NM SYMPOSIUM: The problem with modern-day conservatism is that the realists have been vanquished by the ideologists, with dire results for the conservative movement and the Republican Party that is now wholly identified with the movement.  more

The real lesson of the 1994 Newt Gingrich engineered Republican resurgence is that moderates are a necessary part of a conservative-led Republican coalition. The party cannot succeed by writing off any region or group of Americans.  more

Few people nowadays can remember Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Nixon’s 1960 Republican running-mate. Lodge has been forgotten because the tradition of New England Republicanism that he represented is extinct.   more

When I heard Rush Limbaugh’s statement that moderates cannot be brave or great, it so happened that I had on my desk several books about moderate Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It takes considerable gall for Limbaugh, who found reasons not to volunteer for the Vietnam War, to deny the greatness of General Eisenhower.  more

I interviewed McNamara in July 2001 at his office in Washington, DC. He was much the same as he later appeared in the 2003 documentary “Fog of War”; he may even have been wearing the same tie. In the course of our interview, McNamara said something which he subsequently refused to allow me to publish in the book that I was writing, in part, about his colleague McGeorge Bundy.  more

“The real divisions today in the Republican Party,” according to Jim Leach, “are not between liberals, moderates and conservatives; they are between pragmatists and ideologues.”  Leach – now President Obama’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, made that comment in the 1980s when he was a Republican Congressman from Iowa, but it   more

Every reliable survey reveals a bell curve distribution of American political opinion. A solid majority of Americans, usually some 70 to 80 percent of the electorate, holds basically moderate views, center-left on social issues and center-right on economic issues. And yet, oddly, the overwhelming majority of elected officials represent the most extreme 10 percent on either side   more

How they cursed Arlen Specter! By switching parties, they claimed, he had put his own political fortunes ahead of loyalty and principle. He was “Benedict Arlen,” “Specter the Defector.” It all sounds quite familiar, but the year was 1965 and the Specter-cursers were Democrats enraged that he had abandoned them to run on the Republican ticket in the   more

Most of the high-flying, college-bound high school seniors I talk to want to be Senators someday. An aura of Roman grandeur and world-spanning ambition still clings to the upper chamber of Congress, while the House is seen as a trough where undistinguished representatives root through the muddy business of politics and mundane government operations. And yet it   more

Conservatives who object to moderate Republican officeholders have over the years asked themselves how far they are prepared to go to rid themselves of their intraparty rivals. In the case of California’s senator Thomas Kuchel, the answer was: very far indeed.
Kuchel (pronounced “kee-kul”) was among the last of the California progressives, politicians who had been decisively   more

If Dwight Eisenhower had made any real effort to build a political base within the GOP, his moderate brand of Republicanism – often termed “modern Republicanism” – might have continued to dominate the party after he left office, and Arthur Larson would have been remembered as its leading theoretician.  Instead, the GOP’s philosophy came to   more

The Republican Party was born fighting – with itself. From its inception, the party has been wracked by factional disputes.  The issues contested have included post-Civil War Reconstruction (with the Radical Republicans pushing for a more aggressive approach), the spoils system (pitting Stalwarts against Half-Breeds), Progressive reform, isolationism vs. internationalism, and so on through to the   more

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller remains the best-known moderate Republican of recent times, to the extent that even today anyone who diverges from the conservative line of the GOP may be referred to as a “Rockefeller Republican.” As the grandson of Senate Republican chieftain Nelson Aldrich and Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, he was advantageously placed for   more

For the past several decades, moderates have believed that their position in the Republican cosmos is, at best, that of a small and wary moon orbiting a raging conservative sun. It was not ever thus. In the mid-1950s, one prominent Republican, Paul G. Hoffman, rejoiced that moderates had the upper hand in the party and urged that   more

In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his conservative aide Patrick Buchanan believed they had discovered a winning Republican formula. A recent book, The Real Majority by Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg, had argued that the prototypical American voter was a forty-seven-year-old machinist’s wife from Dayton, Ohio. The authors believed that Democrats could sway this   more

Many Republicans like to believe that the torch of conservatism has been passed along undimmed through the decades, and that those who now guard the sacred flame can trace their conservative lineage directly to past giants like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Robert Taft. In fact, the meaning of conservatism has changed drastically with each handoff. The   more

Moderate Republicanism diminished as a national political force when its principal media organ, the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, folded in 1966.  While the Herald Tribune is remembered as a “newspaperman’s newspaper,” with sparkling contributions from writers like Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, and Tom Wolfe, it also served as the house organ of Eastern moderate   more

Historically, moderate Republicanism was most strongly associated with the East Coast and regions settled by New Englanders such as the upper Midwest, the Northwest, and California.  There were many exceptions to this rule, however, and one of the most notable Congressional moderates in the ‘50s and ‘60s was Thomas B. Curtis, a Missourian who considered   more

Most people remember Thomas Dewey, if at all, as the Republican candidate who lost the seemingly secure 1948 presidential election, the fall guy to a grinning Harry Truman holding up the botched Chicago Tribune headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  But Dewey had an active career before and after his stunning defeat, and did more than anyone   more

Secretary of War under William Howard Taft and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover, Henry Stimson was the prophet of the American Century and the paragon of pragmatic yet idealistic Republican statesmanship.  He was a role model and mentor to two generations of Cold Warriors inspired by his example of service   more