“that doesn’t fit the Beck Levin Rush and NRO screed seen here. GOP always good. Dems always bad”
A screed which is being spread to our (gullible) friends by the huckster D’Souza.
Everett Dirksen was definitely a moderate when he was Republican leader of the Senate, when he worked with LBJ to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Ol’ Ev didn’t claim to be a conservative, although he would occasionally throw that wing a bone, and he supported Goldwater’s run albeit without any enthusiasm.
The GOP had a powerful liberal wing that apparently none of our pop-history hucksters admit or remember- Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy, George Romney, Hugh Scott, Thomas Kuchel, Edward Brooke. Apparently they didn’t exist in the comic book history that is now popular.
“John Tower more than anyone changed all the Dixiecrat stuff”
Not Strom Thurmond? Of course Tower switched parties about a decade earlier.
I was a Harry Byrd Democrat in High School, College & Law School. I started working for Goldwater in December, 1960, but did not join the Republican Party until Strom Thurmond did also in 1964. Those who thin that the Republican Party was really Conservative, as a whole, before the shift got underway in 1964, are in a fantasy (both parties had conservative wings, to be sure, and they worked together in the Truman Second Term to block the “Liberal” agenda.