I Don't Like Ike

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The recent Boston Globe endorsement of GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is illustrative of the panic setting in among America’s Progressive triumvirate: Democratic and Republican party establishment leaders and the opinion-shapers in the mainstream media. The Tea Party and the social (Christian) conservative movements are blamed for committing the unforgivable sin of moving the Republican Party to rightward “extremes.” As the Globe stated in its recent endorsement of Huntsman, this coalition of conservative activists are pushing GOP candidates in “unwanted directions.”

So, it should come as no surprise that Saturday’s New York Times Book Review highlights the ongoing intramural war between bipartisan establishment Republicans and Tea Party upstarts. “Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene,” writes Geoffrey Kabaservice. Then Kabaservice perfectly describes the GOP’s history since 1952 – its greatest weakness. “Wary of excessive government, they [Republicans] were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent.” As any rational observer of today’s American scene is aware, government is neither lean nor solvent. And establishment Republicans are guilty co-conspirators in what can only be described as one of history’s great crimes – the “Great Recession.”

And who is responsible? According to Kabaservice, it started with Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it ‘Modern Republicanism.’ With Eisenhower’s landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P,” says Kabaservice. But this is only a partial telling of the story.

Author Daniel Galvin notes that Eisenhower’s 1956 landslide was a pyrrhic victory. “Eisenhower campaigned in 1956 on the claim that he had transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for progress, a Modern Republican Party. But when put to the test, his claims came up empty … and Eisenhower’s lack of coattails in 1956 did not help matters,” writes Galvin in his book Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush.

“In 1957 and again in 1959, Eisenhower launched a series of highly publicized party forums to rally his party around Modern Republicanism, but in each case he failed to build support for his ideas. Instead, his forums revealed the fragility of Modern Republican ideas and galvanized a more ideologically robust conservative movement in opposition. When Eisenhower proposed broad, ambiguous principles in order to offend none and include all, his efforts only invited his challengers to expose his vagueness, sharpen their own claims, and clarify the differences they had with the administration. Eisenhower’s organizational forums, ironically, provided a place for more doctrinal conservatism to grow,” says Galvin.

And grow it did. Conservative-Movement godfather William F. Buckley’s 1955 founding of National Review magazine was in response to the GOP’s unholy alliance with Democratic Party Progressives. His journal became a clearinghouse for conservative thought that worked to transform the GOP into a true opposition party. These ideas eventually found their expression in the political arena with the rise of Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

“The root difference between Conservatives and Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature,” wrote Goldwater in his 1960 book Conscience of a Conservative. “The Conservative has learned that the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free, or even economically efficient, if he is enslaved politically …,” wrote Goldwater.

When Goldwater won the GOP nomination for president in 1964, he defended conservatism against the Progressive epithet still hurled to this day – “extremism.”

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice …,” said Goldwater to his Progressive critics during his nomination acceptance speech; and followed this with an admonition to his establishment brethren, “… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Lyndon Johnson went on to defeat Goldwater by mischaracterizing “Mister Conservative” as a warmonger, buying airtime to broadcast the now infamous television ad showing a nuclear device detonating while a young child played in the foreground. The victorious Johnson escalated America’s military involvement in Vietnam, micromanaging the war down to the choice of targets for aerial bombardment. His mismanagement of the war in Southeast Asia divided the nation, galvanized the hard left, which began the slow radicalization of the Democratic Party. And Johnson declined to seek a second term as president.

It would be 16 years before another conservative made a bid for the White House. “For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present,” said Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address. “To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.” And Reagan exposed the underlying evil of Big Government. “From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

But something strange occurred when Reagan departed from public life: his brand of conservatism mutated back into Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism” in the form of “a kinder, gentler” “compassionate-conservatism.”

And America continued its march toward a more complex society governed by “an elite group” that gladly “piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present.” That came to a sudden and shocking culmination with the government-caused financial crisis of 2008.

That same year, a presidential candidate convinced the nation that this crisis required expanding the power of government elites. That times, such as they were, proved too complex for the quaint niceties of self-rule. But when the candidate became the nation’s 44th president, and passed a draconian health-care bill that forbade once-free Americans to opt out, grassroots activists began an opposition movement in the political vacuum of Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism. And the Tea Party did more than challenge the presumptions of Barack Hussein Obama; it challenged the legitimacy of tainted, co-opted Modern Republicanism.

This elicited the ire of one prominent guardian of 1950s Republicanism – Karl “the architect” Rove. “If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement … you will find that it is not sophisticated … It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.”

Even after Democrats took a shellacking in the 2010 elections at the hands of the Tea Party, David Frum, the kinder-gentler former speech writer for George W. Bush, wrote on his CNN blog, “The Tea Party stands for a series of propositions that don’t meet the reality test: that deficits matter more than jobs, that cutting deficits and tightening credit will accelerate economic growth, that high taxes and over-regulation are the most important reasons that growth has not revived, and that America still offers the world’s best opportunity for the poor to rise … if put into practice, the Tea Party platform is a formula for political and economic crisis.”

The incredible statement by Frum shows the inability of Eisenhower Modern Republicans to admit their complicity in the 2008 financial meltdown. What angers Frum and his establishment brothers is that the Tea Party is not bashful in pointing out Modern Republicanism’s monumental shortcomings. Who are these upstart Tea Partiers, after all? They haven’t read Friedrich August von Hayek!

Unlike Karl Rove and David Frum, the Tea Party understands instinctively, as Hayek once said, “Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

Hayek also said, “Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”

And the Tea Party-inspired debate within the Republican Party threatens to upend the disastrous cycle of meaningless elections that shifts control of government between the two parties while doing nothing to change the nation's disastrous course.

A real shift in direction can only occur with a Tea Party overthrow of Modern Republicanism.