nowadays, whereas back in the nixon administration that meant school busing and desegregation, and that was pretty much it. now it means government interference in absolutely everything. well, i think there was a regulatory aspect to that, too. i would say this. if you want to quote a lobbyist lobbyist tony podesta in d.c. has said that essentially obama is a make-work program for lobbyists because any time there s a proposal to regulate as claire pointed out, there s going to be pushback from the industry, whether it s contributions or whether it s paying the salaries of lobbyists to influence legislation. linda and claire, i think you re both right on the motivations, but what we have at the end of the day is where we are on the political spectrum and its movement. linda, if eisenhower was running today, first of all, he d be run out of the republican party, but i think he might be along the dennis kucinich lines in the democratic party, wouldn t he? he would definitely care ab
joining us now, linda m ho nk, constitutional scholar and author of the words we live by and claire potter, professor of history and american studies at wesleyan university. thanks for joining us. linda, let me start with you. have we moved significantly to the right in the police call spectrum aase i just explained, or am i seeing things wrong? no, i think you re absolutely right. color comment have i definitely in your future, but i would like to bring back, you know, richard nixon, who had a guaranteed minimum income for everyone. if that s not socialist, i don t know what is. claire, is that right? is nixon massively liberal by today s standards on social policy? well, it depends how you think about it. i mean, you mentioned, for example, nixon establishing osha, and osha, of course, was important to establish workers rights, to a safe workplace and so on. osha also gave the nixon administration tremendous leverage to force business to
johnson administration. but for i think you ve got mccarthy coming along in the eisenhower time, and certainly that was within the republican party, and that was a strong ideological bent, so i hear what you re saying about there s a concern about extremism, but certainly it had a place during the republican party at that time. sure. i mean, i don t think you re wrong about that, but i think one of the things that you see between 1948 and 1970 is a seismic shift in relation so who is a democrat and who is a republican. right. so that there is an enormous liberal block in the republican party. the democratic northern liberals are working with. right. and that southern democrats, who are conservatives and can be brought along with a variety of democratic initiatives, eventually moved to the republican party. right. over desegregation and busing. linda and claire, i agree with both of you, and by the end of it, i remember, even in my lifetime, when i started out i
was a liberal republican. no such thing exists anymore. you and nelson rockefeller. that s wiped off the face of the earth, and so we see how and part of the movement i think is because and why the media didn t challenge is because they kept calling it the liberal media, and why do they call them that, because during civil rights, they said black people and white people are the same and conservatives at the time said damn liberal media, and that intimidated the media into not recognizing this trend, i think. let s not let s not be too celebrity of eisenhower. he did stand up for the desegregation decisions. he did his job as president, but privately he was known for saying that racial desegregation was social disintegration, so he perhaps wasn t as progressive on the race issue as some would interpret his actions to be. fair point. got to wrap it up. linda and claire, thank you both of us for joining us. thanks, cenk. thank you. other stories that caught my eye toda