MR. CODEVILLA HAS GRACIOUSLY GIVEN ME PERMISSION TO POST AND CIRCULATE A PERSONAL LETTER HE RECENTLY WROTE ….RSK
Is there a Republican Establishment that differs from and is antagonistic to people who vote Republican?
Whether such a thing existed before, say, 1950, is problematic. But since about that time it has manifested itself undeniably. Consider:
Beginning circa 1940, Robert Taft of Ohio rebuilt the Republican Party’s credit with the American people. He spoke of smaller government at home and the pursuit of the national interest abroad- including opposition equally to Communists and Nazis. Wars were for winning. But the Party’s machinery and money were in New York. J. D. Rockefeller, Wendell Wilkie, John Foster Dulles, and Thomas Dewey, supported heavily by old money, were Progressives in the mold of Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson. They believed that they could bring the world together onto the path of progress and improve America by tweaking FDR’s New Deal. Wilkie and Dewey lost. By 1952 the party was almost unanimously for Taft. But the Republican Progressives bought and stole delegates to the ’52 convention, especially in the South where delegates had no voters who could hold them accountable. When that did not work, they used the Credentials committee to exclude the elected Texas delegation and replaced it with one formed by them. Dwight Eisenhower was a great man. But he was foisted on the party – not picked by it.