Wasn't he a conservative Quebecois nationalist before going to an American university too?
Post world leaders, revolutionaries or high ranking figures whos ideology or party affiliation was different before or after their 'heydays'
- Thread starter The Banker
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Fidel Castro was educated in a jesuit school, and so had a lot of influence of "social christian" ideology. Around his youth he also closelly aligned to Falangism, and even into his Communist rule, still had considrably close ties to Franco's Spain.
Richard Nixon's father, Frank Nixon, was a quaker who had a very progressive voting record and similar "social christian" stanches. A cousin of Dick, the writter Jessamin West, stated Frank's teachings at their local sunday school and "his version of the social gospel inclined her politically toward socialism". Is it too crazy to imagine there is a left leaning Richard Nixon in a timeline not too far from ours?
Richard Nixon's father, Frank Nixon, was a quaker who had a very progressive voting record and similar "social christian" stanches. A cousin of Dick, the writter Jessamin West, stated Frank's teachings at their local sunday school and "his version of the social gospel inclined her politically toward socialism". Is it too crazy to imagine there is a left leaning Richard Nixon in a timeline not too far from ours?
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By the standards of the 21st Century Republican Party Nixon, and Regan & Eisenhower, would now be leftists. All three were social liberals & Ike was equally courted by the Democratic Party 1948 - 1952 & supported Civil Rights movement. Nixon came very close to getting a Federal health care system set up. Regan had little interest in the sexual mores agenda of the social conservatives, or the religious right. When I was a teenager in the 1960s the current regard of the Democratic Party as leftist & socially liberal was a lot weaker. The Southern conservatives had not yet deserted the Democrats. That movement was just starting, and the trade Unions and general blue collar voters tho voting Democrat were also socially conservative as any Republican voter of the 1960s.
Francois Miterrand was on the right and even a minister in Vichy for a while before going Socialist.
Much of these shifts could well be due to Political opportunism.
Much of these shifts could well be due to Political opportunism.
Reagan absolutely did have interest in the social mores agenda of the religious right. It was one of the most defining things about the 1980s.
The Reagan administration was infamously unsympathetic to those who were dying of AIDS.
I've heard he was also a fan of the writings, thoughts, and speaking style of Mussolini.
Although, when he was proposing this, it was as a reactive, triangulating measure, to preserve some private sector involvement, in the face of discussed and presumed Democratic alternatives that would have been more statist and more generous.
But yes, it would have been anathema to later Republicans.
To a degree it was and always has been, and still is, the cha-cha dance, you step in to the position your dance-partner/enemy just vacated, and vice versus, to keep up the right appearance but right amount of distance.
Nixon proposed federal health care coverage because he sensed the intelligentsia, unions, and Dems in Congress building up a groundswell for it. He proposed something to keep up with the joneses, but also to set the terms, before they went too far.
Senator Ted Kennedy, and others in the Democratic Caucus, overestimating their political strength, and blindly sailing into the shellacking that would be the 1972 McGovern campaign, refused to embrace Nixon's plan and get a deal done, holding out for something better.
Nixon won reelection but soon everybody got consumed with Watergate investigations, and maybe nobody wanted to hand their opponent a legislative 'win', even the Dems, even if they realized they were weaker than they thought.
The Dems came back strong in Congress in the '74 midterms but healthcare's moment had passed apparently, between the Watergate babies' greater interest in process reform, transparency, good government reforms, getting seen on televised hearing, and probably the health care industry having more time to research and get its ducks in a row to real lobby to minimize any reform, and for Union leaders and rank and file to probably figure out their actual members were OK and to say with regard to non-members who were uninsured, 'I'm alright jack!'
As well as Winston Churchill, Lord Palmerston (UK Prime Minister in the 1850s) had switched parties, having moved from the Conservatives to the Liberals. The only other Cabinet Minister to have switched to a political party which had diametrically-opposed views to the one he had started with was Sir Oswald Mosley, who started his political career as a Conservative, switched to the Labour Party and subsequently formed the New Party and the British Union of Fascists.
In the USA, the highest profile switchers were
In the USA, the highest profile switchers were
- John Connally, Governor of Texas from 1963 to 1969, who began as a Democrat and moved to the Republicans in 1973;
- Strom Thurmond, Senator for South Carolina from 1956 to 2003, who switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1964;
- Rick Perry, Governor of Texas from 2000 to 2015, who began his political career as a Democrat and switched to the Republicans in 1989;
- John Lindsay, Mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973, who switched from the Republicans to the Democrats in 1971;
- Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013, who began his political career as a Democrat, switched to the Republicans in 2001, became an Independent in 2007 and rejoined the Democrats in 2018; and
- Charlie Crist, Governor of Florida from 2007 to 2011, who began his political career as a Republican, before becoming an Independent in 2010 and joining the Democrats in 2012.
- Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas in the 1950s who was responsible for using his state's National Guard to prevent African-American students from enrolling at a previously all-white school in 1957, supported the Presidential bids of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988.
- John C Stennis, the long-serving Mississippi senator who had been a resolute supporter of segregation in the 1960s, supported the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and, in 1986, campaigned on behalf of Mike Espy who became the state's first African-American congressman since Reconstruction.
- Lester Maddox, Governor of Georgia between 1967 and 1971, implemented policies which appeared to be at odds with his reputation for being a segregationist. As Governor, he integrated the State Patrol, appointed the first African-Americans (i) to head a state-wide government department , (ii) to the State Bureau of Investigation as an agent and (iii) to the State Draft Board, and integrated the farmers' market lines.
- Robert Byrd, Senator from West Virginia for 51 years, who filibustered against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and, 40 years later, had fully renounced his support for segregation.
He wasn't a Vichy minister. He was a mid-ranking civil servant.
He was, apparently, a Catholic nationalist in his early years.
Conor Cruise O'Brien - or 'Conor Cruise O'Brit' as his detractors called him - went on an interesting political journey.
en.wikipedia.org
Erskine Childers is another interesting Irish example. Half Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, half English. Starts off as an Empire-loving Unionist and ends up as an anti-Treaty Republican who was executed by the Free State government as part of their reprisals. His namesake son was elected President of Ireland.
Conor Cruise O'Brien - Wikipedia
Erskine Childers is another interesting Irish example. Half Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, half English. Starts off as an Empire-loving Unionist and ends up as an anti-Treaty Republican who was executed by the Free State government as part of their reprisals. His namesake son was elected President of Ireland.
Not a Quebec nationalist per se - there wasn't really a Quebec identity yet - but very deeply interested in a sort of Vichy on the St. Laurence. He campaign managed an anti-conscription candidate in 1940 who he claimed "won if you don't count Jew votes" and flirted with a lot of integralist student revolutionary cells that never went anywhere. Then yeah he went to university, ended up as a sort of fellow traveller for a while while still being a hard-core Catholic - he visited Moscow on a cultural delegation to learn about planning and earned a J. Edgar Hoover file, but as a civil servant he apparently had a surreal conversation with Ngo Dinh Diem about the possibility of replacing all the French priests in Vietnam with Quebec Jesuits. He then was a CCFer during the Asbestos strikes, developed a set of concepts about how Quebec needed to go through a bourgeois revolution before answering the social question, split to the right over hydro nationalization and provincial autonomy, and ended off as a post-nationalist left-liberal.
He's so cool
