Can any modern GOP practices/policies/philosophy be traced back to Eisenhower?
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  Can any modern GOP practices/policies/philosophy be traced back to Eisenhower?
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Author Topic: Can any modern GOP practices/policies/philosophy be traced back to Eisenhower?  (Read 1071 times)
TheReckoning
Junior Chimp
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« on: November 22, 2022, 01:31:04 AM »

Did Eisenhower have an impact of the characteristics of the Republican Party that still last today? If so, what are they?
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« Reply #1 on: November 22, 2022, 01:47:26 AM »

The Southern Strategy started with him not Goldwater or Nixon
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Orser67
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« Reply #2 on: November 22, 2022, 11:36:15 PM »

I would say Eisenhower's biggest impact on the party was probably in foreign policy, specifically moving the GOP in a more interventionist direction. Eisenhower certainly wasn't the sole person responsible for the GOP's shift towards interventionism post-WW2, but his win over the more isolationist Taft in the 1952 Republican primaries, his subsequent defeat of the Bricker Amendment, and his general continuation of Truman's Cold War containment policies (including his strong support for NATO) all represented a sharp break with previous Republican administrations. Despite some of Trump's recent moves, I think there's still at least a wing of the Republican Party that generally continues the interventionist Republican tradition that Eisenhower helped create.
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Junior Chimp
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« Reply #3 on: November 23, 2022, 10:17:26 PM »

I'm not sure it had a significant impact on the Republican Party in in a lineal sense, but the parallels to contemporary conservative concerns in this I recently came across is interesting

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Sol
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« Reply #4 on: November 24, 2022, 12:31:07 AM »

The Southern Strategy started with him not Goldwater or Nixon

IMO the earliest seeds of it go back to the 20s.
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Vosem
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« Reply #5 on: November 24, 2022, 12:34:08 AM »

The Southern Strategy started with him not Goldwater or Nixon

IMO the earliest seeds of it go back to the 20s.

First GOP presidential campaign to actively try to appeal to Southern whites was 1896.
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Sol
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« Reply #6 on: November 24, 2022, 12:43:04 AM »

The Southern Strategy started with him not Goldwater or Nixon

IMO the earliest seeds of it go back to the 20s.

First GOP presidential campaign to actively try to appeal to Southern whites was 1896.

The Southern Strategy is always already Tongue

I said the 20s since the strength of the Lily-white movement in that particular era and  Al Smith's poor performance seems like an obvious starting point for the shifts seen in the 30s.

Really, once Democrats were competitive with Black voters something like the Southern Strategy was probably inevitable.

Might be an interesting thread topic.
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Orser67
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« Reply #7 on: November 24, 2022, 12:15:18 PM »

The Southern Strategy started with him not Goldwater or Nixon

IMO the earliest seeds of it go back to the 20s.

First GOP presidential campaign to actively try to appeal to Southern whites was 1896.

We could really go all the way back to 1864; Republicans wrote off the South in 1856 and 1860, but in 1864 they actively went after Southern white unionists, as reflected in part by the selection of Andrew Johnson as Lincoln's running mate. The lily white movement that began in 1896 is a lot more relevant to the Southern strategy, but the same basic question of how to balance Southern whites and African American voters has been around since the Civil War.

Bringing this back to Eisenhower's impact on the modern Republican Party, while he wasn't an active opponent of the civil rights movement, nor was he a strong proponent of it, and his hand was often forced by courts and/or public opinion. So despite the fact that he appointed Earl Warren and did continue the integration of the military, Eisenhower was an important link in the shift of Southern whites into the Republican and the shift of African Americans into the Democratic Party.
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Nathan
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« Reply #8 on: December 06, 2022, 12:16:22 AM »

