Let me start off with a couple of quotes;
Quote number 1: Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Quote number 2: Recognizing the equality of all men and women, we are willing and able to lift the weak, cradle those who hurt, and nurture the bonds that tie us together as one nation under God.
I didn't attribute the above quotes to anyone because I want you to think about who might have said them. Quote number one speaks to the popularity and importance of the largest social programs in our country, or as conservatives would call them "entitlements". Many conservative leaders in our nation would be thrilled to do away with social security, unemployment insurance, labor laws and farm programs as they see them as a drain on our economy, unnecessary government expenditures, and programs that encourage laziness by providing a way for people to avoid working for a living. Several leading conservatives had proposed plans that, even if they didn't eliminate these programs outright, would restructure these programs in such a way as to cause their death over time. So who is this person who claims that ending these programs would be political suicide and outright "stupid"? Obviously it must be an extremist liberal who can't relate to the real world from his or her academic ivory tower. I won't keep you guessing, the extremist liberal who said quote number one was Republican President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower.
Quote number two is obviously from some touchy feely liberal. A lefty concerned with nothing but amorphous issues like "equality" and taking care of the poor so they don't have to take care of themselves. This is exactly the type of person that conservatives enjoy painting President Obama as. Lifting the weak and cradling those who hurt, I wonder how much that will raise our taxes? These people need to go out and get jobs so we don't have to lift or cradle them. Of course these kinds of ideas come from thinking that everyone is equal, Donald Trump and a homeless drunk are not equal. Liberals want us to think they are so that they can take Mr. Trump's money and give it to a bum who doesn't deserve it. It is easy to see that quote number 2 had to come from the leader of some fringe socialist group. In fact this socialist leader was President Ronald Reagan and he said this while accepting the GOP presidential nomination for his second term at the Republican National Convention in 1984.
Of course a single quote can fail to really show you the nature of a person. So let's take a look at the policies of Eisenhower, and Reagan.
Eisenhower, as you can see from quote number one, was a believer in social programs like social security and unemployment insurance. He also didn't seem to think that lowering taxes was a huge issue as the earners in the top income tax bracket paid no less than 75% during his two terms. He also didn't mind big government spending projects (of course he had the tax revenue coming into pay for them) like the interstate road system that he started and funded. He could also see the danger of letting the concerns of the business world take precedence over the concerns of the real world as he warned the nation in his farewell address. In this speech he spoke of the dangers of the US "military-industrial complex" that would harm our nation to promote their own selfish goals. President Eisenhower today would not be seen as a conservative, in fact he would probably be seen as being to the left of President Obama. This begs the question, what happened?
Ronald Reagan is the patron saint of today's conservative movement. As we have seen in quote number two, however, Reagan may not have been as conservative as many today would like to believe. Yes, Reagan spoke often of smaller government and lowering taxes. In action though Reagan did not always live up to the goals he set for himself. This is because Reagan could step away from the ideology from time to time and address reality. When his 1981 tax cuts were shown to be creating a budget shortfall of huge proportions Reagan quickly backtracked and raised taxes to prevent the budget deficit from climbing to levels not seen since World War II. In fact Reagan signed off on tax increases about a dozen times during his two terms. Why would the hero of Congressional members who have signed pledges to never raise taxes for any reason do something like this? Because he saw that it was the best thing for our country. Pragmatism won out over ideology. Of course it wasn't just in tax policy that Reagan veered off of the road to today's vision of conservatism. Reagan grew the size of the government in terms of man power and new regulations on individuals and businesses. Reagan dramatically increased spending even in departments like the Department of Energy which he had vowed to eliminate. Reagan extended our military reach into the rest of the world. Reagan, the hero of today's conservative, was in fact a big government, tax and spend President who put our country deeper into debt than it had ever been before. If he is the founder of the conservative movement we see today we must ask ourselves, what happened?
Of course it isn't just Reagan and Eisenhower, Nixon was a major proponent of expensive social programs, Barry Goldwater supported gay rights, and the list goes on and on. Conservatives today are, when compared to the conservatives of just a few years ago, radical extremists who have moved so far to the right in their actions and propaganda as to have turned the Republican Party into something that would be unrecognizable to Lincoln or Eisenhower or even Reagan.
Recently Rachel Maddow aired a segment looking at the work of a political scientist at the University of Georgia. Often times it is said that people on the right are moving further to the right and people on the left are moving further to the left. This is the easiest way to explain the political divide we find ourselves in today, but it simply isn't true. In fact Congressional Democrats have been inching towards the right, not the left, the divide comes from the fact that Congressional Republicans have been running full speed ahead toward the right creating the divide completely on their own.
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If current trends continue we will be seeing more discussions of banning contraceptives and passing laws to encourage discrimination against gays and lesbians. We will see a continuing economic divide exacerbated by the weakening or elimination of the social safety net. We will see growing poverty while those at the top, those who I feel are responsible for pushing our nation so far towards the radical right, see their incomes continue to climb while their tax rates drop. We are seeing the takeover of our nation by a wealthy class who is using propaganda and class warfare to turn our nation into a banana republic where the rich prosper and the poor will work for anything and in any condition just to keep from starving. The leaders of the right are using social issues and economic lies to coerce us into accepting them as our rulers so that they can rig the system to work for them, and only them. They are a threat to our freedom and our democracy as they try to restrict voters rights and limit political speech to only those with pockets deep enough to drown out everyone who disagrees with them. I do not want to see the right go away, we need their ideas in the competitive marketplace that is US politics, but at the moment they seem, especially in many states, to be trying to form political monopolies and we must work to stop this.
I will freely admit to having many problems with some of Reagan's policies and tactics, but I wish we could return to the days when his actions actually represented the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Today Reagan is simply the most revered god in the right's pantheon of deities and they are making up the mythology about him, and themselves, as they go along.
