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Reagan wasn’t facing a Congress that was committed to his personal destruction. There was no equivalent in the ’80s to McConnell’s dedication to ensuring the president’s failure, even at the expense of hurting the economy or American citizens. If the current Congress was still populated with people like Bob Dole, or Pete McCloskey (who’s something of a folk hero to folks in SF Bay Area political circles who miss having sane elected Republicans to talk to), things would be different.

But we’ve got a party of Jacobins, loudly saying that they don’t accept the legitimacy of the existing order and want to tear it down. All the while, the pundits and business elites keep assuming they don’t really mean it, and won’t really implement their most extreme policies if they win the presidency and retain the Congress in 2016. One can only hope we don’t test that proposition.

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Tip O’Neill’s Dems were not remotely equivalent to the Tea Party, and if you think they are, you’re basically just proving yourself to be unqualified to discuss politics. There are plenty of quantiative metrics on political polarization (such as the DWNominate analysis, or measures of how often people vote with the majority of their party, or frequency of anti-majoritarian blocking actions), and there’s just common sense. (Dixiecrats / Reagan Democrats still existed back then, as did Rockefeller Republicans. Now, they don’t.)

McCloskey was only anti-Semitic if you believe that any criticism of the policies of the Israeli government or support for the human rights of Palestinians makes you anti-Semitic. In which case, something close to half of Israeli Jews are anti-Semitic. My cousin is a rabbi, who spent years in Jersusalem and married a patriotic Israeli citizen. But I suppose they’re anti-Semitic, for not always agreeing with Bibi?

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Let’s also not forget that Reagan was way to the left of today’s Republicans, to the point that he couldn’t possibly win the GOP primary today — he violated something like 8 of the 10 bullet points on the GOP’s “promise to America” in their 2012 platform. Quite a few Republicans have even acknowledged this — at various times, Bob Dole, Jeb Bush, and even Mike freaking Hucakabee have commented on it.

I am by no means a Reagan fan, but I’d LOVE it if the GOP were actually still the Party of Reagan, rather than the party of wild-eyed conspiratorial rejection of basic facts.

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So, I’m going to concede that a couple of my comments were unnecessarily nasty.

I’ve researched your quote, and it is not clear to me that the “so-called Holocaust” line can be verified as ever actually having been spoken, as opposed to being attributed to him after the fact. I do agree it’s at least mildly disturbing that McCloskey went to speak to the IHR, since I think that they’re an irredeemable hate group. But to the extent that he was actually challenging their views, it’s not all that different from science educators going and speaking on issues of human biology to groups that hold anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-racial-minority positions.

You can find, in the Internet Archive, this public letter, in which McCloskey quite explicitly says he knows the camps were real and that atrocities were committed. I also would say that I have never heard of anything in his actual record, either in office or after, that makes me believe he’s ever had any interest in harming the civil rights of Jews, or the security and safety of Israel. His substantive position and arguments, which drew the ire of AIPAC and other even-more-extreme organizations, are not all that different from those of Israelites who see the Palestinians as human beings and neighbors rather than implacable enemies, and want a two-state solution that gives the Palestinians a viable homeland.

I’d also say that regardless of anything else, the guy is a product of his time, and that on balance he has an excellent record. The Kennedys, and LBJ, all seem to have had some anti-Semitic and racist biases, but still generally were good on policy. Nixon was RABIDLY anti-semitic, and nuts, but still did some good things. I’d be delighted to see anyone in the GOP claiming Nixon’s accomplishments on environmental policy as part of their legacy, and looking to put some “conservation” back in “conservatism”. Nixon also was an early advocate for the kind of managed private care model that we’re now finally implementing; it’s a shame Ted Kennedy didn’t work with him back in the ’70s to just do it then, and a bigger shame that there doesn’t seem to be a single Republican in Congress today who wants to coöperate with the Dems on making course corrections or fixing drafting errors in the ACA.

I still think your impression that the Democrats have “tilted to the left” is unsupportable, with perhaps the exception of civil rights for gays (though the victories on that issue are rotted in Andrew Sullivan’s conservative argument). Obama’s policies are those of an Eisenhower Republican. The great liberal accomplishment of this century is a health plan that literally originated at the Heritage Foundation. There are a handful of radical House Dems, such as Kucinich or Berkeley’s Barbara Lee; they have no power whatsoever. Bernie Sanders is a European-style advocate of Democratic Socialism. Even in a Dem-dominated state like California, the power structure can barely be thought of as liberal — certainly it’s far to the right of where a liberal from the ’60s of any stripe (labor, civil rights, green) would’ve expected, if they heard the liberal party had a supermajority.

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