Illustration by Tom Bachtell

On the second Tuesday in March sixty years ago, Republican primary voters in New Hampshire had a choice of two major candidates. One was the former Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was supported by a cabal of moderate Easterners, including the two-time Presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey and the editorial board of the New York Herald Tribune. His opponent, Senator Robert A. Taft, of Ohio—the older son of former President William Howard Taft—was the early favorite, and had the backing of the Manchester Union-Leader and of conservatives generally. Eisenhower hadn’t campaigned in the state—he was still headquartered in Europe—but, when the ballots were counted, he had forty-seven thousand votes to Taft’s thirty-six thousand. That didn’t settle the nomination, but it did move Eisenhower persuasively forward.

The Party didn’t really like Ike. He was a career soldier who had come out as a Republican only that January, and many in the G.O.P. believed that he wasn’t truly one of them, although they could see that he was more electable than his chief opponent. (Many Republicans today view Mitt Romney, who won the New Hampshire primary last week, and is now the likely nominee, in much the same way.) They did like the reliable, somewhat isolationist Taft (he opposed NATO), who favored old-age pensions and public housing. But the Party, and Taft, came to terms with Eisenhower. His choice for Vice-President, Richard M. Nixon, of California, pleased the Old Guard, who admired Nixon’s Red-hunting prowess, and it satisfied the need for someone who shared Eisenhower’s outlook on foreign policy, which was deeply internationalist.

The Republican Party seems to have always been divided between moderates and conservatives, but until recently the Party of Lincoln (as it liked to call itself) had never completely lost its bearings. Even when it was bitterly divided—as it was in 1964, when Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller competed—it tolerated loopy views, but not from its serious Presidential contenders. During the 1952 Convention, held during a steamy July week in Chicago, General Douglas MacArthur, having traded his celebrated military career for the temptations of politics, gave a keynote address in which he said that the Democratic Party “has become captive to the schemers and planners who have infiltrated its ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state.” Senator Joe McCarthy, of Wisconsin, declared that the Truman Administration had “built up Russia while tearing down the strength of America,” for which he blamed a “combination of abysmal stupidity and treason.” All this goofy music had a sort of rhythm section provided by people like Senator William Ezra Jenner, of Indiana, who believed that a “secret invisible government” was leading the United States to destruction, and that the United Nations had managed to infiltrate the American educational system. Yet though the McCarthys and the Jenners were given time on the podium, they knew their place—and it was behind the Eisenhowers and the Tafts.

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The Party wasn’t one in which leading Presidential candidates facing an unprecedented deficit would promise not to raise taxes, or would promote “free enterprise,” as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich claim to do, while attacking a competitor for enriching himself by practicing tooth-and-claw capitalism. (Supporters of Perry and Gingrich produced and distributed the “independent” documentary “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” which portrays him lurking in the shadows as a sort of Ted Bundy-like serial killer of the job market.) The Party has long had an attachment to social issues, but no serious Presidential candidate has been quite so unsparing about the private behavior of others as the man Tony Soprano called “Senator Sanitorium.”

Romney seems at first and second glance to belong to a more sober tradition, if only because he brings with him a penumbra of pragmatism and a moderate record as a one-term governor. But little that he says today deviates from the Party’s prevailing hard-line tenets: no new taxes, a blanket repeal of “Obamacare,” the appointment of Supreme Court Justices committed to repealing Roe v. Wade, a pledge to cut billions of dollars in unspecified spending for entitlements, little sympathy for gays. Latching on to these views seems to have been easy for Romney, which gave rise to the complaint that he is driven less by personal beliefs than by the demands of his party’s ideological outliers. Perhaps he inherited a flip-flop gene from his father, George, the Michigan governor and Presidential candidate, about whom, in 1967, General Eisenhower said, “He has been on so many sides of so many questions that one begins to wonder just where he does stand. He sounds like a man in a panic. And a man who panics is not the best candidate for President.” Republicans have left a little room for diverse views, such as the neo-isolationism and currency fixations of Ron Paul. But that’s about it for the “big tent” that the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater once celebrated; today, the only tent that comes to mind is one that houses a circus.

In 1959, Vice-President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” Ten months before the general election, the increasingly angry, suspicious, and divided party of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry seems ever more immersed in its current orthodoxies. None of the candidates, though, seem the least bit interested in even addressing how they, or their party, might actually govern the “whole people” of a fractious nation. ♦