The James Wilson Foundation on Natural Rights and the American Founding

“Can Trump Be the man Eisenhower Was?” -Prof. Hadley Arkes in Public Discourse

In a piece in Public Discourse, Prof. Hadley Arkes parallels the current state of Republican presidential politics with the 1952 presidential primary between Sen. Robert Taft and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

“People tend to forget that Ike did not actually have the numbers he needed to become the party’s nominee on the first ballot. He led Taft by a count of 595 to 500. But the leaders could see the likely direction of things, and so Minnesota moved to switch its vote on the first ballot from Harold Stassen, the favorite son, to Eisenhower. With that move, the rival candidates folded and joined the motion to make the nomination unanimous. But the disagreements within the party ran deep, and so it was thought necessary to arrange a meeting between Eisenhower and Taft in New York. Eisenhower had been the President of Columbia University, and so the meeting was held in Morningside Heights.”

“The main rival, taking the role of Taft, would have been Ted Cruz, but Cruz doesn’t have the detachment of Taft, and Trump is not the large-natured man that Eisenhower was. Instead, the figure to complete the scene will be the man who will be meeting with Trump on Thursday. Paul Ryan, along with Mitch McConnell, has taken the lead in shaping and preserving a conservative agenda in Congress. These two promise to be the source of a more distinctly conservative policy if a Trump Administration took office.

“Trump has not exactly been Lincolnian in his willingness to expound and explain the substance of his policies. He has left that task to official statements written by his hired hands. This could be the time to speak more clearly in his own voice in a conversation that focuses precisely on the details of his plans—that is, if he can speak to those details. Over the past week, Trump’s statements haven’t done much to help unite the Republican Party. Trump has treated as negotiable and unsettled the positions long settled among Republicans about taxes, entitlements, and the manipulation of the minimum wage by politicians and unions. Nor is it exactly the invitation to a conversation to denounce Paul Ryan, demand his ouster as speaker, and send henchmen out to remove him from his congressional seat. Still, Ryan will know, better than anyone else, whether Trump can speak to the details of his policy. If he cannot, Ryan will tell us.”

 

Read the whole piece here.

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Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge.
— James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1790