Thread by @KevinMKruse

Thanks to the trolls in my mentions, I see Kevin Williamson is back at it in the pages of @NRO.

All right, a short thread. nationalreview.com/2019/06/joe-bi…

First of all, I'm flattered by the shout-out.

By "a reliable peddler of this sort of thing" I can only assume Williamson meant that I am "a reliable peddler of the overwhelming consensus of four decades of work by historians and political scientists."

My Twitter presence leads some to single me out now, but -- and I can't repeat this enough -- the case I present online is not some kind of edgy revisionism that I'm pushing alone but a standard account chronicled by countless historians and political scientists for decades.

Beyond the standard denialism about the party realignment, Williamson specifically takes issue with my assertion in this thread of mine that, when Biden entered the Senate in 1973, Jim Eastland (D-MS) and Herman Talmadge (D-GA) were seen as conservative.

https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1141475876837777409

Williamson asserts that "by most criteria" men like them were understood to be progressives.

Which criteria exactly?

In that thread and this one too, I went to lengths to show that, in 1973, by the criteria of the American Conservative Union -- you know, Matt Schlapp's group? the one that runs CPAC today? -- Eastland and Talmadge were considered to be quite conservative.

https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1141523506536075265

But maybe the American Conservative Union was an unreliable judge of ... American Conservatism.

Well, how about William F. Buckley Jr., who identifies Talmadge and Eastland as "conservative-minded Democrats" who might be lured to switch to the GOP?

https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1141729357477699586

So the American Conservative Union thought Eastland and Talmadge were conservative & William F. Buckley Jr. thought so too.

Williamson ignores all that and points to Talmadge's vote on Medicare. (You'll note he ignores Eastland's vote. Here it is.)

How representative was that one vote? How conservative were Eastland and Talmadge in 1965?

The ACU ratings don't start until 1971, but at the other end, the ADA had its liberal ratings.

Talmadge got a 12 from the ADA that year. Eastland ... zero. (Note Russell & Stennis too.)

So conservatives like the American Conservative Union & William F. Buckley thought they were conservatives, and liberals like the ADA thought they were conservatives.

And what about National Review itself?

Well, it literally ran a poem to Talmadge's conservatism in Jan 1972.

By most criteria, yes, it seems that Talmadge and Eastland were conservative.

Sincerely,
Your Most Humble and Reliable Peddler

Additional criteria:

Richard Nixon's strategist Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority (1969):

https://twitter.com/LarryGlickman/status/1142505044887113728

And their voting record in toto, in case you thought the ACU was skewing things.

https://twitter.com/rauchway/status/1142514070521729024