Conservative policies of DEM presidents and liberal policies of REP presidents

[buritobr]

Of course, the "liberal Eisenhower" and the "conservative Kennedy" are myths, as we discussed in other thread. But we can make some cherry picking to create these myths because there were some conservative policies of democratic presidents and liberal policies of republican presidents.

Some examples:

FD Roosevelt: didn't try to end racial segregation, stoped the countercyclical policies in 1937, causing the second depression

Truman: created the Truman Doctrine, starting the Cold War, started the US involvement in the Korea War

Eisenhower: kept the 90% top income tax rate, used federal troops against segregation in Arkansas, didn't side with UK, France and Israel in the Suez Crisis, had a good relation with Nikita Khrushchev

Kennedy: traveled to Berlin after the building of the wall and gave a strong anticommunist speech, took a very hard line position in the Cuban missiles crises, cut taxes

LB Johnson: started the US involvement in the Vietnam War, supported the military coup in Brazil

Nixon: started the affirmative action, created environmental regulation for automobiles, said "we are all keynesians", brough back the troops from Vietnam, started the SALT with the USSR, signed the agreement with China


Ford: did not oppose Roe vs. Wade, signed the education for handicapped children act, kept the SALT, entered into the Helsinki Accords

Carter: deregulated the airline and rail industries, nominated Paul Volcker for the FED, supported the fundamentalist muslim terrorists in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion

Reagan: subsided the farmers, used state intervention in order to help the American automobile manufacturers in the competition against the Japanese ones

GHW Bush: raised the taxes, signed the immigration act, was the least pro-Israel US president

Bill Clinton: invited the authors of "reinventing government" to be his advisors, said that "big government is over", deregulated the banks

GW Bush: reacted to the 2001 crisis in a keynesian way, increased the spending in welfare programs

Obama: reduced the size of the government after the increase in 2009, was more tolerant to the Honduras 2009 coup than European conservative leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy, allowed espionage against left-wing governments in Latin America

Trump: before the primaries, he was considered to be more left-wing than na average republican, but not now


Do you agree with this list? Do you know some more items to add?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Truman’s involvement overseas was considered liberal at the time. As late as 1960 there were the antecedents of what we call “movement conservatives” that disliked Ike and Nixon’s internationalism. The 1952 nomination was considered a compromise, where liberals claimed foreign policy while conservatives claimed domestic policy.

[Dr. MB]

FDR for example, a large part of his coalition was made up of Southern Democrats who would abandon him the second he tried to do anything about segregation.

[buritobr]

Was the anti-soviet Truman Doctrine considered liberal?

[RINO Tom]

FDR - I don't really consider having lukewarm views on civil rights - at that time - to be incompatible with the spirit of American liberalism at all, but we can agree to disagree?

Truman - See Cathcon's post ... the Old Right was very associated with an "America first" isolationism, and it wasn't really until Nixon and Reagan that this "American exceptionalism" idea stopped advocating not worrying about other countries' affairs and started to get the idea that our exceptionalism required us to spread our ideals through military might.

Ike - Just as Obama wasn't "conservative" due to the actions of his Congress, we can't exactly call Ike "liberal" for keeping tax rates that he inherited with a Democratic Congress in place ... he also lowered those rates eventually.  Again, I reject your categorization of civil rights, as Eisenhower (by all accounts, a moderate conservative) sent federal troops to integrate a state run by an openly socialist segregationist governor.

JFK - Taxes, sure, but they were pretty damn high ... just as I don't think it's fair to call early Republicans' support of infrastructure necessarily "liberal" (everyone supports infrastructure when, well, there hardly is any ... not really ideologically analagous with modern liberals' ideas on infrastructure, not to mention it was criticized as built for the wealthy and business elite), I am not sure this is THAT "conservative."  However, it at least makes him pretty moderate.  There was somewhat of an "anti-Communist consensus" around then, no?  Besides the far left of the Democratic Party, most people were pretty anti-communist, but I agree that JFK "ran to the right" on the issue.

LBJ - Again to Cathcon's post, LBJ certainly would not have thought of himself as engaging in a "conservative" mission abroad ... far from it.

Nixon - Nixon is hard to pin down ... I think it's safe to say the man believed very few policy positions with that much conviction, LOL.

Ford - Though it seems rabid pro-choice folks were always Democrats and rabid pro-life folks were usually Republicans, it wasn't nearly as partisan.  I think it should be easy for all of us to imagine some very convincing "liberal" arguments for being pro-life and "conservative" ones for being pro-choice.

