The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

OK, call me when the GOP runs an IKE or a Nixon, again

Why the GOP Blowout Is So Scary for Democrats

Beinart, as so often, really doesn't seem to get it.

Eisenhower accepted the legitimacy of the New Deal and enforced liberal court decisions on race - Brown, for example - with which he lacked personal sympathy.

Earl Warren, by the way, had been a Republican governor of California before IKE nominated him to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Nixon - he of the historic landslide of 1972 - claimed from the start of his political career to be a liberal Republican - that meant he was in the GOP progressive tradition - and was and is loathed by the conservatives of his time and ours.

The Democrats hated him because he had so adroitly played Whittaker Chambers against Alger Hiss.

An astounding parade of Democratic luminaries extending even into the Supreme Court had absolutely disgraced themselves in the Hiss affair, and their utterly vicious treatment of Chambers prefigured their eventual destruction of Nixon.

When liberal/Democratic historians, politicians, or journos describe Nixon as small, bitter, second-rate, and haunted to the point of paranoia, bear all that in mind.

He was too smart not to have an enemies list and, long though it may have been, it likely missed more than a few.

Anyway, if the GOP ever broke the stranglehold of the conservatives and nominated a progressive rather than a devotee of Ayn Rand pining for the good old days of McKinley they would have a real shot at taking the White House again and keeping it for a good long time, for sure.

But Beinart knows and we know that nothing like that is happening.

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