I’m guessing you mean this poster, that puts Bernie (”Acceptance of the ‘S’ Word”) in a lineage with T.R. (Sherman Anti-Trust Act), FDR (Social Security), Eisenhower (Interstate Highway System) and LBJ (Medicare & Medicaid)

My first thought is “gah, that succession makes no sense for any political tendency”, except the fact that I’m seeing it here means that by definition it does, so hm.

I suppose makes sense to align Bernie w/ those 4 as the most proactive-institutionalist presidencies of the 20th Century, since Grant maybe.

Now you know who would agree with the take though, it was the conservatives of the ‘50s. Eisenhower was the first Republican president since 1932, and they expected him to fix it all - undo the welfare state, stand down the WWII wartime apparatus like the “Return to Normalcy” had after WWI, undo the labor protections they regarded as little more than official support for banditry

With hindsight a corner had already been turned - under the Truman administration Congress had reigned in labor with the Taft-Hartley act, setting up purges of radical unions. Accompanying were the McCarthyite purges of administrative agencies, media, and society. All in all Truman’s “Fair Deal” tempered the New Deal with the old Square Deal of company-town patriarchalism (alt. “Knights of the Rotary Meeting manorialism”).

But that socialists were suppressed just goes to remind that there were socialists to suppress, that these programs had been kicked off in a world where they were an active tendency, often the motive tendency. Eisenhower seemed to think that sure, some moderate amount of socialism was okay, and he thought that in a time when moderate, socialist-inclusive regimes in Eastern Europe and China were leading to communist totalitarianisms and people guessed who would be next - Finland, Sweden, Italy? Great Britain? And gosh, the conservatives didn’t know what to call someone who could look at these countries’ trajectory and continue to smile on the process in their own, except, you know, socialist.

That’s what really ignited the conservative movement, the realization that electing Republicans wasn’t enough and they needed to organize to affirmatively put across the notion that there was no amount of democracy that made any amount of socialism acceptable.