Carter: Not much to add

Reagan - Not as "conservative" as he is popularized, IMO ... he gave a lot of credibility to the Religious Right in the GOP, and that carries more weight than his policy enactment (perhaps rightfully so).

Bush 41 - Definitely agree on the immigration thing ... even going back to the 1700s, American conservatism has relied on somewhat strict immigration policy, and both Bushes didn't seem to buy into that.  However, there was certainly a time when raising taxes to cover a defecit was, by definition, "fiscally conservative."

Bill Clinton - I don't think it can be discounted that he had a very hungry GOP Congress in front of him, but Clinton was the Democratic Nixon when it came to policy.

Bush 43 - Similarly to Reagan, I think Bush is remembered as "so conservative" because he empowered conservative groups, not because everything he did was so right-wing.

Obama - Not much to add ... might be too early to judge?

Trump - Way too early to judge, but he certainly seems to have an odd combination of love for business/zero need to apologize for wealth and financial success mixed with a bit of an anti-intellectual elite populism.

I don't like to nitpick your list like that, because you right away identified all of these people as liberals who might have DONE a few conservative THINGS (and vice versa), and most of what you said is true from our modern perspective.  However, things change, and I don't think a Northern Republican from New England in the 1930s who opposed the New Deal but supported civil rights legislation (that, relevantly, did not affect THEIR states) looked at someone like Theodore Bilbo (D-LA) - a borderline socialist on class issues and an ardent segregationist - and thought, "I'm more conservative than him on everything but civil rights."

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Was the anti-soviet Truman Doctrine considered liberal?

It was the liberal response to communism. There were those to Truman’s left, such as Wallace, that would have preferred friendship with the Soviet Union, of course. Nevertheless, if you were to break up Truman’s presidency into a dichotomy, of sorts, Republicans and conservatives would still have been more anti-intervention than Truman. Hoover’s stance on the Marshall Plan and the Cold War is a good example of what a post-1945 conservative foreign policy might have looked like, perhaps pioneered by Bricker or Taft. Dewey, Eisenhower, and Lodhe were all in 1952 considered as relatively Liberal internationalists among Republicans. By the sixties, this was hanging; Kennedy and Johnson both felt pressure from the right to fight communism across the globe, and it helps to communicate the extent to which conservative isolationism was no longer tenable.

In contrast with Truman, Republican anti-communism in the years 1945-1952 would have looked more like the McCarthy hearings (though hopefully less embarrassing) combined with the idea of building our strength at home. They likely would have still signed onto the covert actions pioneered by Dulles, et al. I assume they would likewise have invested in nuclear technology. The likelihood of a Marshall Plan and associated giveaways to countries such as Greece and Turkey is reduced. The exception to all this is perhaps MacArthur, who received the votes of isolationist Mid-Westerners in Republican primary contests, but whose own opinions I know very little about, and who oversaw the rather liberal postwar reconstruction of Japan.

I’m at work, so I’m not at liberty to go further in-depth.

[Bismarck]

I’m not a fan of FDR’s bad record on civil rights being an example of conservatism. Also besides Hoover, which republicans pursued pro cyclical economic policies?

[Orser67]

I personally disagree with most of the foreign policy actions pointed out; I don't think that anti-Communism or starting wars are necessarily conservative or liberal.

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I wouldn't place the blame for "starting the Cold War" on the Truman doctrine; I would argue that it was an inevitable conflict between ideological adversaries.

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Broadly speaking, he didn't try to roll back the New Deal, which you could call "not conservative." In civil rights, Eisenhower actually tried to not involve the federal government as much as possible, which is pretty conservative (not from the racist angle, but from the limited government angle).

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Nixon did do a lot of liberal things, though this was at least partly because of the period he happened to serve and the Democratic Congress. Also, I wouldn't give him too much credit for withdrawing from Vietnam; he dragged the war on a lot longer than he needed to just to save his own credibility.

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And more generally, he tried to keep federal spending down to flight inflation. His desire to kill inflation is a big part of why the U.S. doesn't have a national health insurance system.

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He also a law that granted amnesty to three million illegal immigrants.

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He also presided over welfare reform and the deregulation of communications, and signed the Defense of Marriage Act

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I assume you mean the 2007/2008 financial crisis? Also No Child Left Behind increased the federal role in education

[White Trash]

Trump backing out of the TPP