their bidding but not a one strong enough to regulate their business or class interests.

Roosevelt disagreed.  He said that “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”

Roosevelt believed that “social efficiency” was based in “love of order, ability to fight well and breed well,” (racially based eugenics being a very important part of the Progressive movement) “capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community.”

Roosevelt’s philosophy of the “New Nationalism” sought to use governmental power to enforce his own concept of class stability in the service of national goals set by… him.  He was alarmed by the power of both Business and Labor; he feared Jeffersonian individualism almost as much as he feared socialist Revolution; he had great faith in a strong, centralized, “omni-competent” State and saw nothing wrong with building a personality cult around the Presidency to increase the Chief Executive’s popular power to enforce his will over and against the individual States, the Congress, the Courts, the Trusts, the Unions and, of course, those individuals that dissented from this Statist policy, especially in the Press.

One does not have to be an alarmist to see just how dangerously close this view of government is to the Corporatist politics of the later 20^th phenomenon of Fascism as practiced in Italy or Germany as well as in the United States by Theodore’s relative Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal”.

This view was diametrically opposed to the entire history of small government in the USA and a direct threat to the Plutocracy’s manipulation of it.

Classical Jeffersonian Liberals were horrified by the movement and caused them to become increasingly identified NOT as “liberals” but as “Conservatives” trying to maintain the pre-existing economic and social status quo in favor of individual achievement without government interference.  They viewed Roosevelt as a “Tammany Nietzsche” whose hyper egoism and intemperate will to power rendered him incapable of drawing a distinction between himself and the nation he governed.  The supporters of Taft were therefore the “conservatives” in the 1912 election running against progressives in BOTH the Democrat and Progressive Parties (The Progressives were also known as “The Bull Moose” Party, so named after Roosevelt’s assessment of how healthy he was to run – “I’m as healthy as a bull moose!”).

For what would later become an almost regular RINO occurrence, Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote, beating the uncharismatic Taft but loosing to Wilson.

But his philosophy found a home in the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party and lived on long past the defeat of 1912.

The “New Nationalism” was nationalist in that it maintained the right to control business in the name of the greater good of the nation over the individual and his private property and needed to greatly expand governmental power to do so.  Again, as proved to be true later in the 20^th century in Europe, this mixture of big government policy combining nationalism and socialism - especially in Germany and Italy - made for a toxic, deadly cocktail of tyranny capable of crimes beyond the imagining of those who thought such power could be directed towards regulating society for the better during the turn of the century.

Minor rhetoric differences aside, the policies favored by Wilson and Roosevelt differed very little from each other.

Both believed in the power of Big Government to effect positive change.

Both were imperialistic in foreign policy seeing war as an edifying, glorious experience that was necessary for a vibrant, virile society to advance and win in the worldwide Darwinian struggle of “survival of the fittest” (which was not, in fact, a phrase made by Darwin; it was made by the philosopher Herbert Spencer).

Both believed that if so empowered the State could create a new, fair, egalitarian society on earth such as the one religion promised to create but never delivered on and therefore deferred to the afterlife.

Both chafed under the restrictions placed on the State by constitutional checks and balances and saw it as an outdated impediment to the fulfillment of their utopian plans to re-make society. Wilson mocked concern for constitutional checks and balances as “Fourth of July sentiments” and believed in a Darwinian “evolution” of the Constitution whose interpretation should reflect the changes in society and not be interpreted for all time strictly as it was written.  This was the genesis of the idea of the Constitution as being a “living document” subject to radical and far reaching “interpretation” to the extent of discovering constitutional “rights” in it that are not even mentioned, such as a constitutional “right” to privacy, found only in the “light” of living in the more tolerant sunshine of the modern world.

Roosevelt had a similar distain for constitutional limits on the power of the State, which he saw as “lagging behind” the reality of modern society and over concerned with individual rights over “popular” or the Public’s “rights”… as defined by Roosevelt.

Both Democrats and Progressives encouraged personality cults to be built around Wilson and especially around TR.

Both Democrats and Progressives hated the idea of the increasingly materialistic, money worshipping America being established by the Plutocrats who owned the Trusts and Corporations that was driving the country to the kind of violent class warfare that often erupted in the late 19^th Century.

While Roosevelt represented the “strenuous life” required by an aggressive Nationalist, Wilson represented the social reformers who sought to alleviate society’s problems by handing them over to maternal “nanny state” of socialistic “experts” – social workers, reformers and government bureaucrats for resolution.

