Cowards: What Politicians, Radicals, and the Media Refuse to Say Read online

  So, let’s take a giant step back, get out of the weeds of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and cable channels and Twitter attacks, and ask ourselves this simple but important question: How did we ever get to the point where the conservative/libertarian point of view does not even get a seat at the table?

  THE RINO–AN ANCIENT SPECIES

  It’s pretty easy to spot the people who don’t really fit into the Republican Party. A lot of times these are the same people who frequent the Sunday morning talk shows or are media darlings. I’m talking about people like Arlen Specter, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham. But these types of Republicans are nothing new.

  Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first RINOs (Republican in Name Only) in American history. Yes, I know, Roosevelt was brave and strong. He explored the world. He strung up rustlers in the Wild West. He wrote more history books than most people ever read. He edited a magazine. (Even if Newt Gingrich were around back then, Teddy Roosevelt would still have been the smartest guy in the room.)

  All of this made Roosevelt incredibly dangerous when he decided to get on board the Progressive train. And the longer he rode those rails, the more radical he got. His “Square Deal” was one thing. It started the ball rolling. It got the nose of big government under the Constitution’s tent by regulating business and the banks. But then Roosevelt’s progressivism got increasingly more toxic. After he left the White House, he unveiled something he called the “New Nationalism.”

  * * *

  They Really Said It

  You know, my hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt.

  —JOHN MCCAIN AT A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE IN OCTOBER 2008

  And for government to not leave guarantees that you don’t have the ability to change, no private corporation has the purchasing power or the ability to reshape the health system, and in this sense I guess I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. In fact, if I [was] going to characterize my—on health where I come from, I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and I believe government can lean in the regulatory leaning is okay.

  —NEWT GINGRICH

  * * *

  There’s a reason Barack Obama took time out in December 2011 from pretending he was FDR or JFK or Harry Truman or Lincoln (and from golf, too, come to think of it) to channel Roosevelt at Osawatomie, Kansas. Osawatomie is where, in 1910, Roosevelt gave a speech that would sound right at home in today’s Democratic Party. “We should permit [wealth] to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community,” Roosevelt told a crowd of thirty thousand listeners. “This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary. . . .”

  Two years later, Roosevelt doubled down, turning from rogue elephant to Bull Moose and running for president on his own Progressive Party ticket. The New York Times explained that Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive Party convention was at best a gathering of “a convention of fanatics.” How bad was Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign? It made people think that Woodrow Wilson was conservative. That’s bad, but what’s far worse is that Roosevelt is the president who some prominent modern-day Republicans, like John McCain and Newt Gingrich, still look up to.

  Roosevelt certainly wasn’t alone in being a progressive Republican; the GOP was infested with these guys. In 1912, Roosevelt’s Progressive running mate was California governor Hiram Johnson, a big-time Progressive who hated Japanese immigrants. You know who worshipped Johnson? Earl Warren—the same guy who, as the Republican governor of California during World War II, helped FDR ship the Japanese in his state to internment camps.

  * * *

  Sometimes the Truth Slips Out

  I am keenly aware that there are not a few men who claim to be leaders in the progressive movement who bear unpleasant resemblances to the lamented Robespierre and his fellow progressives of 1791 and ’92.

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  * * *

  Then there was Nebraska’s progressive senator George W. Norris, who served nine congressional terms (five in the House and four in the Senate) as a “Republican.” Norris was the very model of a RINO. Not only did he endorse FDR in 1932; in 1928 he had also endorsed Democrat Al Smith. Norris also sponsored FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Act (both alongside segregationist Mississippi anti-Semitic congressman John Rankin) and was very pro-Soviet (“Russia is more in accord with the United States . . . than most any other foreign nation”).

  * * *

  Bipartisan Progressives

  I guess it’s not really surprising that when Henry A. Wallace (another former progressive Republican) and his communist-controlled Progressive Party staged their national convention in 1948, they hung a huge portrait of the late former supposed Republican George Norris from the rafters.

  * * *

  Another big-time Republican progressive was Wisconsin’s Senator Robert La Follette Sr. “Fighting Bob” La Follette actually wanted to be the national Progressive standard-bearer in 1912, but two things stood in his way: Teddy Roosevelt, and a nervous breakdown he suffered while delivering a speech in Philadelphia that year. (It must have been really stressful keeping up the small government charade.) In 1924, La Follette finally embraced who he really was, leaving the GOP and running for president as a Progressive against Calvin Coolidge. His platform included nationalizing the country’s big industries, an idea that was so good it resulted in an endorsement from the Socialist Party of America.

