When was the last time the Republican nominee was arguably more left-leaning than the Democratic one
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  When was the last time the Republican nominee was arguably more left-leaning than the Democratic one
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Author Topic: When was the last time the Republican nominee was arguably more left-leaning than the Democratic one  (Read 5624 times)
Alcibiades
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« Reply #25 on: September 10, 2021, 04:01:10 PM »


Exceptionally bad take.  Even if you insist on putting civil rights on a left/right scale as you clearly do, there are a plethora of other issues to consider.

This is clearly the only reasonable way to view the issue. The real question is why you are so insistent on putting 19th century issues of religion/morality on a 21st century spectrum.

Stop trying to make Protestant supremacism seem woke. It's not woke.

1892, 1904, and 1924 are all defensible answers to this question. 1904 is probably the best one. 1952, 1956, 1912, and especially 1948 and 1976 are all terrible answers, with 1912 as probably the best of a bad lot.

That 1924 is a possible answer really speaks to just how conservative John Davis was, rather than any progressivism on Silent Cal’s part. Although, I suppose the latter did have a surprisingly liberal attitude on civil rights (not just towards African Americans, but also Native Americans in particular).
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Cassius
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« Reply #26 on: September 10, 2021, 05:00:59 PM »


Exceptionally bad take.  Even if you insist on putting civil rights on a left/right scale as you clearly do, there are a plethora of other issues to consider.

This is clearly the only reasonable way to view the issue. The real question is why you are so insistent on putting 19th century issues of religion/morality on a 21st century spectrum.

Stop trying to make Protestant supremacism seem woke. It's not woke.

1892, 1904, and 1924 are all defensible answers to this question. 1904 is probably the best one. 1952, 1956, 1912, and especially 1948 and 1976 are all terrible answers, with 1912 as probably the best of a bad lot.

That 1924 is a possible answer really speaks to just how conservative John Davis was, rather than any progressivism on Silent Cal’s part. Although, I suppose the latter did have a surprisingly liberal attitude on civil rights (not just towards African Americans, but also Native Americans in particular).

Coolidge was actually regarded as leaning towards the progressive wing of the Republican Party whilst he was active in Massachusetts state politics (he supported women’s suffrage, laws to cut working hours for women and children and veterans bonuses). On the other hand, he seems to have not regarded it as the proper role of the federal government to be a driver of social reform, nor for the Presidency in and of itself to be ‘activist’. However, it’s arguable that the conservative financial policies that Coolidge is typically associated were in fact primarily driven by the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon rather than the President himself (it’s also worth noting that Herbert Hoover clashed with Mellon over the extent of his tax cutting proposals).
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #27 on: September 12, 2021, 11:25:14 PM »

I would say 1948. Dewey seemed to be more left-leaning than Truman in my opinion. As a matter of fact, as a Republican, I probably would have voted for the latter.

I mean, ONLY in some vague “culturally conservative” vs. “culturally liberal” way, which is not only not a great barometer for 1940s politics but also only a small part of this equation.  Dewey pretty clearly ran to Truman’s right.

More accurately Truman ran to Dewey's left while Dewey spoke in platitudes. Truman saw himself as the spiritual heir to WJB and he therefore viewed himself as fighting for the common man against the "special privilege people" as he described it. Dewey meanwhile had close ties to Wall Street and while he had a moderate record as Governor, he did not emphasize it and instead allowed the Republican Party to be defined by the much more Conservative Congress, which Truman aggressively assailed on the campaign trail. 1948 is very much like 2012 in a sense, with a Midwest Democrat running against a Northeast establishment Republican, with the Taft-Hartley situation (Congress overriding Truman's veto painting him as the champion of the working class) in place of the Auto bailout (and its damaging effects on Romney and painting Obama as the savior of the Auto industry).

There is also the dynamic caused by Truman's desegregation of the military and the adopted of Humphrey's Civil Rights planks at the DNC. Because Truman let the Conservative wing of the Southern Democrats go and instead doubled down on the populist/Progressive wing (aided by his own heritage from the border states), Truman was helped to minimize losses in the South and at the same time score huge wins with black voters.

The combination of strong union support, black support and populisty up country Southern whites would deliver Truman back to the Presidency. The only candidate Truman ran to the right of in this election, was Henry Wallace.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #28 on: September 12, 2021, 11:29:29 PM »


Exceptionally bad take.  Even if you insist on putting civil rights on a left/right scale as you clearly do, there are a plethora of other issues to consider.

