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Was John F. Kennedy a "liberal" president? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Charles Tips, Retired entrepreneur, Founding CEO of TranZact, Inc., former Science Editor, on Quora:
The Democratic Party was founded in the late 1820s at the end of the Era of Good Feelings to preserve the Jeffersonian agrarian vision for the nation, very much a liberal concept. The agrarian orientation tilted the party to various populist platforms, some of which, such as Indian relocation, are difficult to color as liberal. A couple of decades later, the Republican Party was founded on more explicitly liberal terms, including resolving the issue of slavery, a founding that drained the Democratic Party of the most liberal among its membership.
The Civil War ended the Democratic Party as a national force for many decades, resulting in the long line of “Beards,” the bearded Republican presidents who followed Lincoln and Grant that everyone has a hard time naming. What is lesser known is that the label liberal that had been catching on since the 1810s as a synonym for republicanism fell out of use at this time. Horace Greeley was recruited by the new Liberal Republican Party to oppose the 1872 re-election of Ulysses Grant and his Radical Republican faction. As it began to look as though Greeley could unseat Grant, the Grant campaign so successfully lampooned him in the papers that liberal fell out of favor as a political term.
As the desire to emulate the statecraft of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck began to influence both parties as progressivism, the Bourbon Democrats formed as a specifically liberal (though not in the racial equality sense) faction that succeeded in electing Grover Cleveland to the presidency in 1884. And once again in 1892, the last liberal before the string of successive presidents of the Progressive Era.
The presidency of Woodrow Wilson returned the Democrats to national prominence but with progressivism so extreme that it was widely hailed in Europe as the proof of fascism and the first fascist administration. During the Wilson administration, Herbert Croly, as editor of The New Republic, editorialized that progressivism, an outlook thought of as explicitly anti-liberal, could be reconciled with liberalism. The idea did not catch on, at that time.
The ugly excesses of the Wilson administration together with the massive reaction in the United States that resulted in the repeal of Prohibition ended enthusiasm for progressive politics. Two liberal presidents were elected—Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—and the American Civil Liberties Union was formed to safeguard our very liberal constitutional rights and prevent abuses such as Wilson’s from recurring.
However, Republican Herbert Hoover, successor to Harding and Coolidge, was not a fellow liberal but a progressive, arguably a left progressive. He was a Quaker from California at a time when a politician needed to be Republican in that state to win office. His bumbling of the first two depressions of the Great Depression paved the way for Franklin Roosevelt to win the 1932 election cagily portraying himself as a liberal rather than the left progressive he was. In fact, liberalism in the United States was primarily down and out cold, with just a few bastions, such as the ACLU, and with its revival being pushed mostly by immigrants who came here expecting more freedom. FDR’s purloining of the liberal label as a synonym for progressive has more or less stuck in standard American usage though not in political science nor educated use around the world.
Where World War I could be viewed as the last gasp of waning monarchies and empires in the face of nationalistic urges, World War II was a contest among the emergent forms of socialism. Fascism sought to defeat communism, and social democracy tried to defeat fascism. The final positions of the armies at the end of the war became the arrangement for the Cold War that ensued. However, between the death of Roosevelt and the anti-socialist fervor of the Red Scare, the widespread feeling in the United States was that it had been our productive capacity and freedom that had prevailed.
The US enjoyed a resurgence of liberalism. Dwight Eisenhower was not an ardent liberal, but he was a pragmatic one. Rather than inflate away the war debt as Wilson had done disastrously following WWI, leading to The Great Depression, Eisenhower jacked taxes sky high but with a promise to return them as soon as possible to much lower rates to get productivity going again. The US was subject to much propaganda from the communist bloc at the time, and Eisenhower felt that the one part of that that was true was the appalling state of race relations in this country. He determined to do something about it.
When Kennedy was elected to succeed Eisenhower, he more capably pursued Eisenhower’s agenda than Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice-president, was promising to do. He pursued the supply-side tax cuts Eisenhower had promised and even more ardently sought racial civil rights. He was the only thoroughgoing liberal ever elected president by the Democratic Party. His younger brothers, Bobby and Teddy, however, were progressive in their politics, and Kennedy, in issuing an executive order permitting valid bargaining unions for federal workers did more probably than any other Democrat to ensure the return to dominance of progressivism in that party.
Kennedy’s successor, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson, was an old-time New Deal progressive. The 1968 Chicago riots surrounding the Democratic Convention seemed to me, a student editor following them at the time, to portend a more activist progressivism for the Democratic Party eclipsing the “walk in the sunshine of civil rights” liberalism of the Hubert Humphrey wing. Nixon, an ardent progressive whose political icon, the execrable Woodrow Wilson, should have alerted America not to vote him into office, won over Humphrey. Another progressive followed in Jimmy Carter.
I braced myself against the election of Ronald Reagan figuring him to be another Nixon-style progressive from California, but, wonder of wonders, he turned out to be liberal. And there you have it. Well beyond a century now, the nation with the most liberal charter in the world has managed to elect, in Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy and Reagan, only four liberals to preside over it and provide the bottom-up of the people, by the people, for the people approach to governing we are constitutionally guaranteed.
I had supposed, based on Trump’s past politics in evidence, that he is, like Bill Clinton, a split-the-difference Third Way New Democrat at heart. But, as he starts to pull his team together, it’s beginning to look like we might have a run at liberalism shaping up. I’m starting to get interested.
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