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‘In the late 1960s Democrats had been more likely to be churchgoers than were Republicans.’
‘The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again’ by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.
‘The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again’ by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.
‘At the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the abortion issue did not divide Americans by party or religion. The first reaction of Southern Baptists was actually to support the Roe decision.’
‘Apart from TR, as historian James Patterson pointed out, “Nixon was easily the most liberal Republican President in the twentieth century.” He kept Great Society programs more or less intact...............’
‘............... raised social spending; sponsored the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the National Endowment for Arts and for the Humanities; signed Title IX, which ended sex discrimination in education..........’
‘................ opined that “I am now a Keynesian in economics”; and even proposed a national health insurance system and a guaranteed annual income.’
‘Eisenhower extended core elements of the New Deal, including Social Security, minimum wage regulations, and labor laws...........’
‘........... In 1954 he expanded Social Security coverage to 10 million farm and service workers who had been excluded from the original New Deal program in part because they were disproportionately black and female.........’
‘.............. One of his first acts as president was to create the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and during his tenure, social welfare spending as a percent of GNP rose from 7.6 percent in 1952 to 11.5 percent in 1961..........’
‘............ While acknowledging the burden of high tax rates, a legacy of wartime, Ike emphasized that Americans also wanted an expansion of Social Security, unemployment insurance, more public housing, better health care, more schools, and massive investment......’
‘........... in infrastructure. (The Interstate Highway system was his proudest domestic achievement.) These things cost money, and that money would have to come from taxes, he explained, in sharp contrast to Republican tax- and budget-cutting after World War I........’
‘............. All this from a Republican president, collaborating with the moderate Democratic congressional leaders, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson, to produce policies that a later generation of Republican leaders would castigate as “tax and spend liberalism.”‘
I like Ike.
‘The 1940 Republican platform endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment and decried discrimination against blacks—in other words, on both racial and gender equality, Republicans in 1940 were actually to the left of the Democrats.’
Wendell Wilkie ran that year.
Wendell Wilkie ran that year.
‘Eight of the ten Republican presidential nominees and six of the eight Democratic nominees in the first half of the twentieth century had launched their careers as members of the broad Progressive movement at the turn of the century.’
‘By 1912 all three major candidates— TR, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—claimed the Progressive mantle.........’
‘......... Their policies were not identical, nor were all members of their parties progressive, but all three supported antimonopoly initiatives and a progressive federal income tax........’
‘........... Even though TR’s Bull Moose Party lost in the three-way presidential race, that party’s platform of 1912 helped set the progressive policy agenda for Wilson’s presidency, the New Deal, and beyond.’
‘ Progressive Era social innovations and institutional reforms put the US on a new path toward greater economic equality, laying the foundations for the Great Convergence that lasted until the 1970s.’
‘In 1913 the wealthiest 1 percent owned 45 percent of the country’s total wealth, and during the Roaring Twenties their share rose for a couple of years to 48 percent’
‘In the following six decades, however, their share was more than halved to 22 percent, in large part by financial regulation and progressive taxation on income and estates, though in part because of redistributive spending.‘
‘However, in recent decades the top 1 percent’s share of our national wealth surged back to nearly 40 percent by 2014 and has continued to increase.’
‘The top 0.1 percent of American families now hold about 20 percent of household wealth, almost as much as at the peak of the first Gilded Age.’
‘The top 1 percent now have nearly twice as large a share of the nation’s wealth as the bottom 90 percent, thoroughly justifying the labeling of our age as a new Gilded Age.’
