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I Like Ike
I like him quite a bit.
Does someone who likes Ike have a place in the American Republican Party today?
Published in General
Nice point Claire. But on other side to that where are the Harry S Truman’s to be found in the modern Democratic party. I really liked him.
” . . . to strive for less . . . inflict grievous hurt . . .”
Wise and troubling words. Prescient, perhaps.
There should be a place for a guy like him. Possibly the most competent administrator that the US has had as President.
His farewell address is a brilliant opus to the doctine of balance in public policy, a nice descendant to an earlier generation’s “Prudence”. It’s a pity that it’s remembered only for the “military-industrial complex” line, and more the pity because he equally warned of public policy becoming captive to a scientific-technological elite. He saw both as undermining the tools of self-government within the citizenry. Sign him up for the Tea Party!
He gets too much of a bad rap for making peace with the New Deal. Given public opinion at the time, I’m not sure that any rollback could actually have been achieved. Some context to ponder here is that he balanced the budget 3 times in his 8 years, something achieved only 5 times since. Again, sounds like something we can get on board with as conservatives.
The other factor that needs consideration is that the conservative movement was still really in gestation through his term as President. Maybe there would have been more conservative options at the time, but it’s an open question at best whether they would have achieved the understated but effective performance that Ike did.
Why not? What should the problem be?
Aside from that, a few notes: Only in America could a man who’d sent millions to kill millions talk about world peace & that sort of thing–making the world a paradise. Maybe that’s connected to the fact that latter-day Americans hear their arms are supposed to build nations & solve humanitarian crises, not unleash hell.
Also, are Americans today any way connected to or spiritually influenced by the military class? Whatever is otherwise the influence of the military-industrial complex…
As for his moral talk on fiscal conservatism, that’s just undemocratic. That’s part of the talk that got Messers. Romney & Ryan to lose recently.
Hey! You sound like someone else who likes Eisenhower!
So it sounds as if once again we’re trying to determine what conservatives believe. Because it is hard to wrap my mind around the idea that Ike represented some species of commie degeneracy. Doesn’t seem common-sensical.
What I found striking about re-watching that is how much what he says was prescient in a manner that conservatives today are talking about. He warns about how “public policy could be captive of a scientific, technological elite” and that statesmen are needed to redirect that. That is the argument conservatives make on a number of matters that always engender the “anti-science” trope.
“A government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” That basically sums up our university system.
The balance concept is basically what conservatives are talking about. Ok, so some people want to abolish the safety net. But the majority of us just want it limited in a manner that actually works and doesn’t undermine the values that are needed to avoid falling into the safety net in the first place. That’s all about balance.
The more you listen to the mid-century Republicans, the more you realize how the current party is really very close to that. Remember, the welfare did not exist in its current form when Eisenhower gave his farewell address. To assume he would have supported the size the welfare state has grown is contrary to the message in his farewell address.
Here is another one. I am sure most of you have heard this speech. But listen again just in case. It’s eerie how prescient he is. This second speech is really just the progression in time from the Eisenhower address.
I can only imagine the fury over at The Weekly Standard and Murdoch Central over Suez if they had been around in 1956 (Eisenhower didn’t “stand with Israel!!”).
Kevin D Williamson had a very good cover article on Ike about two years ago in National Review if anyone wants to check it out. John Derbyshire is also of the opinion that Ike was the greatest post-WWII President.
The New Deal was inevitable. Conservatives who do not face that do not know politics & cannot read history. Look at Britain & learn from Churchill: He was promptly sent home in favor of people who thought nationalization was the future. America had it better than Britain, to a large extent because the British had it worse than the Americans. Churchill said that no one would be surprised at the rise of Labour if they knew what the people in Britain had had to endure. He never blamed them. I never read that Eisenhower blamed America for the New Deal either. These policies are crippling in certain ways, but the truth is that tory politics really does mean that people who think themselves serious do not take seriously how silly ideas like nationalization take on a moral force. Tories may end up getting worse than they deserved–but maybe that’s what they deserve.
Ike was damned near providential. Not a politician by reputation or profession, the most impressive man in the world, a conquering general, & a reasonable man in an age where reason was dying.
Ike was a supremely confident foreign policy president with a clear vision and an efficiently crafted persona (Evan Thomas’ book Ike’s Bluff is excellent). His intervention in Little Rock was righteous. However, his domestic policy was passive and he offered no competing vision to the FDR legacy. “Social issues” did not really exist in his time and the bankrupcy of the welfare state was a distant fear trumpeted only by those considered right-wing kooks. The clear threat at that time was the USSR and he handled that well. I like Ike as a model of a foreign policy president but not otherwise.
