Myth or not, I repeat -- the Democrat Party of today wouldn't have anything to do with JFK due to his conservative views on certain issues.
Conservatives emphasize diplomacy, too, but they are not handcuffed by it. Was it diplomacy that ended the Cuban Missile Crises? Yes, but it was gunboat diplomacy and capitulation re weapons sites in Turkey (which the Soviets, in their own words, cared a great deal more about than Cuba). It's just that Democrat diplomacy, then, was "bad" diplomacy that led to the Cuban Missile Crises in the first place. Conservatives embrace Kennedy's words (defend freedom anywhere, Berlin speech, etc.). The Democrat Party of today wouldn't endorse such words -- under any circumstances (unless, perhaps, they were needed somewhere outside NY and Calif. at election time).
Firstly, it's the "Democratic" Party. If you want to be serious and scholarly about matters, then you should use the objective and historical terms, not the partisan banter of today. I'm not going to call the Republican Party the "Repub" Party.
Secondly, many Democrats voted for the war in Iraq, and many more (including the current president) supported an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Kennedy, conversely, may have looked askance at both initiatives. Moreover, Kennedy resisted the calls of his generals to just bomb the Cuban missile sites, which is the action that many of today's Republicans would have advocated. Many contemporary Republicans would be calling Kennedy weak for the belated removal of the missiles in Turkey, and for not bombing the missile sites or Castro's government in general (or for not staging an overt invasion of Cuba).
So, frankly, I'm not sure what you're talking about. Kennedy was far from a Dick Cheney-style "neo-con." To be fair, the "neo-cons" originated in the Democratic Party during the Vietnam War before eventually shifting over to the Republicans, but Kennedy, who may well have diminished the American presence in Vietnam after winning reelection in 1964, was not of that stripe.
You're also assuming that Kennedy would have supported a dramatic tax cut in today's context, or that today's Democrats would have been unilaterally opposed to a stimulative tax cut circa 1963-64, when federal deficits were much smaller, income inequality was much lesser, and top tax rates were far higher. Either of those assumptions, in my opinion, would be fallacious.
Moreover, one could argue that Bill Clinton proved more conservative, in certain ways, than John Kennedy.
A predictable gesture on LBJ's part at the time. It was Kennedy's tax cut.
But LBJ still embraced it, while conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and the business community opposed the tax cut. So if you're trying to say that many Democrats of that era would not recognize the party of today, the same would be true of Republicans.
By the way, Kennedy also tried to pass Medicare, which Johnson ultimately embraced as well. So are you also not going to give Johnson credit for Medicare?
Keynes is not persona non grata in conservative circles by any means.
He seems to have become persona non grata, although "supply side" economics are basically a bastardization of Keynesian economics, especially given how Republicans since Reagan have often paired them with stimulative increases in defense spending.
Btw, tax cuts stimulate both production and consumption, neither of which are of much concern to Democrat leadership today. Rule by Executive Order (the Constitution be damned), single party dictatorship, and the consequent aggrandizement of power in a central (not federal) government are the orders of the day.
I'm going to avoid addressing your puerile, demagogic, partisan statements (except to note that Obama has used executive orders less often than Reagan and the most recent Bush), and just say that Democrats indeed support middle-class tax cuts as a means of stimulating consumption. However, the stimulative impact of tax cuts is overrated for consumption and especially production, particularly when the high-end tax rates are so much lower than in Kennedy's day. The actual quantitative context needs to be considered, not just abstract theory irrespective of the numbers. Remember, Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and wealthy corporations in 1993 and the economy still kicked into overdrive.
In other words, let's potentially talk about the stimulative impact of tax cuts on production when the top rates are 91 percent, as when Kennedy took office, or 70 percent, as when Reagan took office. But when we're debating 35 percent versus 39 percent, the context is dramatically different and frankly incomparable.
Nope, JFK couldn't be nominated. Perhaps I should add -- in either party.
Kennedy constituted a moderate progressive, much like Obama. Now, that's not to say that Obama is the same caliber of leader as Kennedy, but I don't see a dramatic ideological difference. If Kennedy were around today, advocating Medicare (which Reagan and other conservatives claimed would end freedom in America), diplomacy with the Soviet Union, and federal power over states' rights on the question of civil rights, many of today's conservatives would be calling him a Marxist (just not a Muslim Marxist). Remember, too, that Kennedy took on the steel industry, the kind of endeavor that would displease many current Republicans.
(You say the Democrats were not a segregationist party "on a national level". That's wrong. The 1957 Civil Rights Act was a Republican initiative and opposed exclusively by the Democrat Party -- Southern and Northern members. A handful of Dems. voted for it.)
The Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress in 1957. Therefore, by definition, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 represented a Democratic legislative initiative, with Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson constituting the critical figure in navigating the bill through the Senate. Although support proved greater among the Republicans (who unanimously supported the bill in the Senate), far more than just a "handful" of Democrats voted for the measure. Indeed, a majority of Democrats supported the legislation in each chamber, overcoming their ill-fitting Southern faction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1957 On the issue of the national Democratic Party in that era, I'm not sure where your understanding of history comes from; it seems to stem from right-wing media manipulators, which do not represent a sound source. The truth of the matter is that the Democrats were long split between their national orientation, which highlighted Northern/Midwestern liberals, intellectuals, and progressive populists (including 'ethnic'-immigrants and labor) who believed in using the federal government to promote equality, fairness, and justice (essentially, the party of FDR and the New Deal), and their old Southern base with roots in the Confederacy. In fact, in 1948, Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic governor of South Carolina, marched out of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in response to a liberal civil rights platform plank being pushed by Hubert Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis and soon to become a Minnesota senator and then Johnson's vice president. Thurmond took many of his fellow southern Democrats (the "Dixiecrats") with him and formed the short-lived States' Rights Party, running as a third-party presidential candidate that year. After Harry Truman, who legally desegregated the armed forces by executive order, won reelection in 1948, Thurmond returned to the Democratic fold for the next sixteen years. Then, after President Johnson led the successful passage of the far more consequential Civil Rights Act of 1964 (that August), Thurmond—now a Democratic senator from South Carolina—jumped ship, leaving the Democrats for the Republicans, whose presidential nominee, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, opposed the Civil Rights Act on the basis of "states' rights." In the years to come, many other Southern Democrats would following Thurmond's lead, either voting Republican (especially in presidential elections) or actually changing their registration and becoming Republicans. Mainstream Republican politicians from northern states, or from California, began taking note and adjusted accordingly. Although Richard Nixon was legally committed to civil rights, in 1972, he was politically committed to winning the old Democratic South, in other words the racist George Wallace voters from 1968. Thus he instructed his political operatives to downplay their administration's record on civil rights and instead make sure that they did not alienate the South. In 1980, Ronald Reagan (like Nixon, a California Republican) went further, actually launching his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the ghastly and infamous Ku Klux Klan murders of three civil rights activists in June 1964 (subject of the Oscar-nominated 1988 film
Mississippi Burning, directed by Alan Parker and starring Gene Hackman in one of his most memorable roles). That's not to say that Reagan was racist, but one would be naive to not know what he was doing. Beginning with the Truman and Kennedy administrations and then decisively with Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats decided to place civil rights ahead of politics, the politics of retaining the South as part of their electoral coalition in order to win presidential elections. The Republicans responded by then catering to the old Southern Democrats, hence enabling the GOP to win five out of six presidential elections from 1968-1988 (the only exception being the Watergate-shadowed 1976 election). But that strategy has long since run its course.
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