Frank DiStefano: 'The Republican War Over a New Direction After FDR'

Source:Frank DeStefano talking about the Republican Party post-FDR.

"In this episode, we explain the war within the Republican Party after the New Deal between Robert Taft and his conservative faction and Tom Dewey and his establishment faction over the Republican Party’s Direction.

While Franklin Roosevelt remained president, the Republican Party had little luck at the polls. The candidates in those years, Alf Landon in 1936, Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Tom Dewey in 1944, were by modern standards quite moderate. Yet in each election the Republicans would rail against Roosevelt and his New Deal and promise, if they got the chance, to undo everything Roosevelt had done reversing his New Deal revolution. The American people soundly rejected them. 

Then in 1945, Roosevelt passed away and soon after the Second World War came to an end. For the first time since the 1930s, the Republican saw an opportunity back into the White House. Roosevelt had been unbeatable for the Republicans, but the new president, the far less popular Truman, was someone they thought that they could beat.

Over the next two elections the Republican Party broke out into an internal war between two factions with very different ideas about how to get back into power. The conservative faction, headed by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, son of former President Howard Taft, wanted to continue fighting against Roosevelt New Deal and promising to undo it. They believed the fight that had begun in the 1930s was not yet lost, and that America need the Republicans to prove a clear contrast with the Democratic Party agenda. 

Another faction, which came to be called the establishment, thought this was political suicide. They thought the Republicans had tried this strategy for election after election and gotten crushed. They believed the time had come to accept that America liked the New Deal and there is no undoing what Roosevelt had done. Republican could continuing fighting the advance of the New Deal agenda, could promise to administer the New Deal government better, and could offer alternative ways to achieve the same goals as Democrats. To even again promise to dismantle the institutions, programs, and agendas the Democrats had created however was now impossible.

This wasn’t a philosophical battle over ideas. It was a fight over tactics—how should the  Republicans sell their ideas now in his new post New Deal world?

The establishment won this internal fight. In 1948, they nominated Dewey who very nearly won using this new strategy of a positive campaign without a lot of specifics and without attacking the New Deal directly. In 1952, the Dewey’s establishment won the nomination battle with a new leader, hero of the Second World War Dwight Eisenhower. America liked Ike and for the first time in twenty years like the Republicans back into the White House.

The establishment believed they had been proved right and over the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency the establishment’s perspective became the dominant one within the Republican Party. Until a small band of dissidents began to form who thought the establishment had made a mistake. They called themselves the Conservative Movement." 

From Frank DeStefano

What Frank DiStefano seems to be talking about here is that the Republican Party post-FDR, the Eisenhower faction versus the Taft faction, followed by the Rockefeller faction versus the Goldwater faction in the 1960s, wasn't arguing or competing with each other over political philosophy as far as what the Republican Party should stand for going forward, but what they were really just debating each other over tactics. That every major Republican basically shared the same political and government philosophy, but differed on how best to sell that philosophy to American voters and how to defeat Democrats.

To know that Frank DiStefano is simply wrong here, all you have to do is look at Dwight Eisenhower's presidency in the 1950s and look at Richard Nixon's presidency in the 1i970s, at least as it related to economic philosophy, then look at the civil rights movement and agenda and the laws that came from that movement in the 1960s.

Dwight Eisenhower didn't run for President and govern as President in the 1950s, to reverse the New Deal. He didn't believe he had that votes to do that in Congress or the authority to repeal it by himself, and he didn't believe in that either. If he was a Robert Taft Conservative Republican as far as political philosophy, he would've ran for President in 1952 to repeal the New Deal and go back to the Calvin Coolidge philosophy of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and fiscal conservatism, of the 1920s. 

President Eisenhower simply wanted to hit pause on the New Deal and make those programs as fiscally sound as possible. He was also the first great civil rights President, at least post-Abraham Lincoln, by integrating schools in the South in the 1950s. 

The civil rights laws in the 1960s, don't pass without Republican votes both in the House and Senate. After 1960, Democrats controlled both Congress, with huge majorities both in the House and Senate and The White House for the rest of the 1960s, until Richard Nixon is elected President in 1968 and inaugurated in January, 1969.

If you are pretty familiar with Richard Nixon's presidency in the 1970s, besides Watergate, his secret, personal, national, security, unit, his resignation in 1974, thanks to Watergate and other criminal activities on his part, as well as his opening to Russia and China in 1972, and ending the Vietnam War, you know that President Nixon was a pretty Progressive President, at least as it related to economic policy and even foreign affairs. 

President Nixon introduced what he called The New Federalism. Again, not looking to reverse the New Deal or Great Society of the 1960s, but decentralized those programs and turn them over to the states to them. 

President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan of 1969, became Welfare To Work in 1996.

President Nixon's health care plan in 1974, became the Affordable Care Act of 2010.  

The Republican Party, at least until the Christian-Right and now Christian Nationalists took over the party 5-10 years ago, has always been a center-right party. They just have always have had two center-right establishment factions in it. 

The Conservative Republicans, or Constitutional Conservatives, Conservative Libertarians even, on the right of the party, and the Progressive Republicans on the left of the party, but people who are definitely to the right of the FDR/LBJ Progressive Democrats, have been for most of the history of the Republican Party, the two competing factions in it. And these two competing factions have been competing with each other, at least since the Progressive Era of 100 years ago.

You can also see this post on WordPress.