  AN UGLY HISTORY

  In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington put on his spectacles and looked right into the future when he warned us about the dangers of political parties, or factions:

  The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

  It’s hard to find a better example of the “absolute power of the individual” or the “ruins of public liberty” than the way early progressives looked at the weakest members of our society. These people, many of whom are emulated and respected by modern-day politicians, weren’t just busy trying to control big business or monetary policy; they also wanted to control society—from cradle to grave. In some ways that’s just the natural evolution of their ideology; once somebody thinks they know best about a bunch of things like regulating the snot out of the economy, they think they know best about everything.

  “Everything,” in this case, included determining who was good enough to live, die, and breed.

  That was what the Progressive Era eugenics movement was all about. Crippled? No children for you. The wrong race? Ditto. Have special needs? You’re an embarrassment to society and you’ll get none of our attention or care. That’s right—the people who advertise themselves as the ones who care most about the “least of us” are actually the people who preferred that the least of us didn’t exist.

  One of the big players in the eugenics movement was a guy named Madison Grant. Since Grant was named after two presidents, he thought he was really great—and, more than that, he thought that you weren’t really great at all. In 1916 Grant wrote a huge bestseller titled The Passing of the Great Race. It contained gems like this:

  Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the
obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.

  As the percentage of incompetents increases, the burden of their support will become ever more onerous until, at no distant date, society will in self-defense put a stop to the supply of feebleminded and criminal children of weaklings.

  The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German in 1925, and guess who was a big fan? Yep, that’s right. “The book is my Bible,” Adolf Hitler wrote to Madison Grant.

  So, what’s this got to do with this chapter? Just this: Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt were great friends. And when The Passing of the Great Race came out, this is what Roosevelt wrote to Grant: “The book is a capital book: in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts that our people must need to realize. . . . It is the work of an American scholar and gentleman, and all Americans should be grateful to you for writing it.”

  Senator McCain, is your hero really “a guy named Teddy Roosevelt”?

  “The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

  —Madison Grant, writing in a book endorsed as “fearless” by Theodore Roosevelt

  DAMN HOOVER

  Back to the national picture. There were three Republican presidents of the 1920s: Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Harding and Silent Cal were true conservatives: they cut spending and taxes; they reduced the national debt; they vetoed bad legislation; their policies fostered growth and prosperity. They got it right.

  Herbert Hoover was something else entirely. In 1912, Hoover bolted the Republican Party to support Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party ticket. He served in Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration and oversaw the nation’s food supply. In 1918, he joined in Wilson’s call to elect a Democratic Congress. In 1920, Franklin Roosevelt (another Wilson appointee) even supported Hoover as the Democratic candidate for president—and angled to be his running mate.

  Because Hoover was a progressive, he reacted exactly how you’d expect when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Like most elected officials today, Hoover simply didn’t trust the free market to correct the situation. Instead, he waded into the Great Depression with his own version of TARP and stimulus plans.

  * * *

  Cal vs. Herb

  It’s not all that surprising that Hoover looked to the government after the ’29 crash. After all, this is the guy about whom Calvin Coolidge said “for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice—all of it bad.”

  * * *

  It was Hoover’s Republican big government response that set the stage for FDR’s even-bigger-government New Deal. Hoover’s programs cost so much that, in 1932, presidential hopeful FDR blasted Hoover for “presiding over the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” He charged the Hoover administration with “fostering regimentation without stint or limit.” Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, FDR’s running mate that year, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.”

  “We might have done nothing,” Hoover said, defending his big-government, big-spending, little-results efforts. “That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. . . . No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.”

  * * *

  Regulation! Taxes! Stimulus! Infrastructure! Vote Hoover!

  [B]efore a year [of the Depression] would pass, Hoover had done damage . . . on three fronts: by intervening in business, by signing a destruction tariff, and by assailing the stock markets. . . . Hoover proceeded undaunted. He ordered governors to increase their public spending when possible. He also pushed for, and got, Congress to endorse large public spending projects: hospitals, bridges. . . . By April 1930 the secretary of commerce would be able to announce that public works spending was at its highest level in five years.

