These days, folks go on about how back in olden times American conservatives, who tend to be Christians, were much more reasonable than they are now. Many claim the religious Right and its Republican Party has gone radically, toxically authoritarian in its adoration for Norman Vincent Peale–adherent hyper-narcissistic Donald Trump. McCain, the Bushes, Reagan, and even Nixon and Goldwater are cited as examples of past conservatives who didn’t offer up insane policy proposals unworthy of serious consideration. The acme of the model reasonable Republican  is popular two-term president Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower.

I beg to differ. American conservatism has been wild and wacky going way back, always being much more radical—and religious—than conservatism in the other developed democracies.

Ike is an example. Although criticized for some lapses in his military performance in World War II—the failure to anticipate the German Ardennes offensive comes to mind—Eisenhower was a highly effective general who led the Western Allied liberation of Europe while keeping his prima dona generals and politicians in line. Immensely popular in the United States, he sported a winning smile that softened the tough side of a man who ordered many young men to their deaths. Both parties tried to recruit him. At first somewhat resistant to entering politics, Eisenhower threw in his lot with the GOP. (My mother worked briefly in his White House as a top-line typist but turned down a permanent job.)

Eisenhower is remembered as a moderate Republican. He was the last major GOP figure who took deficits seriously—he sharply criticized the stimulus tax cuts of successor John F. Kennedy that Republicans have ever since cited as proof of the economy-boosting effects of tax cuts. He kept his distance from virulent Joe McCarthy while governing prudently in collaboration with the Democrats who largely controlled Congress. He also warned about the growing military industrial complex at the end of his last term.

But there were negatives as well. Fearing antagonizing the GOP hardline base he needed to get elected, Eisenhower did not directly confront  McCarthy. He even attended one of his rallies. McCarthyism has never really gone away; the senator’s notorious lawyer, Roy Cohen, became Trump’s lie-all-the-time legal advisor. To further keep the GOP base happy, Ike picked as his running mate—while holding his nose—the anti-Communist Richard Nixon, a borderline paranoid casual racist who never would have become president if not for his two terms as the respected Ike’s vice president.

In foreign policy, Eisenhower allowed the theoconservative, godless- and Commie-hating, WASP Dulles brothers, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, to globally run amuck. They overturned even democratically elected leftist governments while supporting pro-American autocracies who were loathed by their citizens. Iran is a hardline Islamic republic because Eisenhower put the friendly but inept Shah in place. Masses of Central Americans flee to our country because the Dulles brothers backed the American fruit growers who ruined their economies. The Ike team supported the Mafia-dominated Batista regime that was so vile that the megalomaniac atheist Castro could take over. The damage Eisenhower’s foreign affairs operatives did to the image of America as a fair-playing bastion of democracy is incalculable. It has led to  countless Yankee Go Home demonstrations and has never been repaired.

The 1950s may have been a peak of American popular piety, with three-quarters of Americans being church members who packed the pews on Sunday mornings. In part this was because most Americans had come to equate atheism with the dictatorial, godless Bolshevism that was running most of eastern Eurasia. My father was a classic Cold-War Eisenhower-Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan-Bushes Christian, albeit not particularly pious about it. Most do not think of Ike as a particularly ardent Christian. But it was he who in the panicked effort to make being godly part of what distinguished patriotic Americans from those atheist Reds made “In God We Trust” the national motto and inserted the deity into the Pledge of Allegiance. Just before leaving the White House, he claimed that those poor secular socialist Swedes were suffering from high rates of suicide. He had to quickly retract that because it was fake news, but the bigoted slander stuck. Today the gun-saturated United States is number one among first-world countries in suicides.

My parents were the only ones I knew who voted for Goldwater in 1964. Preferring nuclear destruction of civilization over Communist domination—check out Goldwater’s Why Not Victory? A Fresh Look at American Foreign Policy—Eisenhower helped make the bigoted and largely religious hard Right the dominant power in the GOP. This included the John Bircher line that extremism in the defense of liberty is a virtue. The GOP abandoned being the party of Abraham Lincoln by opposing the Civil Rights Act as well as Medicare. Nixon was a moderate in comparison. Although he hobnobbed with Communist dictators, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and advocated expansion of medical care, he also solidified the poisonous White Southern strategy that has helped doom our nation to the perpetual divisive racism common to White evangelicals. Reagan warned how Medicare would turn American into a socialist state, further dug into the Southern strategy, and pushed stripping women of their reproductive rights while facilitating the gun culture that is making the nation into a country of fear, intimidation, and death. The Bushes did much the same. John McCain used to look for obscure government science projects and slander them as absurd.

Here’s the thing. Such nonsense is not going on in any other developed democracy. Every other such nation [GP: MORE DETAIL ON WHAT IS AN “OTHER SUCH NATION”?—AS] , all more atheosecular and progressive than the United States, enjoys universal health care (which costs a lot less while delivering longer lifespans), strict gun control that keeps homicide and suicide rates low, big government spending and aid that tamps down poverty and income disparity while increasing upward socioeconomic mobility from the lower to the middle classes, and more gender equality. In none of these nations are these policies controversial or under serious challenge because the majorities are not idiots. The measures work too well to even imagine abandoning them. The ideas of small government and big religion are seen as ridiculous, because they obviously do not and cannot work. The United States that many have imagined as Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill of faith and success—which had some validity in the postwar years of PaxAmerica—is increasingly considered a failing state in danger of slipping to second-world status. Life spans have actually been contracting here, a classic warning sign of deep societal distress.

Blame the conservatives for the twenty-first-century national disaster. They have failed to acknowledge how theocon policies have failed or changed their tune to better match the much more moderate conservatism that is typical of other democracies. Instead, they have doubled down via massively funded propaganda from the ultra rich—not all of whom are religious; the Kochs are atheists—including a hardline media that includes an increasingly bizarre and authoritarian Fox News and the evangelical pulpits. The notion that American conservatives need to return to their “reasonable” basics of small government is sociopolitical madness. Even their core ideas are as radical as they are unworkable. To meet modern developed international conservative norms, the American Right has to abandon its promotion of religion and common consorts of creationism, gun possession, low taxes, opposition to universal health care and reproductive rights, and antiscientific denial of climate change. Ike was not as virulent as today’s theocons, but going back to his thinking is not going to benefit us or this country.