“Would you raise the top marginal tax rate to over 90 percent, as it was in the 1950s, when the middle class and the economy were doing so well?” asked Milt Lauenstein, 89, who had the same white hair and hunched posture as Mr. Sanders.
“You mean under the communist Dwight D. Eisenhower?”
The punch-line, of course, is that Eisenhower, the Republican president who shaped the last half of the American Century, couldn’t possibly win the Republican presidential nomination today; the base would dismiss him as a RINO.
It was Eisenhower who smashed Nazism and, as President, launched the Interstate Highway system; funded America’s research into, and subsequent domination of, computing; and initiated the space program while demanding it be organized under civilian control. By almost any sane reckoning he was one of America’s best and most consequential presidents — and his governance is anathema to the modern Republican Party. The deluded fantasists who are now ‘conservatives’ know nothing of their own or their country’s history.
H.L. Mencken had it exactly right: “The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.”