Yes Nate Silver seems very confused about what legislative positions Republican presidents have “articulated”. If he is talking about rhetoric, fine. The simple fact is that Republican presidents have advanced statism just as much if not more than Democrats.
Nixon expanded the regulatory power of the government by leaps and bounds and intervened heavily into monetary affairs.
Reagan voiced opposition to statism while expanding spending at an unprecedented pace, saving SS, and appointing Greenspan. Greenspan transformed the Fed into the bubble machine it is today, greatly expanding the power of the central government to manipulate the economy.
Bush played footsy with market solutions but went on a regulatory spending binge and expanded transfer of wealth to Boomers. All this while launching a Wilsonian crusade for democracy in Iraq and later committing the most egregious economic intervention since the New Deal.
Trump exploded deficit spending and has intervened in trade affairs. He is on the verge of partnering with the Dems on a $2 trillion infrastructure handout, as I predicted would happen.
If someone is trying to call Nixon, Trump, and Bush conservative, there is a good chance they are simply trying to smear conservatives. These are hated figures, so they must be conservative in order to service the liberal fanboys of Silver.
I think that Nixon was definitely not conservative by the modern definition, which I pointed out earlier. Bush Sr. was a bit of a mixed bag. Some things he did were conservative, with the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the SCOTUS being his most lasting legacy in this regard. This is offset by things like signing tax increases and the way he managed the first Iraq war.
As far as Trump, I’m going to come right out and say any argument that Trump is not conservative is fast becoming something that doesn’t have to even be argued against. Trump has basically convinced enough conservatives that whatever he supports is the correct position, basically making Trump position = conservative by definition.
Very few people still call themselves conservative? I could be wrong, but my guess is that you’re thinking about old school conservatives like Bill Kristol, George Will, and William Buckley. Sure, those guys identifie(d) themselves as conservative, but so do Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, etc. I’m pretty sure that most fundamentalist and evangelical religious people would probably say they were conservatives, and they make a lot more than a “very few people” and most of them support Trump.
ETA: What I’m saying is that the old school conservatives that I assume you’re thinking about have basically had the term stolen out from under them.
Are you asking about how we today would view each of the 45 presidents? Or about how voters at the time they were elected would have viewed them?
I think the first question quickly loses meaning once you go back into the 19th Century, as their political issues don’t map to our left/right spectrum.
The second would be interesting to know, but early Americans didn’t think of politics in terms of left vs right. The left/right dichotomy was invented when Washington was still in office, but in France during their revolution. It originally meant you either supported a monarchy (right) or supported a republic (left). And at this point in time it basically means you support Team Red or Team Blue, and represents very little in ideological terms. I think the concept of left/right in American politics was born during the 20th Century, and can’t really be extended back much further than that.
Both can be discussed, as well as any matters that arose or may arise directly from the discussion.
I suppose one can think of Presidents in absolute terms - “Which US Presidents were on the political left/right?” [according to our view today of left and right]" - and also in relative terms - “Which US Presidents represented the political left and right of their time?”.
I was looking through the maps of presidential election results over the past few decades on Wikipedia.
The results of the 1956 election (Eisenhower vs Adlai Stevenson) and the 1964 election (L.B. Johnson vs Barry Goldwater), just eight years apart, show an almost complete flip in red and blue states. Republican Eisenhower won almost everything except the Deep South, and then eight years later, Democrat Johnson won almost everything except the Deep South.
From reading his Wikipedia page, Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, seems like a moderate liberal, but with the albatross around his neck of having to try and retain support of the Southern Democrats, a link which was broken by desegregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by Johnson.
Maps of later presidential elections, from Johnson onwards, tend to show Democrats’ heartland in the North and Republican heartland in the South. There’s one exception, though, which is 1976, Carter vs Ford, in which Carter took most of the South for the Democrats. Why did Carter do so well in the South in this election? Previously, the Deep South had voted for uber-conservatives like Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Harry F. Byrd, and have generally voted Republican in recent decades. Was it because Carter was from the South?
Um no. The Federalists and later the Whigs tended to supported by the wealthy merchant class of New England as well as the great planters of the South (hence Cotton Whigs) and as a result supported highly hierarchical forms of government with restricted suffrage rights. By contrast, the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian stream of American politics tended to favour civil liberties and universal (white male) suffrage. Nor were the Federalists and Whigs particularly likely to be abolitionist given many of their number were from the South and thus slaveonwers. It was only well into the 19th Century that American politics split along pro and antislavery lines thus bringing many former Democrats into the antislavery coalition that was the Republican Party.
This isn’t to romanticize Jefferson and Jackson as enlightened modern liberals given their obvious hypocrisy on slavery as well as Indian Removal and silly notions of an agrarian America that would have crippled her rise to world power. We can be thankful today that the modern American polity takes the best elements of the Jeffersonian (democracy, civil liberties, belief in the common man) and the Hamiltonian (State driven developmental capitalism, a strong federal government, a strong military) traditions.