EJ Dionnenotes that "Today’s conservatives almost never invoke one of our most successful Republican presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave us, among other things, federally guaranteed student loans and championed the interstate highway system." Ike also, as Jean Edward Smith observes in his excellent new biography, Eisenhower: In War and Peace, "slashed defense spending, balanced the federal budget, and worked easily with a Democratic Congress."
Dionne's preceding sentence is less policy-oriented and more conceptual: "A brief look at history suggests how far to the right both the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism have moved." Likewise Smith, just three paragraphs later, portrays Ike, in private correspondence to his brother Edgar, as barely tolerating the far right, although Ike saw little to tolerate: "There is a tiny splinter group that believes you can [e.g. 'abolish social security']. Among them are H.L. Hunt [and] a few other Texas millionaires. But their number is negligible and they are stupid."
What dragged Ike's party to his unimaginable prominence of stupid extremism is a subject that properly fills entire bookshelves, rather than 500-word blog posts. But Smith notes a rarely highlighted feature of Ike's earlier military career that warrants, I think, at least a relevant mention.
Throughout the peacetime 1920s and '30s, promotion through Army ranks was in the main based on seniority, not exemplary performance; thus Ike, according to Smith, was able to retain an independence of mind without threat of career-ending stagnation, which dissent could otherwise have caused. For instance in the 1930s Ike stood up, from time to time, to the morbidly megalomaniacal Douglas MacCarthur; nonetheless Ike professionally advanced. He was, no doubt, an exceptional student and outstanding administrator, yet merely doing one's time, playing the game -- even while earning a few demerits, and building one's hand-picked network of influential associates could in themselves smooth a path to Army success.
In short, the gently rebellious, conservative Ike was an organization man -- one laboring within a large, conservative organization that, unsurprisingly, valued stability, but could also tolerate some rebelliousness. Hence the cultivating foundations of what Smith describes as Eisenhower's "progressive conservatism."
Compare all of that with the sprawling anarchy of today's "conservative" pols and their Republican Party, which only for marketing reasons of brand familiarity persists in billing itself as a conservative organization. Loudmouths, demagogues and buffoons, simple-minded sexpots and utter incompetents are able to leap to the party's hierarchical apex literally within days. The "organization" means nothing; hard, plodding, unglamorous work means nothing; and the importance of building networks has morphed, or rather transmogrified, into an unseemly scramble merely for network time. How to get it? Be outrageous -- indeed, be more outrageous than the last outrage. The media will lap it up.
Thus their "negligible numbers" have become exponential -- "Because [they're] on television, dummy"; Ned Beatty, "Network" -- and the "stupid" have been deified by the vulgar. This illuminates not only "how far to the right both the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism have moved," but explains, in part, the "how" itself.