The GOP, as Kabaservice notes, has not always been a bastion of reflexive hostility to elites or to government. Quite the contrary. It was none other than George Romney—governor of Michigan, father of Mitt—who in 1968 campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination by embarking on a 10,000-mile tour of poverty across America, insisting that it was essential to “listen to the voices from the ghetto.” Can anyone imagine his son, who insists that “corporations are people,” uttering a remotely similar statement?
That’s a quote from an engaging book review by Jacob Heilbrunn. The book, which sounds fascinating and I am going to buy (not from Amazon) is Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party by Geoffrey Kabaservice.
No, I can’t imagine him saying that but not because of his corporation comment. He was right to say that. People talk about corporations as if they were aliens or robots. Most people make their living working for some sort of corporation. They are not people; they are collections of people. A better Romney quote to prove your point would have been his “I don’t care about poor people” comment.
The civil rights act and the Southern Strategy were the GOP equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift. Nixon was the last republican president who hadn’t spent most of his life in conditions of substantial wealth (there was a big deal at some point during his presidency when it was revealed that his net worth had reached — gasp — nearly a million dollars).
And the depression and WWII were of recent enough memory that demonizing poor people (even as a code phrase for minorities) wasn’t a winning strategy.