Republicans, meanwhile, clung to an outmoded ideal of a weak federal government: “In the name of checking . . . ‘executive aggrandizements,’ the party historically would subordinate the Executive to the Congress, and the national voice to a babel of local voices,” Acheson wrote.

Image Credit... Illustration by Oliver Munday

The unwritten constitution? The babel of local voices? It’s hard to imagine the high-profile Democrat today who would so openly acknowledge these presumptions of modern liberalism.

Republicans in the 1950s were no less direct. Take, for instance, the ideas expressed by Arthur Larson, the under secretary of labor to President Eisenhower, in his book “A Republican Looks at His Party,” published in 1956. Responding to Acheson, Larson accused him of a “thinly veiled contempt for state and municipal government,” formed under “the influence of a school of European political theory” — specifically, the socialist theory of Harold Laski. Larson stated his party’s position in language as strident as Newt Gingrich’s. “Let us put it perfectly bluntly: the typical American is inherently a states’-righter by inclination and sentiment.” That same American had “an instinctive sense that . . . excessive centralization means the threat of ultimate loss of personal liberties, and that our constitutional division of powers between the central government, the state governments and the people is right and must be preserved at all costs.” The Democrats’ ideal of the federal leviathan, Larson warned, would place the nation on the road to “totalitarian dictatorship.”

Acheson and Larson were by no means extremists. Each stood at or near the political center. Acheson had been the architect of the cold war containment policy that included the use of loyalty oaths, enacted under Truman, to expunge suspected Communists from the government payroll, though in his manifesto he regretted this “grave mistake.”

Larson, a self-described “New Republican,” proudly pointed to the Eisenhower administration’s expansion of New Deal programs — unemployment insurance, for one­ — and advocated a “strong, confident center-of-the-road American consensus,” a view repudiated by the conservative wing of his own party.

The dominant political figure in the 1950s was Eisenhower, a popular president twice elected with sweeping majorities. He disdained ideological debate but it swirled all around him, at times almost paralyzing his administration. For two years, he was locked in battle with his party’s right wing, most conspicuously with a group of legislators led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the ringmaster of loyalty investigations that reached deep into the executive branch. Other Republicans, exploiting wafer-thin majorities in Congress, gave less attention to major appropriations bills than to drafting constitutional amendments that might confound the most devout Tea Partier. In his 1956 book “Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years,” Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, counted no fewer than 107 amendments that had been submitted to Senate committees as of June 1954. They included one empowering state governors to fill “vacancies” in the House of Representatives should Washington suffer a nuclear attack, another to prevent “interference with or limitation upon the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage, and good order in the state,” and a third that would have inserted the following words in the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”

At one point, Eisenhower, frustrated that the nation’s serious business was being ignored, considered quitting the Republican Party and starting a new party of his own.