I think this misses the point. Parties changed in the last 60 years (not surprisingly), but not just in what they believed but how the power structure of parties worked. In the 1950s, you had the Roosevelt democrats who were progressive socially and economically. They believed in expanding the welfare state, and maintaining a powerful military, and focusing on Americas infrastructure. This very much fit with Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a proponent of the welfare state, he championed the biggest public works project in global history in the highway system, and while he did little to combat it, he was against both McCarthyism and segregation. While this sounds like a modern democrat, that's not how parties worked then. But you didn't just have Roosevelt democrats, you also had Wallace democrats.

Parties in post WWII America were largely regional coalitions. If you look at presidential elections, the democrats had a stranglehold on the south largely because of dixiecrats. Dixecrats were both socially and economically conservative, but they labelled themselves as democrats because the south formed a coalition in support of the democrats. The midwest was largely (almost exclusively) republican at this point, but they didn't all really love Eisenhower. I mean people like Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater would have been incredibly critical of Eisenhower, and they were both influential by the late 50s and early 60s. It wasn't until Reagan came along with the rise of conservatism that the republicans were basically exclusively conservative and the democrats were exclusively liberal.

The only other thing that I wanted to say was that the information age if anything is hurting the right. While there are places like Drudge report, in general online media is far more liberal than tv media and news print media. I would guess that the three most frequent sources on /r/politics are salon, huffington post and MSNBC. All of which are quite liberal news outlets. It's been sort of hard for the right to really get online media behind them because it is largely run by young just out of college progressives.