This mix of nationalism and progressive reform sank deep into BOTH parties and re-emerged in much stronger forms later in the 20^th Century; as an the increasingly more open socialism of the New Deal among the Democrats and as the RINO “progressives moderates” in the GOP.

Herbert Hoover

After two Republican administrations tried to return America to “normalcy” after the First World War, a third Republican president was elected in 1928.  Despite the mythology, Herbert Hoover was no paladin of laissez-faire economics.  While the causes of the Great Depression are beyond the scope of this article, it is interesting to note that Hoover, a man closely associated with championing small government and “Rugged Individualism”, interfered MASSIVELY in the economy in an attempt to forestall the Depression’s effects.  All sorts of “emergency” measures – from bolstering of wage rates and price controls, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works) were taken up by Hoover in his attempt to end the Depression through governmental action rather than let the economy take its natural course and allow it to self-correct as it has ALWAYS done in the past.

Throughout his career, from his work as a food administrator in WW I wielding autocratic power over his bureaucratic fiefdom as well as his tenure as a Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, Hoover favored a corporate state system of forming cartels in both industry and agriculture which would be controlled and coordinated by the Federal Government.  They would also provide the coercive power required to enforce the compliance of its dictates on private enterprise.

It is therefore no surprise – except to those who have been fed the mythology of the Hoover Administration as one dedicated to “rugged individualism” and “hands-off” laissez faire economics – that Hoover advocated all sorts of Statist interventions to try to resolve the crisis.

Hoover used every measure later taken to even further extremes during the New Deal: wage controls, public works, unemployment relief, inflationary monetary policy, large federal loans to shaky businesses and farm price support programs.

He insanely supported a tax hike DURING a severe depression and also kicked off a mutually fratricidal international trade war by supporting the Smoot Hartley Tariff.

 As is routinely the case of Government interference in the natural processes of a free economy it not only failed, it made matters MUCH worse.  Capitalist economy succeeds because it naturally reflects the human beings that compose it. Terrible as they are, recessions and depressions are the results of bad decisions and poor investments made by fallible individual human beings.  There were depressions in the US before; left alone by the Federal Government, they all righted themselves in a short period of time.

However the large amount of interference in the economy by Hoover only exacerbated the problem; the even more massive interference of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt kept the economy in Depression FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS, the longest time the country EVER spent in severe economic depression.  Only WW II pulled the country out of its economic woes and victory in that war – which saw all our competitors bankrupted and our enemies destroyed – established a post-war prosperity that America rode for decades.

But the Statist poison had reached deep not only into the American economy but into the American psyche as well.

Both political parties accepted the New Deal and Republican politicians were apparently more than content not to upset what they saw as a governmental applecart that supported their petty political re-election concerns.  By being faithful junior partners with the Democrats, using abundant taxpayer dollar crumbs tossed to them by the Democrats to bribe the voters back home with governmental largess – as well as provide access to government spending programs to the corporate sponsors that financed their campaigns - they could ensure themselves almost eternal re-election.

Sure they paid lip service to Capitalism and Individualism but in practice, Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” evolved into a barely concealed desire to use the power of government to pay back those whose political contributions were essential to Republican (and Democrat) election.

In the end, it was the Plutocracy – and to a lesser extent, Big Labor – that most benefited by the concentration of power in Washington.  Formerly, the Plutocrats controlled a government they preferred be relatively weak so as not to threaten their interests; now, by pulling the strings of the politicians with their hands on the levers of power, they controlled a MASSIVELY POWERFUL central government that did their bidding much more effectively by hiding behind a mask of egalitarianism, fairness, equality and a desire to promote “social justice”, all found in the socialist and neo-socialist rhetorical bromides uttered by their tethered creatures and puppets in Government IN BOTH PARTIES.

Robert Taft

Robert Taft, the son of Teddy Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, was the senator from Ohio from 1939 to 1953 and was considered the leading voice of conservatism in the Republican Party who, like many Americans prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor with sour memories of our intervention into WW I, opposed further United States intervention in European affairs.  He was opposed by the so-called more “moderate”, less conservative “progressive” wing of the Party which both opposed what has been commonly known in foreign policy as “Isolationism” by combining a more “interventionist” policy for the United States in the world (especially in Europe) as well as a policy more favorable to solutions to issues concerning economic and social justice enacted by a much larger, much more powerful, socially intrusive central government at the expense of the individual states and of individual rights.

