Rockefeller Republicans

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The mistake we make is in considering the "Rockefeller Republicans" as being this ancestrally liberal Republican group who after many decades suddenly realized that they were in the wrong party and started to switch.

On the contrary. In the early Progressive Era, Northeast and Midwest Republicans tended to be more conservative relative to their counterparts out west with some variance and support for local parochial concerns obviously. Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller's own grandfather on his mother's side) was seen as a tool of industrial concerns, and very often got in the way of Teddy Roosevelt's agenda. Senator Wadsworth of New York, opposed the FDA and later opposed women's suffrage. Taft's "conservative" VP was from New York.

Conservative politics tends to require a strong middle class and the only part of the country that that really had such a base tended to be in the Industrial states and Yankee belt. Outside of that, you had a lot of poor farmers, a few rich planters and politics that very often was dominated by personalities, populists and later various forms of Progressive mindsets (at least economically speaking).

The New Deal, the organization of the laboring classes into unions and leftward shift of WASPs (with heavy impact of generational change in bring this about), you suddenly had a GOP establishment that was very tied to Wall Street and business, but struggling to stay politically viable in the region. The answer was that they dove left to chase after their base and their swing voters.

This is how Rockefeller Republicanism was born, it was a reaction to a shifting political map. Its the same reason that Southern Democrats, went from being mostly agrarian populists and New Dealers to having to vote ever more conservative thanks to both the growing suburban vote in the South and the growing hostility to "big government liberalism" in the region. Look at the shift from say Robert Byrd to Joe Manchin as an example of this in action, or how Arkansas Democrats like J William Fulbright were compared to their last holdouts (Who basically acted as the Senator from Wal-Mart).

Ultimately what it comes down to is the fact that so many states were so close and the map was influx during the period between 1952 and 2000.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ironically, despite the name, Nelson Rockefeller was far from the best example of a liberal Republican in the period. He did have somewhat of a populist conservative streak, especially on law and order. The most liberal Republicans were the likes of Jacob Javits, Edward Brooke, John Lindsay (who ended up switching parties), and, at least by his 1968 run, George Romney.

In general, the moderate Republican line on social programmes at the time was that they would essentially preserve the New Deal legacy, but run them more ‘efficiently’ than the Democrats; that is, taking a somewhat more pro-businesses and fiscally conservative stance. Ultimately, these Republicans viewed the New Deal paradigm as having become entrenched consensus, and out of pragmatic concern they realised they had to operate within it to survive. You can see this in the geographic distribution of liberal Republicans; most were from places like New England, New York, and the Bay Area, the liberal reputation of which obviously goes without saying. To name just one example, these coastal urban area were heavily unionised, so a Republican running as a union-buster wasn’t going to get very far.

In addition, cultural, ethnic and class identities played a huge role in the phenomenon of liberal Republicans. The mid-20th century saw the height of class-based voting in the United States; if you were from an upper middle class or higher background, then becoming a Republican was simply the ‘natural’ thing to do, even if you had generally liberal views. As the name ‘Rockefeller Republican’ suggests, a disproportionate number of liberal Republican politicians came from patrician WASPy backgrounds. When you wonder why some of them, despite their very liberal positions, weren’t Democrats, the answer is often probably that they simply felt uncomfortable with the class connotations of doing so.

Related to this, New England, which had the greatest concentration of liberal Republicans of any part of the country, had been riven by a sharp political divide between WASPs and ‘white ethnics’ (usually Irish-Americans, especially in Massachusetts) since the early 20th century. Even as the region liberalised as the century drew on (most early 20th century New England WASP Republicans were decidedly not liberal) this divide certainly still remained, and again, as a New England WASP, being a Republican was just the default option. Similarly, New York City’s fondness for liberal Republicans can be explained by the perception that the city’s Democratic Party was controlled by Irish-Americans, and was extremely corrupt. This led to resentment towards the Democrats not just from WASPs, but also from Italians (e.g. Fiorello La Guardia) and Jews (e.g. Jacob Javits), who would often form a powerful coalition to power liberal Republicans to victory.

Interesting, I hadn't considered the ethnic divides. I knew La Guardia mainly identified as a Republican because he was against Tammany Hall, although Italian-Americans were also usually part of the Democratic coalition, no? And Edward Brooke, who served as a liberal Republican even after the GOP became very much the conservative party, was of course black - but again, most black northerners had become Democrats by the time he entered politics. But I get why liberal northeastern WASPs would favour Republicans, since the GOP was always the party of WASP interests, and Democrats were more friendly with Catholics and immigrants.

Opposing corrupt Democratic political machines like Tammany Hall seems like a no-brainer move for any northern Republican, but what about public policy? I mean, "we support the New Deal but will run it more efficiently" makes sense as a political message, but it's a pretty weak one and doesn't really differentiate you much from the opponent. Even in times less polarizing than ours, there are always some issues that fire people up, did liberal Republicans have any that differentiated them from their Democratic opponents? Or was it just "Democrats are the party of corrupt Irish machines, Republicans are the party of prudency and accountability"?

The question you need to ask though, is what was the alternative?

Say you are Wendell Wilkie or Thomas Dewey.