This is clearly the only reasonable way to view the issue. The real question is why you are so insistent on putting 19th century issues of religion/morality on a 21st century spectrum.

Stop trying to make Protestant supremacism seem woke. It's not woke.

1892, 1904, and 1924 are all defensible answers to this question. 1904 is probably the best one. 1952, 1956, 1912, and especially 1948 and 1976 are all terrible answers, with 1912 as probably the best of a bad lot.

That 1924 is a possible answer really speaks to just how conservative John Davis was, rather than any progressivism on Silent Cal’s part. Although, I suppose the latter did have a surprisingly liberal attitude on civil rights (not just towards African Americans, but also Native Americans in particular).

Coolidge was actually regarded as leaning towards the progressive wing of the Republican Party whilst he was active in Massachusetts state politics (he supported women’s suffrage, laws to cut working hours for women and children and veterans bonuses). On the other hand, he seems to have not regarded it as the proper role of the federal government to be a driver of social reform, nor for the Presidency in and of itself to be ‘activist’. However, it’s arguable that the conservative financial policies that Coolidge is typically associated were in fact primarily driven by the Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon rather than the President himself (it’s also worth noting that Herbert Hoover clashed with Mellon over the extent of his tax cutting proposals).

Coolidge's reputation in libertarian circles is largely overblown for the most part. A good part of it was a poor working relationship with congress and distant approach, in part because of his extremely reserved personality.

His administration presided over sky high tariffs, he signed a bill massively restricting immigration and regardless of his personal feelings on the matter, he was President during Prohibition.

If anything he comes across more as a conservative nationalist than some paragon of libertarianism.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #29 on: September 12, 2021, 11:51:04 PM »


Exceptionally bad take.  Even if you insist on putting civil rights on a left/right scale as you clearly do, there are a plethora of other issues to consider.

This is clearly the only reasonable way to view the issue. The real question is why you are so insistent on putting 19th century issues of religion/morality on a 21st century spectrum.

Stop trying to make Protestant supremacism seem woke. It's not woke.

1892, 1904, and 1924 are all defensible answers to this question. 1904 is probably the best one. 1952, 1956, 1912, and especially 1948 and 1976 are all terrible answers, with 1912 as probably the best of a bad lot.

I watched a bunch of the videos of Truman given interviews on the Truman Library Youtube channel. In one of the interviews he discusses 1904 though he gets the year wrong, it is pretty obvious who he is talking about. He declines to mention the name specifically "because he has children who are still living". He makes the point that nominating him was a mistake because he was a Wall Street guy himself and thus his attacks on TR fell flat.

However, for what it is worth, Parker attacked TR claiming he was too close to the trusts and pointed to the fact that while TR was railing against them, he took campaign money from them as well and refused to give it back or donate it.

TR also gets a bit of a "more progressive reputation than deserved" in 1904 owing to the fact of how he ran in 1912 in a case of historical back projection. TR was out of step with his party obviously and often drawing the ire of the big wigs within it, but he still had to play nice with a Republican Party that was by this point pushing 40 years bought and paid for by rail and steel in 1904. Furthermore, he often infuriated progressives and socialists by not going far enough. There were calls to nationalize the railways among some Democrats and "very progressive" Republicans, which he rebuffed. Also in the push for reform of the meat packing industry, the whole focus on cleanliness and regulation for the sake of safe food missed the larger point about working conditions and workers rights that Upton Sinclair was actually driving at. He also gave JP Morgan a trust waiver of sorts to allow him to bail out the collapsing firm at the heart of the 1907 panic.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #30 on: September 13, 2021, 11:23:46 AM »

From an outside perspective I simply don't get the TR myth in American historical memory: it seems bound up in an uncomplicated ecumenical nationalist narrative that falls apart upon closer inspection. His biggest achievement in office was the national park system for crying out loud...
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« Reply #31 on: September 13, 2021, 10:17:14 PM »

From an outside perspective I simply don't get the TR myth in American historical memory: it seems bound up in an uncomplicated ecumenical nationalist narrative that falls apart upon closer inspection. His biggest achievement in office was the national park system for crying out loud...