Following the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, these progressives included people like Wendell Willkie, a corporate executive who was a former Democrat and Tom Dewy, the moderate Republican governor of NY.  In 1940, the “moderate” Willkie lost to FDR, as did the “moderate” Dewy in 1944.  Dewy, who was opposed by Taft in the quest for the1948 Republican nomination, was subsequently defeated again in 1948 by Harry Truman in a race most thought he would win.

Taft was a strong opponent of the New Deal and many liberal Republicans opposed his run for the presidency in 1952 as strongly as conservatives looking to roll back 20 years of Democrat policy supported him.  Given the Republican Party’s penchant for nominating those “whose turn had come” he was viewed by many observers as the front runner for the nomination.  However, Liberal Republicans were more than comfortable with the statist policies of the New Deal and were quite satisfied with the gigantic government that had grown up during WWII and the early Cold War.  Whether it was due to access to lucrative government contracts or a desire to see the “progressive” social view of the country club crowd they ran with prevail, “moderate” Republicans were desperate for an alternative to what they saw as a reversion to the “outdated” conservative policies favored by Taft.

They found their candidate in the highly popular WW II general Dwight Eisenhower.

Having not even indicated his party affiliation as late as 1951, Eisenhower was courted by BOTH Democrats and moderate Republicans.

The moderate wing of the Republican Party, led by prominent liberals including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and NY Governor Tom Dewey pressed hard for him to run.  They formed an organization to draft Eisenhower for the presidency called the "National Citizens for Eisenhower".  They made inroads with Taft’s conservative backers, convincing them that a popular war hero like Eisenhower was far more electable than the rather uncharismatic Taft.  They also made the case that with the Korean War raging, Eisenhower’s military expertise and interventionist stance of containing the spread of Communism overseas was far more in tune with the times than Taft’s neo-isolationism

After much equivocating, including Lodge having to enter Eisenhower’s name in the New Hampshire primary without Ike’s permission and only after his victory over Taft in that primary, did he announce that he would accept the Republican nomination if offered to him on March 12, 1952.

There battle for the GOP nomination was very close and very nasty.  It opened with Ike and Taft running neck and neck for delegate votes, but the Eisenhower forces were able to out-maneuver those supporting Taft and Ike was nominated.  

So divisive was the convention that many felt Eisenhower’s election might be threatened if Taft supporters sat on their hands.  Meeting with Taft personally in September 1952, Eisenhower and Taft worked out an agreement to gain Taft’s support by promising him he would cut federal spending and fight "creeping socialism in every domestic field."

Eisenhower followed what by today’s standards would certainly be considered a moderate conservative course.  Yet during his administration he funded massive federal spending programs such as the Interstate Highway System (which he presented as a national security measure) and appointed liberal judges to the Supreme Court including the ultra-liberal Republican Earl Warren, Potter Stewart and the radical William J. Brennan.  He was not opposed to using Federal power to enforce Supreme Court decisions at the expense of the individual states.  Most importantly, he continued and even augmented all the major New Deal programs of FDR including the creation of a massive bureaucracy, the Department of Health Education and Welfare as well as pushing for the extension of Social Security benefits to an additional 10 million workers.

Eisenhower was certainly no liberal, especially by today’s standards; but he was also certainly no conservative.  He was quite comfortable with Big Government policies.  His Vice President, Richard Nixon, was even MORE of a statist Republican than his mentor, who, once in the White House, declared he was a “Keynesian” in the field of economics.  As President, Nixon had no problem instituting wage and price controls and expanding the power of the Federal Government in ways that ultimately crossed into an abuse of power that ultimately drove him from office.

The success of Eisenhower convinced moderate Republicans, and the liberal Eastern Establishment that supported and controlled them, that they had found the winning formula.

Just as the Plutocracy allowed the Democrats to don the disguise of a “liberal, socially conscious progressive reformer”, Republicans could put on the mask of a Conservative when running for office.  When the election is over, they simply removed the mask and governed as liberal statists once in power.  They doled out the goodies at the taxpayer’s expense to their owners in the Eastern Establishment in return for ample campaign contributions; then repeat the process using fear tactics during the next election cycle.

But they didn’t count on a backlash of disgust and anger from the overwhelming majority of average Republicans who comprised their Conservative Base who they distained and looked down on as unsophisticated, benighted sheep to be sheared for taxes and votes and then discarded.

And they didn’t count on them finding someone like Barry Goldwater to represent them.

Coming In Part II – The Conservative Resurgence