Right, Left, and Foreshocks of Polarization

For Monday, read Rosenfeld, ch. 5-6.

Thomas Wright on Taft:

There are particular echoes of Sen. Robert Taft, who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination in 1940, 1948 and 1952, and was widely seen as the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Taft was a staunch isolationist and mercantilist who opposed U.S. aid for Britain before 1941. After the war, he opposed President Harry Truman’s efforts to expand trade. Despite being an anti-communist, he opposed containment of the Soviet Union, believing that the United States had few interests in Western Europe. He opposed the creation of NATO as overly provocative. Taft’s speeches are the last time a major American politician has offered a substantive and comprehensive critique of America’s alliances.

Taft opposed the Nuremberg Trials -- but supported public housing and social security. 

 Taft v. Eisenhower

McCarthy and Cohn

Buckley, National Review and the conservative movement (Rosenfeld 76-86).

• Buckley supported Joe McCarthy
• Diverged from Taft on NATO, trade, and containment
• Explicitly white supremacist in its first years -- a view that Buckley later renounced.

The fringe

From the "Keep America Committee" 

John Birch Society

1960

Goldwater emerges

"The Treaty of Fifth Avenue"

Nixon and JFK:  domestic policy as foreign policy

Soviets and Civil Rights  -- the Kennedy Administration sees segregation as a front in the Cold war

The Sharon Statement v. The Port Huron Statement (Rosenfeld 95-99)

Goldwater and a Claremont connection:




The politics of congressional consensus:  the 1964 Civil Rights Act

But LBJ understood that victory is fleeting:

When you win big you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them [in Congress] who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back. 

Dramatized here (1:30):