Ike was a disaster for one basic reason: He wasn’t a Conservative. He really wasn’t a Republican, either. His father was a Socialist activist, Ike was raised a left-winger and he never left those roots behind. The Democrats (Truman, specifically) wanted him as their nominee for President.
The RINO Establishment of the time, whom had run nothing but “Progressives” since 1928, to disastrous effect beginning with Hoover (an ex-Wilsonian Progressive Democrat) wanted to stop the Conservative Sen. Robert Taft, and Ike as the “Moderate” alternative fit the bill (and in the process stopped the Conservative ticket of Taft and Gen. Douglas MacArthur).
Ike couldn’t have done more damage if he had served as a Democrat, and probably given the GOP a fighting chance to not have ended up as a permanent minority party for the better part of 6 decades.
Disagree w/your timeline.
Our sole principled conservative party was the Southern Agrarian Rural Democrats of Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun, Randolph; among others, which being fatally tarred w/slavery, drove it out of existence.
W/the victory of the North, the GOP which represented the Mercantile and later the Industrial class, became ascendant following the Civil War, until Hoover. The GOP has always been progressive soft left and destructive of the primacy of States Rights, the original intent and vision of our Founders. The GOP was the instrument of centralized power in DC from the first day of its existence in 1856 as it goes hand in hand w/its label as the party of big business aka crony capitalism.
Ike couldn’t have done more damage if he had served as a Democrat, and probably given the GOP a fighting chance to not have ended up as a permanent minority party for the better part of 6 decades.
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I would have laid that at the feet of Nixon who made mortal enemies on the left while being himself something of a leftist.