I get called a radical leftist pretty frequently now. Libtard, communist, socialist, Marxist, the whole gamut. My crimes: I think extreme wealth should be taxed, I think the social safety net matters, I think a permanent war industry is dangerous, and I think the system is rigged in favor of the people who own it.

Let me introduce you to a politician who agreed with me on every single one of these points. See if you can guess who it is. I’ll tell you up front: you know him. You might have a picture of him in your house.

He kept the top income tax rate at 91 percent. For his entire time in office, eight years, the top marginal rate sat between 91 and 92 percent. He was pressured constantly to cut it and he refused, because he believed paying the country’s bills came before tax relief for people at the top. Corporate taxes ran around 50 percent. And the economy didn’t collapse. It boomed. The middle class of legend, the one that many people are nostalgic for, got built during those years, under exactly those rates.

He supported unions. One out of every three American workers belonged to a union while he was in office, the highest share in our history, and he was fine with that. His words: “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice.”

He expanded Social Security. In his time in office he expanded it, bringing roughly ten million more Americans under its coverage. And in 1954 he put his opinion of the people who wanted it gone in writing, in a letter to his own brother. Any political party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and labor laws, he wrote, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” He allowed that a tiny splinter group believed otherwise, and then he named them: “a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman.” And followed that up with “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

An American president, in writing, calling the people who wanted to gut the safety net stupid, and identifying oil millionaires as the splinter group pushing it. I get called a communist for saying less.

He believed the government should fund science and innovation. He created NASA. He created the research agency that later built the network that became the internet. He poured federal money into science education because he thought the country’s future was a public investment, not a private hobby.

He called military spending theft. In 1953 he stood up and said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Theft. From the poor. That was his word for it.

On his way out of office in 1961, he gave a farewell warning. Before World War II, he explained, America had no permanent arms industry. We built weapons when war came and stopped when it ended. Now, he said, we had created a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions, and we were spending more on the military every single year than the net income of every corporation in the United States combined. His fear was specific: an industry whose survival depends on conflict now had the money and the reach to influence the government that decides whether we go to conflict. The machine profits from war, and the machine helps steer the choices about war. He said its influence, economic, political, even spiritual, was felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. He gave it the name we still use: the military-industrial complex.

He enforced civil rights with paratroopers. He appointed the Chief Justice who wrote Brown v. Board of Education. When Arkansas defied school integration, he sent the 101st Airborne to walk nine Black children into Little Rock Central High School. He signed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and finished desegregating the armed forces. He was not a modern progressive, and I’m not going to pretend he was. He was something that might be more shocking to today’s audience: a Republican who enforced the Constitution and Civil Rights with the Army.

And he valued a government funded infrastructure, backing that belief by building the largest public works project in US history. Forty-one thousand miles of highway funded by a gas tax.

Who was he? Dwight D. Eisenhower. Five-star general. Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, the man who ran D-Day. Two-term Republican president, elected twice in landslides, so beloved that both parties tried to recruit him first.

Now, Ike was no saint and no modern liberal. He was a genuine budget hawk who balanced budgets and hated deficits. He was a man of the 1950s on plenty of social questions, and some of his record there is ugly by any modern standard. But consider this: a mainstream Republican 5-star general from the 1950s thought 91 percent top rates, strong unions, an expanding social safety net, public funded science, and deep suspicion of the war industry were plain common sense. Not radical or leftist, but rather just what a responsible country does. His own description of his politics: conservative when it comes to money, liberal when it comes to human beings.

There were people in the 1950s who looked at that record and concluded Eisenhower was a communist. They had an organization, the John Birch Society, and its founder put it in writing: Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

The rest of the conservatives laughed them out of the room. Barry Goldwater thought it was nonsense. William F. Buckley, the founding father of modern conservatism, spent years shoving the Birchers out of the movement because he considered them a lunatic fringe that made conservatism look insane.

In 1958, believing Eisenhower’s platform was communism made you a certified crank by conservative standards.

In 2026, it just makes you a regular in my comments section.

I’m standing roughly where the dead center of American politics stood within my own lifetime, holding Ike’s tax tables, quoting a five-star Republican general, and getting called a radical leftist for it.

Somehow, the line moved so far that the man who liberated Europe now reads as a Marxist, and the people the conservative movement once threw out as lunatics are now the ones deciding who gets to be an American.

So the next time somebody calls me a radical leftist, I have my answer ready. I’m an Eisenhower Republican who supports equal rights for all. Go ahead. Look him up. You might develop a new respect for all of the many things you so clearly take for granted, starting with the highway you drive on.

Tax wealth, not work. Ike would have called that idea common sense.