Commentary from WorldNetDaily
By Alan Keyes
Posted: February 12, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern
© 2010
In the days when my awareness of the U.S. political scene was just budding there were politicians in the Republican Party who openly identified themselves as liberals. For this sort of fact
Wikipedia is as reliable a witness as any other:
In the 1930s "Me-too-Republicans" described those who ran on a platform of agreeing with the Democratic Party, or proclaiming only minor or moderating differences. A prime example is presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, who did not oppose New Deal programs altogether, but merely campaigned on the promise that Republicans would run them more efficiently and less corruptly. …
From 1936 to 1976 the more centrist of the Republican Party frequently won the national nomination with candidates such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Indeed, other terms for liberal Republicans include Nixonian and Rockefeller Republican.
If this take on the GOP presidential candidates of the 20th century is accurate (and I think it is) it confirms the notion that, for all their posturing in opposition to the Democrats on particular issues, the controlling powers of the Republican Party have no quarrel in principle with the New Deal worldview. On grounds that are at once aesthetic, practical and self-interested, they decry the excessive Democratic tendency toward openly populist egalitarianism. Yet, impelled by a self-adulating sense of noblesse oblige, they tacitly concede that the Democrats' "liberal" agenda represents the higher ground of moral sophistication. What the liberal GOP elites reject is their frequent lack of sophistication in carrying out that agenda.
In this respect, I suspect that the preferred candidate of the GOP elites in the 2008 election was … Barack Obama. He had all the outward appearances of cool sophistication, purposefully controlled moral passion and seeming respect for the ironically unselfish elite ambition benevolently to secure a position of unchallenged control over every aspect of human life. He seemed so moderate.
This semblance of moderation has become the sine qua non of political virtue for the elitists who still so obligingly fight to maintain their (of course) well-intentioned dominance of the U.S. political system. But in his two successful campaigns for the presidency, Richard Nixon convincingly demonstrated the strategic power of mobilizing conservative grass-roots voters in support of candidates backed by the liberal GOP elites. Nixon paid a little lip service to the economic, moral and social concerns of people naturally sensitive to the Godless and dehumanizing assumptions of the liberal worldview. In addition he got help from the ugly spectacles
soul deadening collectivism, mass murder and violent expropriation associated with Communist regimes abroad. In his campaigns, the otherwise unelectable Republican rump of the liberal elite was able to leech off of the deep vein of conservative moral and social belief that too often remained indifferent to, and aloof from the gritty contests in the political arena.
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