  —AMITY SHLAES IN THE FORGOTTEN MAN: A NEW HISTORY OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  * * *

  Sound familiar? Many years later, after another economic panic, George W. Bush, another Republican president, would claim that he “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system . . . to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

  The GOP went into the fetal position after the Great Depression left Republican officeholders in the breadlines. Alf “the Kansas Sunflower” Landon, the GOP’s hapless 1936 nominee, set the standard for all the “me too” Republican nominees who have followed him. Just elect us, these guys have said for years. We won’t repeal anything the Democrats have done. Elect us, and we’ll run progressive programs better than the Democrats ever could.

  In 1940, Wall Street utilities attorney Wendell Willkie followed Landon. Willkie may have been the RINO-est Republican presidential candidate of all time considering that he’d been a registered Democrat until just before emerging as the 1940 long-shot GOP nominee. After his 1940 loss to FDR, Willkie pursued an obnoxious career of lecturing Republicans to be even less conservative than they already were.

  * * *

  Even Taft?

  Just how dismal were the 1940s and ’50s for conservatives in the GOP? To a lot of people, the conservative alternative to duds like Wendell Willkie, Tom Dewey, Harold Stassen, and Earl Warren was Ohio senator Robert A. Taft, a guy they called “Mr. Republican.” But even Taft was, on occasion, a little squishy. Listen to these words from his colleague Richard Nixon: “As a matter of fact, Taft was a progressive. . . . [H]e had very progressive, advanced views on aid to education, on health care, and on housing.”

  * * *

  In 1944 rumors began to fly that Willkie might turn his coat again and endorse FDR for a fourth term. Unfortunately, Willkie died before that might have happened, but we do know this: Willkie had a secret meeting that July with a Roosevelt emissary about realigning all the progressive/liberal elements into a single party in 1948.

  IKE, BARRY, AND TRICKY DICK

  Some might say that everything changed for the better after Tom Dewey’s embarrassing 1948 defeat; that the GOP turned away from progressivism. But that’s simply not true.

  Dwight Eisenhower captured the GOP nomination in 1952 by defeating the more conservative (caveats apply) Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Compared to what would follow Ike, his administration looks pretty darn good, but compared to what it might have accomplished, it left a lot to be desired.

  The truth is that Ike’s eight years looked very much like what Tom Dewey’s “unity” administration might have looked like had he won. Think about it: Dewey’s campaign manager became Ike’s attorney general; Dewey’s foreign policy adviser became Ike’s secretary of state; Dewey’s running mate Earl Warren became chief justice of the Supreme Court. It’s no wonder that Arizona’s Barry Goldwater blasted Ike for running a “dime store New Deal.”

  Barry Goldwater.

  “Mr. Conservative” captured the GOP nomination in 1964, but, let’s face it, he was the only bright light around at that point for conservative Republicans. There was, however, an avalanche of liberal, progressive RINOs: New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Pennsylvania governor William W. Scranton, Michigan governor George W. Romney, and senators like Jacob Javits, Tom Kuchel, Kenneth Keating, John Sherman Cooper, Margaret Chase Smith, Leverett Saltonstall, Clifford Case, and George Aiken.

  And that’s not counting Prescott Bush, Chuck Percy, Mark Hatfield, Edward Brooke, or even John Lindsay, who soon became mayor of New York City and drove “Fun City” into the ground. In other words, it was a liberal Republican field day. Goldwater was the exception, not the rule. And with the rest of the RINO bunch manning the ship, we didn’t stand a chance of stopping LBJ’s “Great Society.”

  After Goldwater was betrayed by party progressives in 1964, Repub
licans lost their nerve. The conservative recapture of the GOP fell apart. The Washington establishment decided to play it safe. Read our lips: No new Goldwaters! And certainly, they weren’t interested in that actor-governor out in California—Ronald Reagan. Nope, the GOP wasn’t going to buy into any of that c-r-a-z-y free enterprise, small government stuff anymore. It was going to play it safe—that was how you won elections. Or so we were told.

  In 1968, the GOP decided to nominate Richard Nixon again. Now, Dick Nixon wasn’t only a retread (think Bob Dole, John McCain, or Mitt Romney); he was one seriously bad president—and one really bad example of a progressive republican.

  * * *

  No Explanation Necessary

  I will be prepared to put on an aggressive and vigorous campaign on a platform of progressive liberalism designed to return our district to the Republican Party.

  —RICHARD M. NIXON, RUNNING FOR CONGRESS IN 1946

  * * *

  Liberals hated Richard Nixon. They didn’t go for his style. They resented the way he helped expose Stalinist agent Alger Hiss in the late 1940s. But, if they were smart, they should’ve embraced him: down deep he was their compatriot on some very important issues.