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To: William McKinley
I imagine he would be called a neocon, which begs the question- how 'new' can this conservatism be if it has been around for over 100 years?

Well, it poked its head up about a hundred years ago, but then went away not long after TR finished his presidency, and didn't really resurface until after WWII.

19 posted on 05/10/2003 8:28:59 AM PDT by inquest
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To: inquest
Not buying it.

Roosevelt was a radical departure from many of the policies of McKinley, not a continuation.

22 posted on 05/10/2003 8:37:57 AM PDT by William McKinley
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To: inquest
By the way, I think it is misleading to say that a brand of conservatism that rejected isolationsim merely 'poked its head' up 100 years ago. That makes it sound like it was a passing fancy, around only for a few short years. Instead, it was the rule, not the exception, from Harrison to McKinley to Taft (with Roosevelt sharing the international aspirations but little of the rest of the belief system). In many ways it started even earlier, with the Presidency of Chester Arthur, who negotiated freer trade deals with Mexico, Spain and the British West Indies, and who started our development of a powerful, more modern, navy. It was Arthur's Secretary of State who really started the US down the road towards the construction of the Panama Canal.

And as my inclusion of Taft above indicates, it did not end with Roosevelt. It continued onward, starting to wane with Calvin Coolidge, who kept the economic internationalism of his Republican predecessors, but started moving the party towards the anti-war position that would be prevalent for a few decades (until being shattered by the reality of the Axis), starting with the naive the 1928 Kellog-Briand Pact.

The internationalist Republican, religious and socially conservative, supportive of business-- this is what today gets labelled by paleoconservatives and liberal commentators. Yet this is not new, as the prefix neo implies. It was the norm for nearly 50 years (if not more) within the Republican party.

32 posted on 05/10/2003 9:57:05 AM PDT by William McKinley
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