Philosophic support of it by the likes of Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, Tom Dewey, Ike Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and even Richard Nixon, would have been unimaginable, for they all assumed and expected an active role to be taken by government. Small government has no response to these deficiencies in the market, for it is fundamentally negative . There is no longer any way to bring before the electorate a constructive series of policies and projects designed to shore up the social shortcomings of unbridled capitalism, once it has been accepted as a cardinal principle that government is highly expensive and largely ineffective. In political combat this agenda gap immediately becomes as big as all outdoors. Complex financial repercussions are arguable, but budget balancing and international high finance are not for the common mind.
Few households can actually keep their tiny cash flow constantly above water.
Something more likely to reach the solar plexus is needed. Character Assault Nature abhors a vacuum. Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater were nothing if not resourceful. Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, paved the way for this then-questionable technique. Eisenhower obviously despised it.