Matthew Continetti Quotes
Something peculiar has happened. As I write, none of the Republican candidates for Senate has become a public embarrassment. On the contrary: For the first time in a decade, it is the Democratic candidates, not the Republican ones, who are fodder for late-night comics. That the Democrats are committing gaffes and causing scandals at a higher rate than Republicans not only may be decisive in the battle for the Senate. It could signal a change in our politics at large.
Continetti, Matthew. "The Democratic Jokes." The Washington Free Beacon, Center for American Freedom, 17 Oct. 2014.
Lecture, FDR Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY, June 24, 2006
Goldwater was the Republican Nominee for President and Kilpatrick a Journalist & Columnist. Both were leading conservatives of their time.
One of the reasons that Reagan was so popular and effective was the he was positive and civil in his public and political relations. Although he was clearly conservative, he worked very well with the Democrats in Congress and in the state. The Republican Party after Reagan had become totally negative and offered nothing positive and specific. Lack of comity and much nastiness had become the Republican legislative style and on Radio and TV the nastiness rivaled that of McCarthyism. Conservatives like Graham who were civil and polite to Democrats and everyone else, were actually castigated and attacked by other Republican leaders and spokespeople.
The Republicans were the secular party at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It was the Democrats who were the religious party and evangelicals and fundamentalists overwhelmingly supported William Jennings Bryan, the 3 time Democratic Presidential candidate who himself was a religious fundamentalist. Republicans campaigned against the Democrats on separation of church and state issues. See {589654} for a quote on the Republican shift.
This quotation is very surprising to most people who are not familiar with the history of the struggle regarding abortion in America. In the early days of the family planning movement and when abortion rights were first advocated in America, the proponents were almost all Republicans. At the time, the Republican Party consisted of economic conservatives and social liberals—“Rockefeller Republicans they would later be called. At the same time the Democratic Party was aligned very differently. The Southern Conservatives and fundamentalist Protestants of the Bible Belt were all Democrats. Most Roman Catholics were Democrats. Intellectuals at the time tended to side with the Democrats on economic issues and with the Republicans on social issues. In the 1960s the Republicans went after the racist resentment in the South over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Southern Democrats of the Solid South switched to the Republican Party, and many liberal republicans, reacting to their party now being the party of the the anti equality racists, became Republicans. The Southern Democrats then pushed out the moderate Republicans who were the social liberals.
Matthew Joseph Continetti is an American journalist and a Resident Fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
