Full marks to Jay Cost for his deft evisceration of Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, and their resurrection of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a liberal Democrat. What Fineman and Matthews don’t know about American history could fill a book—and in each instance, has done so.

My subject, however, is the recurring Democratic complaint—or, more properly, talking point—that the Republican Party has now ‘strayed’ so far to the right that its onetime standard bearers, from Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, would not only fail to recognize their political home but would be estranged from it.