Quite a bit can, even in the realm of domestic policy. The Eisenhower administration did have a basic amount of foresight and public-spiritedness that subsequent Republican administrations have pointedly lacked, but it was also the architect of the modern "nondenominational but explicitly theistic and implicitly Christian" expression of American civil religion (the "and I don't care what it is" remark, "In God We Trust" on the currency and "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Eisenhower--raised Anabaptist--going out of his way to get baptized in a Mainline Protestant denomination in office, unprecedented levels of access for people like Billy Graham and Francis Spellman), of active homophobia in the American executive branch (Executive Order 10450, which was a deeply regrettable departure from Ike's more tolerant wartime stance towards gay people in the military), of performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline (purely on fiscal issues Nixon was arguably to his old boss's left!), and of course of this country's Killing Eve-tier passionate-yet-toxic love affair with car culture and suburban sprawl (I'm sure I don't need to explain the specifics on this of all secular blogs). Almost all of this was informed by Eisenhower's background in the Army, an environment in which conformism, censoriousness, bean-counting, and an obsession with large and terrifying cars are all genuinely assets and in fact necessary for the men under one's command to survive. I regard Eisenhower fairly highly as conservative Presidents go, but he was a conservative President in every sense of the word "conservative" that isn't deliberately prescriptive and tendentious.
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Orser67
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« Reply #9 on: December 07, 2022, 05:02:45 PM »

of performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline

Maybe I'm not clear on what you're trying to say, but I disagree that the current Republican "performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline" can be traced back to Eisenhower. Federal debt as a percentage of GDP went down substantially during his presidency, and Eisenhower resisted tax cuts proposed by others in the party in favor of a balanced budget. Obviously Eisenhower was helped by a growing economy, but I can't imagine Reagan, Bush II, or Trump would have passed up the chance to pass a major tax cut (and in fact, Democrats cut taxes substantially after Eisenhower left office).

I'd argue that the current Republican approach to the budget can be traced to the Reagan Era, when Republicans began emphasizing tax cuts above all else, and when debt as a percentage of GDP almost doubled (from 1981 to 1993).
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Nathan
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« Reply #10 on: December 07, 2022, 09:01:00 PM »

of performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline

Maybe I'm not clear on what you're trying to say, but I disagree that the current Republican "performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline" can be traced back to Eisenhower. Federal debt as a percentage of GDP went down substantially during his presidency, and Eisenhower resisted tax cuts proposed by others in the party in favor of a balanced budget. Obviously Eisenhower was helped by a growing economy, but I can't imagine Reagan, Bush II, or Trump would have passed up the chance to pass a major tax cut (and in fact, Democrats cut taxes substantially after Eisenhower left office).

I'd argue that the current Republican approach to the budget can be traced to the Reagan Era, when Republicans began emphasizing tax cuts above all else, and when debt as a percentage of GDP almost doubled (from 1981 to 1993).

I was trying to express that Eisenhower had a genuine aversion to deficit spending that later Republican Presidents have performatively aped, and I wasn't really able to communicate that well succinctly.
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Orser67
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« Reply #11 on: December 07, 2022, 09:45:25 PM »

of performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline

Maybe I'm not clear on what you're trying to say, but I disagree that the current Republican "performative preoccupation with budgetary discipline" can be traced back to Eisenhower. Federal debt as a percentage of GDP went down substantially during his presidency, and Eisenhower resisted tax cuts proposed by others in the party in favor of a balanced budget. Obviously Eisenhower was helped by a growing economy, but I can't imagine Reagan, Bush II, or Trump would have passed up the chance to pass a major tax cut (and in fact, Democrats cut taxes substantially after Eisenhower left office).

I'd argue that the current Republican approach to the budget can be traced to the Reagan Era, when Republicans began emphasizing tax cuts above all else, and when debt as a percentage of GDP almost doubled (from 1981 to 1993).

I was trying to express that Eisenhower had a genuine aversion to deficit spending that later Republican Presidents have performatively aped, and I wasn't really able to communicate that well succinctly.

Ah that totally makes sense then, fully agreed
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