Republican Redux
In 1947, the very unpopular President Harry Truman offered General Dwight Eisenhower the top spot on the Democratic ticket if General MacArthur had become the Republican nominee. Eisenhower refused it immediately. At the time, no one knew whether Eisenhower was a Democrat or Republican.
Truman beat the eventual Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in 1948 and went on to fire MacArthur in the Korean War for insubordination. After World War II under Turman, Eisenhower became Chief of Staff of the Army and the 1st Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (NATO). In 1952, he ran as a Republican and won the presidency.
Eisenhower had seen what happens when the U.S. retreats from the world stage. The rise of fascism in the 1920s was immensely helped by the isolationist sentiment that Americans had after the First World War. The Republicans captured the presidency in 1920 and both houses of Congress.
During that decade, the American government enacted high tariffs, low immigration, and an American First foreign policy. Supporting that point of view the Republican platform of 1920 contained these lines, “…for the lowering of American standards of morality and social relations with Mexicans, and for the bringing of American ideals of justice, national honor and political integrity into contempt and ridicule in Mexico.”
After a dozen years of Republican rule when we were at the nadir of the Great Depression, FranklIn Roosevelt was elected. The Republicans lost over a hundred seats in the House and 12 in the Senate in the 1932 election. The White House stayed in Democratic hands for 20 years until Eisenhower’s election in 1952.
Throughout the 1920s, Republicans cut defense spending to the bare bones. Even after the Democrats regained control of the levers of government, there was no money to do anything more than to save the American economy in the 1930s. As Japan and Germany rearmed and built mighty military machines, the U.S. remained isolationist as though the oceans would prevent us from foreign entanglements.
The German Bund movement had a rally on February 20,1939 at Madison Square Garden in New York, and 20,000 American Nazis attended. It ended in violence when protesters and Bund storm troopers fought a pitched battle. Throughout this period and right up to Pearl Harbor, Republicans in Congress were against arming Britain in their battle against Hitler.
During the war, there was still support for isolationism in the party. Though with millions of young Americans fighting overseas against fascism after being attacked by the Japanese and having war declared on America by the Germans and Italians, there was no choice but to pull together.
Between 1945 and Ike’s election, the strains of isolationism once again took root in the party. Ike had spent much of his life posted overseas first under MacArthur in the Philippines and then commanding allied forces in Germany. He knew that America could never build tall enough walls to keep the rest of the world out, especially after the nuclear age began and missiles and jets became tools of war.
His battle in 1952 was not so much against his eventual Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, but rather Republican Senator Taft and the predominant isolationist wing of his own party. Fearful and inward looking, it distrusted immigrants and anyone that was not of northern European descent. Purity of blood and what they saw as traditional American values was their theme.
The isolationist wing of the Republican party was broken by Eisenhower and buried by Reagan. America’s mighty economic power was predicated on our strong alliances and a peaceful democratic world. Both Democrats and Republicans knew from the 1950s through the Obama years that prosperity depended on open and free markets along with our military strength and alliances.
For more than 60 years, the Republicans believed in the addition of trading partners to the world’s economy. They further believed that there was not a finite economic amount to go around but an infinite one. They felt that when prosperity was measured, it was not by who had the most gold in their treasuries but by who had the better quality of life. Then everyone benefited.
Donald Trump and his theory is one of subtraction. Republicans need to get rid of every party member who isn’t completely loyal to the leader. The less people included in the country the better. Mexicans, Moslems, and Africans will taint the blood. As Trump has recently said “what kind of languages are they speaking?”
Strong is a very important word in today’s Republican party. Powerful is another. When you put them together you get the adjectives that describe Putin, Xi, and Kim followed by Orban. This is the Pantheon that Trump and his acolytes admire.
The Republican Party has become one that is inward looking and anti-everything that Eisenhower and then Reagan thought their party was. Both would have been drummed out of today’s party just like McCain, Romney, and Cheney. People can describe themselves as conservatives but not really be considered one by today’s Republicans.
I hope America beats this rogue strain of Republicanism. I am not so sure we will. And that may result in the end of American exceptionalism.
