Paywall removed: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fmagazine%2Farchive%2F1987%2F07%2Fthe-republicans Three Republican factions emerged after the Second World War: the parties of Wall Street, Main Street, and, eventually, Easy Street.
Wall Street was the eastern wing of the party. It was the Republican Party of Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, and Nelson Rockefeller. In a usage that must have been hopelessly confusing to Marxists, the Wall Street Republicans were usually considered to be the left wing of the party, since big business quickly learned to accommodate to and even prosper under the big-government economic policies of the New Deal.
Main Street was the midwestern wing of the Republican Party, its geographic and ideological center. Main Street Republicans were rural and small-town dwellers, bankers and small-business men—decent, honest, God-fearing, and tightfisted. The Republican Party of Main Street was the party of Robert Taft and Everett Dirksen, of Arthur Vandenberg and Gerald Ford.
These two wings of the party found themselves in a confrontation shortly after the Second World War. Main Street Republicans were “real Republicans,” who longed to turn the clock back to pre-New Deal America and who displayed more than a tinge of isolationism. Wall Street Republicans were “me-too Republicans” and staunch internationalists, motivated by economic self-interest and businesslike pragmatism. The showdown came in 1952, when Eisenhower, the candidate of Wall Street, defeated Senator Taft, of Ohio, for the Republican nomination.
The remainder of the 1950s saw a gradual reconciliation between eastern and midwestern Republicans. Many leading midwestern figures, like Senator Vandenberg, of Michigan, had already converted to internationalism, as a result of the Second World War. The Cold War converted the rest of the isolationists, who had objected to America’s alliance with the left but now supported a foreign policy of militant anti-communism.
Easy Street, the Republican Parry of the nouveau riche, is an altogether new phenomenon. It appeared quite suddenly in the suburbs and boomtowns of the Sun Belt, a part of the country that had never been a center of Republican strength. Easy Street Republicanism first became visible with the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, in 1964, when Goldwater challenged and defeated the eastern establishment of the party, as represented by Rockefeller and William Scranton.
The Easy Street wing of the party espouses a vigorous, populist, anti-establishment conservatism that appeals to many working-class voters and Democrats, particularly on social issues and foreign policy. In 1964 the Goldwater movement attacked the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus that accepted peaceful coexistence with communism. In 1976 Ronald Reagan ran against his own party’s policy of détente. The backlash against civil rights also contributed to Goldwater’s southern support in 1964 and to the Republican Party’s subsequent rapid growth in the South. The 1968 Wallace vote, for example, which was almost entirely an expression of racial backlash, was essentially folded into the 1972 Nixon vote; Nixon’s worst state in 1968, Mississippi, became his best state in 1972. Outside the South, racial and social-issue backlash brought a good many white ethnics into the Republican Party. What had once been an exclusive club for the WASP elite now found itself overrun with Irish and Italian Catholics, the so-called Archie Bunker vote. The most dramatic example is the Republican Party of New York. A party once led by Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Kenneth Keating, and John Lindsay now counts as its top office-holder Alfonse D’Amato, who was resoundingly re-elected in 1986 in a straight two-party race.