The key point here is that his legacy is not politically live today. He's most remembered for the national park system and for antitrust activism. People on both sides basically think that the outdoors are good and large conglomerates are bad (and in the former case, the national park system is an enormous part of the popular American conception of this country), and the contexts in which those particular achievements took place are sufficiently remote that they're not relitigated today, even though public land management and economic regulation are both still politically salient. It just doesn't advance anyone's interests to say that actually Theodore Roosevelt was bad.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #32 on: September 14, 2021, 01:59:20 PM »
« Edited: September 14, 2021, 02:06:05 PM by Statilius the Epicurean »

Right. I see TR as a placeholder between the much more consequential figures of McKinley and Wilson, who established American empire and the modern US regulatory state respectively. Both of which TR confusedly seems to be credited with in historical memory. Not a bad President per se, just unimportant relative to his reputation and relative to other, less ecumenical Presidents.
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« Reply #33 on: September 19, 2021, 07:49:43 AM »

It's not like Eisenhower was particularly progressive on civil rights anyway. He privately opposed Brown and did little to expand voting rights. Even dragged his feet during the Little Rock Crisis to the extent that Louis Armstrong of all people was saying he had "no guts" and was "two-faced"!

Stevenson certainly would have done more on civil rights had he been elected.

I guess that’s why Adam Clayton Powell bucked his own party and endorsed Eisenhower in 1956. Personally, based on what each candidate said about civil rights during the campaigns of 1952 and 1956, I can only conclude that Stevenson was far more cowardly on the issue than Eisenhower.

Adam Clayton Powell, while being a black representative kinda sucked, " Powell, hearing of planned civil rights marches at the Democratic Convention, which could embarrass the party or candidate, threatened to accuse Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of having a homosexual relationship with Bayard Rustin unless the marches were cancelled."
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #34 on: October 09, 2021, 03:34:52 PM »

Arguably 1932. FDR heavily bashed Hoover for his reckless spending.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #35 on: October 09, 2021, 04:48:29 PM »

Arguably 1932. FDR heavily bashed Hoover for his reckless spending.

FDR certainly ran as a more traditional Democrat (as it was regarded at the time) but he also campaigned on a "New Deal" however vague that was and later defined that during the course of his Presidency.

Obama also criticized Bush heavily for the deficit. "Borrowing a trillion dollars from the bank of China, raising our national debt" in reference to the Iraq war.
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Libertas Vel Mors
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« Reply #36 on: November 30, 2021, 09:22:08 PM »

Oh great, another one of these threads...the Republicans were inarguably to the left of the reactionary Democrats in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, and arguably so until the 1930s, but we should keep that debate in the "historical continuity" thread (where I've just made a long new post!). By election, I'd say in 1904 Teddy was to the left of Parker and in 1924 both candidates were so conservative it was hard to tell, so I'd choose one of those two.

William Jennings Bryan, noted conservative

William McKinley, noted liberal
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Paul Weller
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« Reply #37 on: December 01, 2021, 12:02:00 AM »

Oh great, another one of these threads...the Republicans were inarguably to the left of the reactionary Democrats in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, and arguably so until the 1930s, but we should keep that debate in the "historical continuity" thread (where I've just made a long new post!). By election, I'd say in 1904 Teddy was to the left of Parker and in 1924 both candidates were so conservative it was hard to tell, so I'd choose one of those two.

William Jennings Bryan, noted conservative

William McKinley, noted liberal

Neither of those men were major political figures in those decades.
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Libertas Vel Mors
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« Reply #38 on: December 01, 2021, 08:20:12 AM »

Oh great, another one of these threads...the Republicans were inarguably to the left of the reactionary Democrats in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, and arguably so until the 1930s, but we should keep that debate in the "historical continuity" thread (where I've just made a long new post!). By election, I'd say in 1904 Teddy was to the left of Parker and in 1924 both candidates were so conservative it was hard to tell, so I'd choose one of those two.

William Jennings Bryan, noted conservative

William McKinley, noted liberal

Neither of those men were major political figures in those decades.

I was responding to the "arguably until the 1930s" part.
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« Reply #39 on: December 01, 2021, 07:06:37 PM »

Also keep in mind the Conservative Democrats in those days from the South frustrated the National Democrats a lot as they voted with the Republicans more than they did with the Democrats on legislation. These Democrats were only Democrats cause the south was a one party state, not cause they were actually democrats in any sense of the word
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #40 on: December 05, 2021, 02:18:06 AM »

Does Robert La Follete in 1924 count?
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« Reply #41 on: December 15, 2021, 07:56:10 PM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.
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H. Ross Peron
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« Reply #42 on: December 16, 2021, 04:13:33 AM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.
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Unconditional Surrender Truman
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« Reply #43 on: December 16, 2021, 01:29:22 PM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.

