The Fallacy of the Republican 'Moderate'

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fallacy-republican-moderate



***snip

Let’s turn to the Wayback Machine, shall we?

First, it’s important to remember that in 1946, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate, Taft was the leader of the conservative Senate Republicans who were eager to use red-baiting to help Republicans get elected. Taft had no compunction about claiming that the legislative agenda of Democrats in Congress “bordered on Communism.” That kind of talk helped put the entire Congress back in Republican hands for the first time since 1930. So forceful — and out there, ideologically speaking — was Taft’s leadership that after the election the New Republic editorialized that “Congress…now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.”

Second, Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, one of the most infamous rollbacks in 20th century American history. (Far from being a genteel defender or “steward” of tradition, as Taft the grandson suggests, Taft the grandfather aggressively sought to counter the New Deal. When he ran against Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952, Taft was the candidate of domestic rollback, not accommodation, including rollback of such policies as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which required companies receiving government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race.)

Among Taft-Hartley’s many provisions was the prohibition of closed or union shops, which paved the way for states to pass “right to work” laws and other anti-union legislation of the sort that we’ve seen many right-wing state legislators pushing since 2010—particularly in those states where both elected branches of government were suddenly in the hands of the Republicans, thanks in no small part to support from the Tea Party.

In addition, the anticommunist provision of Taft-Hartley was one of the more potent pieces of legislation contributing to the developing atmosphere of Cold War hysteria around communism. That provision mandated that all unions seeking the protections of the Wagner Act had to have their leaders take an oath affirming that they were neither members nor supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking the overthrow of the United States government. That provision provoked a wave of red-baiting and red-hunting within and around the labor movement, which proved to be a kind of social corollary to what the government was doing in and around the executive branch.