I partly disagree with this. I don’t fault him for not putting forth an alternative vision. In Ike’s time, the problems of the welfare state were only just becoming an issue. If all we had today was the welfare state of 1960, we would be in great shape. Spending 8 years keeping the status quo of 1952 is actually pretty good. The New Deal as it existed in 1952 was not that bad. The reason we hate it now is because in retrospect, we see it as the foundation for the insane policies of the 1960s and 1970s. It was starting with JFK’s New Frontier – expansion of agricultural subsidies, urban housing funds, direct aid to economically distressed areas – where this starting becoming clear.
Ike did what a conservative should have done in the time he existed.
It was the 1960s and 1970s that destroyed the balance that had worked so well. It took 30 years after that to start seeing the generational impact of such an awful period of legislation.
That’s not Ike’s fault.
Ike was, much more than others, a product and reflection of his time – but that time was different from today. Ike not only commanded men during war; the American culture during his presidency was largely stocked and dominated by the same soldiers he had commanded a decade earlier. There were a number of cultural pillars that Ike could take for granted then that we can’t take for granted now – pillars that were essentially conservative. By that I mean the chief conservative perspective; i.e., that government is only intended to supplement and assist private life, not to dominate and subjugate it. No one would listen to Eisenhower and believe that he personally felt compelled to dictate to Americans how to live – unlike our current president.
Times changed, however. The willingness to allow government more power only came because citizens trusted leaders like Ike to use the power prudently. But instead, the political elites following Ike weren’t so prudent. Vietnam. Watergate. Carter. America came to regret handing over power to Washington. Conservatism became prominent because it represented a refusal to hand over any more power, and to start taking it back. (Liberals, naturally, represented the never-satisfied appetite for government to acquire more and more power.)
You can’t look at Eisenhower in a vacuum. Eisenhower was president before the government was overrun with power-sucking liberals and a vast bureaucratic Fourth Estate. Conservatism wants to remind America that the ambitious desire to do great things gets subverted to fascism when power is handed over indiscriminately. The fifty+ years after Eisenhower taught us some hard-learned lessons.
Maddow just wants to go back to ambitious dreams and blind trust in government. She unintentionally shows that she has learned nothing from history.
Fair points and well-stated.
My criticism has to do with the lack of some articulated vision other than accommodation and limitation. Ike and Nixon both let Democrats define the issue of the role of government. Without some philosophical alternative, there is nothing to build on.
I grant that the political landscape would not have tolerated a proposed serious repeal of the New Deal in its entirety but a critique of its problematic nature from a vastly respected and popular president might have moved the ball.
That’s probably right.
Ike’s speech is also noteworthy because unlike every speech from the current POTUS:
1) no partisan snark
2) thoughtful and principled
3) no spin or utter BS
4) no self-congratulatory references
5) mature, moral and genuinely patriotic
6) forward-looking (but not to the next election)
The contrast between Ike ands the utterly unprincipled, shallow twit who holds the office now is stunning.
I think this is simply a liberal narrative that tries to make today’s conservatives seem “extreme”, because they go so much further than Republicans from the past. Does any thinking person actually believe that Rachel Maddow is in total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform?
Liberated Europe, baby face, grandfatherly, played golf. What’s not to like?
I would think this is a great occasion not to treat the sitting president like a devilish version of some Chaplin character. Whoever answers to a display of one man’s virtues by turning that into a weapon to discredit another is facing serious trouble…
Eisenhower was no longer a partisan fighter. Washington’s Farewell Address is also non-partisan. It is over for them as politicians. They can afford to rise above partisan fights. So it’s also unfair to make the comparison-
Eisenhower was a unique man for a unique time. Here’s a military man who was never in combat but learned to navigate the political waters by managing some of the greatest outsized egos known to man.
Having served as an aide to “Sarah*”, that is Douglas MacArthur, Ike went on to juggle the likes of Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle and Montgomery. No mean feat. And he still managed to invade a continent and win a war.
National Review called it “the only good conservative is a dead conservative” philosophy. Goldwater, incredibly, is given the same treatment (“why can’t today’s conservatives be principled and reasonable like Barry?”). Eventually even George W Bush will outlive his usefulness as a hate figure and he will get the same treatment.
I liked the part where Ike warned of the scientific elite and government policy entanglement – man made global warming, war on coal, keystone anybody?
I liked the part about stealing from our posterity. But, many say that and most don’t do jack squat about it.
A minor, flippant take-away from the video – Ike’s voice reminds me of Burl Ives.
On a more serious note – I think wisdom, earned through experience, may be the key to what make Ike seem a cut above. I think great leaders have a grounded, realistic view of the world, while perhaps still holding on to faith and hope for something better. So many folks alive today, in the political realm and elsewhere, have lived a soft, academic life, and thus seem to lack wisdom.
An adult in the White House! Those were the days. I was impressed with the authority with which President Eisenhower spoke from the Oval Office.
