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Yale professor David Gelernter writes in the LA Times what the blogosphere has been saying literally for years, that the Republican party is the “spiritual heirs” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This is serious business. If you agree that President Bush has no automatic right to call himself Lincoln’s successor just because they are both “Republicans,” then Democrats have no automatic right to FDR’s mantle either. The Democrats and Republicans switched roles while no one was looking.
Either the good professor is repeating what is now conventional wisdom or he thinks he made a deep insight. And he may have, but it’s sort of late. I wrote in December 2003,
The Republican party under G. W. Bush today bears a much greater resemblance to the Democrats under F. D. Roosevelt than it does to any previous Republican administration.
I doubt I was the first commentator to point that out. Gelernter doesn’t dwell on this, though; his article’s interest is elsewhere. But he does say that the “Big Switch” explains a lot of the political dynamic in Washington today. I agree. But as I observed almost a year and a half ago, I rejoin that the Big Switch,
… is not an improvement not because I excoriate Roosevelt or his administration’s record. Like any other administration, it has its successes and failures; it’s legacy probably springs more from the fact that FDR was elected four times, keeping his programs alive much longer than they might have lived had he stopped at two terms.
Whatever FDR’s faults or virtues, there’s no denying that he was a big-government activist. In fact, “big-government activist” is redundant; by its very nature, big government must be activist, else it would not have become big to begin with.
More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today.
Is Bush a “big-government conservative?” Only if you think the term is not self contradictory.
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April 22nd, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Last week at the Lincoln Presidential Museum dedication I watched Democrats and Republicans stake their claim to Lincoln’s legacy.
Sen. Dick Durbin recognized that his party did not support Lincoln for President, but cast all of the votes of Illinois Democrats for Lincoln as our country’s best president.
President Bush discussed how Lincoln dedicated his Presidency to the ideals of freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence, ideals which challenge every generation, including the generation of Martin Luther King, Jr., who called for freedom from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He argued that the challenge for this generation is whether freedom described in the Declaration will be confined to the culture that produced it, or whether all people of the world, regardless of birth or background, deserve to be free of tyranny?
***Bush also repeated some of the criticism the New York Times levied at Lincoln’s English***
Patrick
April 24th, 2005 at 2:22 am
Although he is a partisan, Galertner is correct. But he might just as well say that left and right have switched places-for they have.
Democrats-at the national level-very much resemble 1930s Republicans: bitter, mean-spirited, frustrated, and incoherent, lacking any conviction on anything in particular except that their political opponents are evil and must be stopped.
Which just goes to show you that politics in America really is cyclical. Today the Republicans are the progressive party. Just like they were when Teddy Roosevelt was in charge.