Neo-liberalism--Rage of the Unempowered

During the 1952 Presidential campaign, columnist Joseph Alsop made an interesting and thought provoking observation. He wrote in a private letter that the campaign had convinced him that Adlai Stevenson (Democrat) was more qualified to be President than Eisenhower. But!
“I find myself constantly blackmailed,” Alsop continued, “by the virtual certainty that we shall have a first-class fascist party in the United States if the Republicans don’t win. The real need for change in this country arises, not from the decay of the Democrats [after twenty uninterrupted years in power] but from the need to give the Republicans the sobering experience of responsibility.” (Halberstam, “The Fifties”, pp 235-236)
He was talking about the rage of those who felt they were unempowered. These were the isolationists, small government people, classic Nineteenth Century liberals who felt run over by events (the Depression, World War II, the new Cold War)—and by the ever bigger government response to these events: The New Deal, the vast new defense establishment.
They wanted their voice back—a sense they had something to say about our national destiny, a sense they had not enjoyed since the first two years of the Hoover administration (1929-30). Their deepest desire was to return to the days of Coolidge or even Grover Cleveland.
It was essentially a “Back to the ‘20’s” movement. Let’s pretend Hitler and Pearl Harbor never happened—that the stock market never crashed, that there never was a day when 25% of Americans were out of work and the GNP never fell 50% in four years.
(It’s first worth noting that, in the 1920s , the Ku Klux Klan was truly powerful—not just in the South but as far north as Indiana and Michigan, with a large membership. About ten years ago, a list of KKK members was found in an attic in the town where Gerber Baby Food is made.
(Included in the list was most of the law enforcement personnel in Western Michigan. It took Roosevelt’s New Deal to take the edge off the pain of the Depression [which began years before 1929 in rural areas] and take the wind out of the sails of angry radicals.
(Had Roosevelt and the New Deal not come along, I am convinced that our political sympathies—at least in Europe—would very likely have been with the Axis. These same people were still unhappy in 1952, and they were increasingly gathered under the “big Republican tent”.)
The Republican Party has always been double minded throughout its history. Industrialists and bankers, Abolitionists, radical racists and Midwestern conservatives [who hated eastern bankers and industrialists] united to create the Party in the 1850s.
That double mindedness was never more apparent than it was in the 1952 convention. On the one side stood the easterners—Eisenhower, the Rockefellers, Dewey, representing everything from Wall Street to the most progressive elements in the Republican Party.
On the other side stood the conservative Midwesterners—represented by MacArthur, Taft, Dirksen, representing everything from denial that the Twentieth Century had ever occurred to a rigid kind of religiosity mixed with horror at the spectre of a government able to function well enough to deal with national and world issues.
Leaving the conservatives to sputter in outrage, the progressive wing of the Republican Party won the nomination and got the “sobering experience of responsibility”. To conservative horror, Eisenhower, the elected Republican, allowed most of the New Deal legislation to stand.
Radical conservatism would be out of power for nearly 30 more years. It would take the Supreme Court to put them back in control of the nation. More tomorrow.