PA, NY and NJ cast like 90 electoral voters between them and the South was a solid block still and sure not going to vote for the party that burned down the family farm in Georgia.

You go liberal on civil rights and foreign policy (post WWII) and you attack Democratic corruption, incompetence, deficits and abuse of power and rally the troops that way. Alternatively you get hawkish on the Cold War and for a while attacking Communist infiltration worked until Joe McCarthy took it too far.

That is why Nixon focused on the Cold War, Vietnam, Crime and Busing, and took a middle of the road path on economics.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Without reading the dozens of paragraphs above, I need to chime in to remind everyone that "Rockefeller Republicans" had some of the most brutal views on crime, urbanism, and race in the history of the country. The movement is literally named after the governor best remembered for his response to the Attica prison riots. They were not suburban intellectuals; they were the last political movement appealing to the concerns of a now politically extinct class: upper-class urban whites. Their "moderate" views on abortion and gun control largely stem from paranoia regarding black crime, and the common view of them as broadly "liberal" is misguided, as is liberal nostalgia for them.

P.S. Having written this out, I did go back and see that Al and NCY largely hit the mark.

I'll tack on that the narrow WASPishness (at least in public reputation) of the Rockefeller set prevented them from appealing to ethnic minorities, which would have preserved their power another decade or so. And the acceleration of Northern white fears after 1964 pushed voters past what even the Republicans were offering. Instead, ethnic  voters went for Wallace (before later abandoning the cities) while wealthier voters abandoned the cities as soon as possible for Rye, Greenwich, Orange County, etc., forming the basis for the Reaganism of the 1980s.

And none of this is to say that there weren't "liberal Republicans" as there are today. But they were never a coherent enough movement appealing to enough voters to, say, elect a President. Or even a Governor of New York.

Economically it does seem like Rockefeller was more liberal than the 1980-present GOP Though.

Rockefeller was re-elected in the three subsequent elections in 1962, 1966 and 1970, increasing the state's role in education, environmental protection, transportation, housing, welfare, medical aid, civil rights, and the arts. To pay for the increased government spending, Rockefeller increased taxation - for example, a sales tax was introduced in New York in 1965

He also supported Single Payer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_in_the_United_States

In April 1970, Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) introduced a bill to extend Medicare to all—retaining existing Medicare cost sharing and coverage limits—developed after consultation with Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and former Johnson administration HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen

Wasn't he considered pretty pro union as well

Kevin Phillips notes of an acceleration of the leftward drift in Republicans representing WASPy areas, even among the more rural Yankee ones, who up until just a few years prior were down the line Republicans on most economic issues. This acceleration occurred in the Congressional sessions between 1965-1969, demonstrating increased support for the Great Society and later there was a correlation between those manifesting this voting shift and support for Rockefeller over Nixon in 68.

Phillips basically is asserting that the 1964 election broke the hard coded partisan identity in many of these districts and since LBJ won so decisively in so many of them, there was this impetus to support the administration's agenda.

This is kind of similar to how Republicans shook lose by anger at Trump, tended to re-evaluate the rest of their positions as well and it becomes more of an embrace of the Democrats than just a temporary thing to bounce Trump.

You can get a way with murder practically if your base is partisan Republicans, but if a nominee comes along that motivates a radical change in voting behavior (even if it is just one off), its typically never the same after that.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

On the contrary. In the early Progressive Era, Northeast and Midwest Republicans tended to be more conservative relative to their counterparts out west with some variance and support for local parochial concerns obviously. Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller's own grandfather on his mother's side) was seen as a tool of industrial concerns, and very often got in the way of Teddy Roosevelt's agenda. Senator Wadsworth of New York, opposed the FDA and later opposed women's suffrage. Taft's "conservative" VP was from New York.

This was a good point.  There was a time when populist Republicans were to the left of establishment Republicans.  The "switch" probably happened by the 1940s.

In Canada this is true as well with the Conservative Party.  In the 1950s the quintessential "Red Tory" was from Saskatchewan, rural-populist John Diefenbaker.  He was to the left of the Bay Street wing.

But today, when the term "Red Tory" is used it's the socially liberal/fiscally conservative Bay Street type.

I tend to view it as a situation driven by concentration of wealth (in this case geographically speaking) and their relative influence on the politics of a state. That is not to say that the wealthy don't have influence in New York today, more to the point that at the same time relative to other states, it was one of the most wealthy states and thus a larger number of middle class voters willing to opt for the status quo as opposed to backing some kind of Prairie or Mountain radical.

Its also a case where the Democratic coalition, since it included so many Irish voters courtesy of the Tammany machine, had thus come to have a substantial contingent of "not so hard up voters" and many of those who were sometimes even sided with the Republicans against the machine. It was not until the progression of the New Deal era, where you have a consolidation of support along class lines and thus a decided shift leftward, which the establishment then dove after to maintain its own power and clout becoming either liberal Republicans or Democrats.

The people most angry at the big business trusts and railroads would be the farmers and miners of the South and West, though obviously anger at the them was all over, this is more about relative concentrations.

At the same time the Dust Bowl and similar shifts towards mechanization of farms, occurring after and alongside urbanization meant that the depopulated rural areas, shift more conservative than was the case when there was a large base of debt laden small farms.