So how conservative was Ike? In the context of his times, very conservative. The conservative movement was practically nonexistent at the time and there was no effective counter-force to the New Deal mentality still largely in effect.
Now let’s take him out of context see how he is by today’s standards. While not as conservative as Ted Cruz, he’s still no liberal. Ike was inspired to run for the presidency because he felt that the government had gotten too big and people were getting too dependent on it.
Have we had a nominee, since Reagan, that thought the government was too big? (Some of them felt the deficit was too big, but that’s a different thing.)
I like Ike too.
Is there a place for an Ike in the GOP today? Yes, of course.
At his core, Ike was a highly effective leader and administrator, and one of things he took on was reorganizing the administrative state that had erupted out of the New Deal. Today we have a government with a bloated and increasingly ineffective bureaucracy. Ike knew how to get things done in whatever environment he found himself and he would conduct himself as the adult in the room. Goodness knows we could use an Ike today.
The real issue is whether his “liberal Republicanism” of the 1950s would float with the modern, conservative-leaning GOP of today. But would an Ike of 2015 have the same approach to domestic politics that the 1955 Ike had? After 20 years of FDR and Truman, the New Deal was not only popular but it was popular because it seemed to work. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s saw that same regime crash and burn and the GOP is a much more skeptical and conservative party as a result. I think a modern Ike would be similarly influenced.
Well, that’s because Maddow is either lying or never read the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform, or both. It opened with:
Here’s more
Somehow I doubt that Maddow would be in support of all this.
It is true that the 1956 Republican platform was pro-union. We’ve learned a lot about the negative effects of unionism since the 1950s.
It is interesting that the 1956 Republican platform supported an Equal Rights Amendment for women and an equal pay act. I suspect that this was because we had not yet learned, in the 1960s, how the Leftists could twist such provisions to require reverse-discrimination and quotas.
Eisenhower enacted Operation Wetback to remove illegal aliens from the United States. That makes him all right in my book.
Claire,
All Nations Under Gd:
1) Peace with Justice
2) Unswerving in Devotion to Principle
3) Confident but Humble with Power
4) Diligent in Pursuit a Nations Great Goals
Ike warns against rule by a military industrial complex and by a technocratic elite. The reality of the moment is that we are threatened by a medical industrial complex, an educational industrial complex, and a media industrial complex. The non-technical politically correct nihilistic elite is already in control. Eight years of Obama is evidence of that.
Numbers 1 & 2 are non-existent with the Obama administration. The Obama administration is living up to numbers 3 & 4 only if you consider self destruction the same as being humble and blind obsession the same as diligence.
Regards,
Jim
I’ve told this story before on Ricochet, but I am now old, so I am expected to repeat myself.
My father was wounded in WWII in Europe (October 1944). His wound (to his right shoulder and upper right arm) required multiple surgeries at Madigan Hospital in Fort Lewis. Sometime in 1946, dad was recuperating from yet another surgery when General Eisenhower strode into his ward.
He went from man to man, personally thanking each for his contribution and sacrifice. Dad said, “he looked me in the eye, and thanked me–and he meant it.”
In my house, we didn’t just like Ike. We loved him.
One more point. We talk about what kind of experience that helps prepare a person to serve as president. How about balancing the needs and desires of politicians ranging from FDR to Churchill to de Gaulle? How about supervising men like Montgomery and Patton? How about successfully overseeing the largest military operation in the history of the world (which included commanding forces from the USA, Great Britain, Canada, France, Poland, and many other), making it work successfully? How about being ready, in the event of failure, to accept both blame and responsibility for the failure–but always sharing the glory of victory? Plus heading NATO and serving as a university president.
President “I’m not responsible for anything” Obama could learn a bit from Ike. Sadly, he seems impervious to learning from those who preceded (and surpassed) him.
Oh, yeah, who was it that sent the 101st Airborne to secure the safety of black kids trying to go to previously segregated schools?
No one, on either side of the aisle, brings the kind of gravitas, experience, and sheer moral power that Ike did.
He sent millions to free hundreds of millions. The killing was the only means left to do it after peaceful idiots let the enslavement happen. Go visit the camps Eisenhower’s troops found and describe any other way other than force to stop the murder.
Americans used to understand that. A pity they need to be retaught every three generations.
I cannot see how you’d be in a position to tell me what happened in Europe.
You do not seem to see my point. I’ll help: Nobody who has seen hell could talk about world peace, except in America.
Maybe the fact that you do not see my point should point out to you that there is something about facing ugly truths that’s part of the problem. I think Americans created this problem. It’s spreading. When the man whose entire glory depends on the worst slaughter in world history talks up world peace, are you surprised people need to be told there may be trouble coming their way? He did not do the killing himself–Churchill did that, too–but he ordered it & knew it. If he did not see fit to remind people in his Farewell Address that there is no world peace, just preparations for the next war, who is going to do it?