This is a pretty major undercurrent in the "party switch" narrative that bears addressing. Especially coming from the likes of Chernow, &c., a lot of it is just blatant classism and paternalistic disdain for poor white people in rural areas of the South and Midwest.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #44 on: December 16, 2021, 10:46:09 PM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.

This is a pretty major undercurrent in the "party switch" narrative that bears addressing. Especially coming from the likes of Chernow, &c., a lot of it is just blatant classism and paternalistic disdain for poor white people in rural areas of the South and Midwest.

I feel that's SLIGHLTY unfair with regards to Chernow. Biographers tend to develop sympathies with the people they write about after going through a bunch of letters and journals and etc. and Chernow identifying with Hamilton and Grant is totally reasonable, and, of course, Ulysses Grant was one of America's greatest leaders and writers and I'd of COURSE have voted for Grant both times.

This can lead to unfortunate things like playing down their downsides (like...um...the entire Adams Administration for Hamilton, or certain very very problematic aspects of the Grant Administration for US Grant).

I have no compunction in saying US Grant was a great and good man and I'd vote for him both times (ESPECIALLY in 1868...can you IMAGINE President Seymour?). It's also true that during Grant's time in office the Republican Party grew to be captured by business interests (see Schuyler Colfax, whose early abolitionism didn't mean he was immune from being the most crooked Vice President this side of Spiro Agnew). It's also possible to appreciate Hamilton's ahead of his time idea of having an independent central bank and a state funded by bonds which could use its own debt as an asset rather than a liability while also thinking Hamilton's support of John Adams' tyrannical agenda as President and Hamilton's vicious elitism kind of disqualifies him as a truly sympathetic figure.

Sad thing is, nuance is dead to "Good" "Bad" and if you try to pull Hamilton out of the Bad bin like Chernow did, you force a recategorization of him into the Good bin, which is a terrible fit for him. Same thing with Grant in that the old narrative that Grant was kind of a terrible president still has some validity, it's just that it very much wasn't his fault.
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Alcibiades
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« Reply #45 on: December 20, 2021, 04:37:02 PM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.

Ford was not really more upper class than Carter, though, despite their respective images. In fact, they both came from remarkably similar backgrounds; both their fathers (or adoptive father, in Ford’s case) were upwardly mobile, enterprising businessmen from humble backgrounds who took a hit during the Depression before becoming genuinely affluent local civic notables later in life.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #46 on: December 20, 2021, 08:09:35 PM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.
Dewey was a “wine track” candidate and Truman was a “beer track” candidate, but wine track or beer track doesn’t mean culturally liberal or culturally conservative.
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« Reply #47 on: December 20, 2021, 09:24:52 PM »

1912 stands out.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #48 on: December 21, 2021, 01:35:07 AM »

Ford was probably more culturally liberal than Carter, the same might've also been true of Dewey compared to Truman.

In what sense? You seem to be equating cultural liberalism with being more upper class.

This is a pretty major undercurrent in the "party switch" narrative that bears addressing. Especially coming from the likes of Chernow, &c., a lot of it is just blatant classism and paternalistic disdain for poor white people in rural areas of the South and Midwest.

Most of the party flip is narrative is driven by such, a desire to "other" the undesirables and to whitewash history for one's own group to paint them as the good guys.
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« Reply #49 on: December 23, 2021, 09:12:53 PM »

Oh great, another one of these threads...the Republicans were inarguably to the left of the reactionary Democrats in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, and arguably so until the 1930s, but we should keep that debate in the "historical continuity" thread (where I've just made a long new post!). By election, I'd say in 1904 Teddy was to the left of Parker and in 1924 both candidates were so conservative it was hard to tell, so I'd choose one of those two.

Alton Parker was to the left of Theodore Roosevelt. The Democrats' criticism of Teddy consisted of tirades about how Teddy was the "big business candidate," who was backed by the "trusts." Alton Parker was supported by left-leaning Democrats and personalities such as James B. Weaver and Carl Schurz. Even William Jennings Bryan ultimately supported Parker over Teddy in the general election (albeit only begrudgingly so), as Bryan was actually a constant critic of Teddy's administration, which he viewed as performative, pandering, and "not enough."

The Democrats have never been "reactionary" lol.
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