“Down the Middle of the Road”

Abstract

Against the backdrop of a dynamic and divisive intraparty debate about how best to recapture majority status, moderate Republicans identified a consensus posture as an electoral imperative, whereas conservatives advocated an anti-statist challenge to the principles on which consensus rested. These differences shaped Republican thinking on public policy during the Eisenhower era in particular; the administration’s agenda embodied the key assumptions of Godfrey Hodgson’s “ideology of the liberal consensus,” but still manifested significant differences with Democratic policies. Eisenhower prioritized fiscal conservatism, advocated state and local rather than federal solutions to socioeconomic problems, and critiqued New Deal liberalism as rooted in divisive group interest rather than oriented toward the public interest and social harmony. The Republican right, by contrast, contended that acceptance of the New Deal state threatened American freedoms and advocated deployment of superior military power to meet the external threat of Communism; the refusal of this faction—which initially represented a minority within the GOP—to embrace consensus laid the foundations for the conservative mobilization that would fundamentally reshape both the Republican party and American politics in the second half of the 1960s and beyond.