News Bureau | ILLINOIS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Politician and businessman Nelson Rockefeller was considered a moderate to liberal Republican, although he turned to conservative politics as the Republican Party shifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s.

In her new book, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism,” Marsha Barrett, a history professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, examines the political career of Rockefeller — the four-time governor of New York and vice president under Gerald Ford — as a lens through which to examine the evolution of the Republican Party and the rise of conservatism. Barrett is a political historian who studies how politicians and the state respond to social movements, race and public opinion.

“I’m really interested in moderate Republicans as an example of politicians who blurred party lines in the mid-20th century,” she said.

Delete

Edit embedded media on the Files tab and reinsert it if necessary.

The prevailing view that Rockefeller was a moderate ignores how competitive moderates are within the Republican Party, wrote Barrett, who examines Rockefeller’s career with a focus on policies that affected African Americans.

Barrett said moderate Republicanism stems from the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and the belief that government must be big enough to keep corporations in check. “A generation later, the rise of the New Deal and Americans’ changing expectations of government inspired Republicans to once again support active government,” Barrett said.

Moderate and liberal Republicans are concerned about how to survive in this political environment, she said. While their policy positions and those of Democrats differ incrementally, they have many similarities, particularly on civil rights legislation and foreign policy.

As governor of New York in the 1960s and early 1970s, Rockefeller supported many policies associated with a more liberal agenda, such as infrastructure and housing projects and the expansion of the state’s university system. Nationally, he pushed to add language to the party platform that advocated racial equality in elections, housing, schools, and jobs. Moderate and liberal Republicans became known as “Rockefeller Republicans.”

But the conservative Republican tradition that advocated small government has always had an antagonistic relationship with moderates, Barrett says, and after the New Deal there was a movement toward conservatism, marked by anti-communism and a sense that the Supreme Court had overstepped its authority with the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended racial segregation in schools.

With its shift to the right, the party has rejected bipartisan cooperation and demanded that Republicans push through their agenda without compromise, she said.

“They were not only angry at moderate or liberal Republicans, but at any Republican who was willing to work across the border with the Democrats. That created this very hardline ideology in the Republican Party. It became increasingly popular and was able to successfully demand that everyone take these uncompromising positions,” Barrett said.

Moderates either left the party, were pushed out or lost primaries to more conservative Republicans. While Rockefeller tried to build an ethnically and racially diverse, bipartisan coalition early in his career, he changed course when he realized it wasn’t working, Barrett said.

“One of the central premises of the book is that Nelson Rockefeller wanted the Republican Party as a partner in civil rights legislation to advocate for African Americans. When that didn’t work and he was just trying to get re-elected in a more conservative party, we see his policies and rhetoric reflect that change,” she said.

“People think of Nelson Rockefeller as the epitome of moderate Republicanism. But in some ways he’s an outsider. He was very keen to be president and was very keen to stay loyal to the Republican Party as it moved to the right,” Barrett said. “He was so driven by ambition and the desire to be president. If he was going to stay within the more conservative Republican Party, he had to make some changes.”

To show he was conservative enough for the party, Rockefeller pursued law-and-order policies, passing punitive drug laws in New York that served as a model for other states and the federal government. He justified welfare cuts by falsely claiming that people were cheating the system, rather than admitting that the state had overreached itself, Barrett said.

“You take this vulnerable community that is already racially discriminated against and portrayed as criminal, and you capitalize on it,” she said of his strategies.

This is not a purely Republican phenomenon; politicians from both parties make similar decisions, she said. Many Democrats have also taken political action to show that they are tough on crime and protecting themselves from attacks from conservatives, she said.

The more conservative political environment that began in the 1960s with the shift to the right of the Republicans and Democrats has continued.

“When Ronald Reagan left office, people like Newt Gingrich were more antagonistic and had a more ideological approach to conservatism. They pushed the party further and further to the right. What we see today in the Republican Party is part of that long 20th century tradition,” Barrett said. “It will continue down that path as long as enough voters find that version of conservatism attractive.”

She said she was also interested in understanding how voters responded to moderate Republicans and other politicians who did not quite fit into a partisan box.

“Many voters didn’t seem to like the fact that there were so many contradictions and differences of opinion within the parties. They wanted to know who they were voting for when they saw an ‘R’ or ‘D’ next to their name,” Barrett said. Today’s partisanship is partly due to political leaders’ desire for power, “but also because voters don’t want to think too hard about who they’re voting for.”