Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (12 page)

Still, Nixon’s “new majority” never extended to Congress, which remained under Democratic control throughout his time in office. Indeed, after Nixon was forced from power by Watergate, Democrats vastly enhanced their congressional dominance in the 1974 election. The “Watergate babies” elected that year were to help Democrats hang on to the House for another two decades.

Certainly Ronald Reagan’s two triumphs, followed by the election of his vice president, George H. W. Bush, in 1988, were seen as a mark of the permanence of what came to be known as the Reagan Coalition. Reagan picked up the party from the wreckage of Watergate and the narrow defeat of President Gerald Ford by Jimmy Carter in 1976. He helped crack the Democrats’ twenty-six-year lock on control of the U.S. Senate in 1980, when the Republicans picked up twelve seats. Eventually, after the 2000 election, George W. Bush would become the first Republican president since 1952 to preside over a Congress in which both houses were controlled by Republicans.

There are two other moments when hopes for Republican dominance seemed, for the short term, justified. Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994 deserves to be seen as the most durable of all the GOP’s breakthroughs. Until Gingrich, Democrats controlled the House for forty consecutive years—and, more astoundingly, for 58 of the 62 years since FDR’s 1932 victory. Reestablishing competitiveness in the contest for control of the House is an enduring achievement.

And there was one promise of a new Republican era that differed from all the others. It anticipated the GOP’s long-term success
not
as a victory for the right or center-right but as a triumph that would be earned by way of a journey down the middle of the road.
During Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, Arthur Larson, one of Ike’s advisers, coined the term “Modern Republicanism” to codify what he saw
as Ike’s underlying philosophy of moderation. Essentially, Larson wanted the party to do over the long term what Eisenhower had done in office: to come to terms with the New Deal and the welfare state—to support “as much government as is necessary,” as Larson put it, “but not enough to stifle the normal motivations of private enterprise.”

Had Richard Nixon defeated John F. Kennedy in 1960, he might well have turned Modern Republicanism—the very approach that Buckley, Goldwater, and their conservative allies loathed—into his governing philosophy. Nixon, after all, waited a long time before he identified himself as a conservative, and was never fully comfortable doing so.
Chris Matthews’s joint biography of Kennedy and Nixon reminds us that when the two were first elected to Congress in 1946, it was Kennedy who ran as the “fighting conservative” while Nixon proclaimed his allegiance to “practical liberalism.”

No one talks much about “Modern Republicanism” anymore, yet it may have been the great missed opportunity of American politics.

Still, 1960 was a consensual time and 1968 was not. The Nixon who had been a supporter of civil rights became the Nixon of law and order, pursuing the votes of southern whites and northern working-class voters, particularly Catholics in the big cities. The very structure of the 1968 contest made Nixon the man in the middle—between the liberalism of Hubert Humphrey, already weakened by his association with LBJ and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, and George Wallace, the outspoken segregationist Alabama governor. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the Democratic Party crackup as the party’s left revolted against Johnson on the Vietnam War, even as its right, in the South and in white ethnic neighborhoods in the Northeast and Midwest, revolted around the questions of desegregation, crime, and welfare.

Nixon’s conservative advisers, including Phillips and Pat Buchanan, his young personal emissary to the party’s right, knew that the path to a future Republican majority was not down the middle road. It would be built by converting Wallace’s Democrats and Independents into Republicans.
Nixon was never going to be a hero to the left, they argued. His hope lay in a “silent majority” anchored on the right.

The failure of three different realigning moments—four if one includes the Gingrich Revolution of 1994—helps explain the slowly building rage on the right end of American politics.

Over and over, the conservative rank and file was promised that
this
victory would be the decisive one. It was the conservative version of “the final conflict” that Marxists sang about. At each juncture, conservatives felt they had finally created a long-lasting governing majority in the tradition of the New Deal coalition, only to see those hopes disappointed.

Samuel Lubell, the public opinion analyst, wrote in 1952 of the existence of a dominant party he called the “sun” party, and a minority party he referred to as the “moon” party. “It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out,” he said, “while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated.”

But every time the conservative movement sensed it might finally be part of the sun party, its sun would set, prematurely. Today’s rage on the right is the culmination of decades of broken dreams.

“These are people who grew up voting for Reagan and winning twice, and then Bush [wins], and feeling like the country was kind of moving in their direction,” said William Kristol. And then conservatives started losing elections—four of six after 1992, and five of six in the popular vote.

“And they lose on certain cultural fights—marriage and others,” he continued. They win “mild victories” in the Supreme Court, “but ultimately . . .
Roe v. Wade
’s not getting overturned. And the country’s more secular. . . . I don’t know. Why wouldn’t they be unhappy with the way things are going? I mean, you can say, you know, they were optimists then and now they’re pessimists, but that’s just another way of saying they’ve lost a lot of fights. That’s just objectively true, I think. Government hasn’t been radically rolled back. The Reagan gains are pretty evanescent from a certain point of view.”

Indeed they are. And the pattern began with Richard Nixon.

The struggles inside Nixon himself and within Nixon’s 1968 campaign provide a template for the battles that would rage within Republicanism into our time. Almost alone among Republican politicians, Nixon managed to remain on decent terms with all wings of the GOP. He personally embodied the full range of a party’s sensibilities as few other politicians ever have. Although his own career seemed at an end after he lost a 1962 campaign for governor of
California and gave an angry postelection performance at what he called his “last press conference,” Nixon still harbored hopes of being nominated for president again in 1964. But he remained at the sidelines as Goldwater and Rockefeller tore each other apart. And when Goldwater won the nomination, Nixon did not walk away, as so many moderate and liberal Republicans did, but campaigned for Goldwater all over the country. Nixon won gratitude on the right and Goldwater’s enduring loyalty—broken only when the Arizona senator decided that Nixon’s actions during and after Watergate demanded his resignation. In the 1966 midterm elections, Nixon campaigned for Republican candidates of every ideological stripe and received a share of the credit when the GOP picked up forty-seven seats in the House, the clear signal that the era of the Great Society was over, just two years after Johnson’s landslide.

The 1966 elections also strengthened the hand of those who favored a Southern Strategy and saw new openings around racial issues. Republican House and Senate candidates, the historian Julian Zelizer noted,
“were determined to capitalize on the underlying fragility of the liberal victories in 1964 by exploiting the tensions that had arisen over housing, the War on Poverty, civil rights and other issues the liberals had pushed.” While most Republican candidates “didn’t believe that opposing civil rights or even focusing on urban unrest was their best strategy,” Zelizer noted that many in the party—including Ronald Reagan in his 1966 campaign for governor of California—actively campaigned against open housing laws that had created a backlash among white homeowners.

By 1968, Nixon was again the nation’s dominant Republican. His principal rival for the nomination, Governor George Romney of Michigan, dropped out of the contest after telling reporters he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War by American government officials there. It was an unfortunate term that was unfairly invoked to question Romney’s psychological stability. It carried heavy baggage in a Cold War era when communists were alleged to have brainwashed American POWs. George Romney’s campaign was largely dismissed by history until his son won the Republican nomination in 2012.
But Geoffrey Kabaservice, the definitive chronicler of the downfall of moderate Republicanism, is right in asserting that “Romney was the GOP moderates’
last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency, which in turn would have preserved the long-term viability of the moderate movement.” Never again would a moderate Republican of progressive instincts start out with a real chance of winning the party’s nomination. Representative John Anderson’s fight for the Republican nomination in 1980 would prove the point: a politician of his inclinations was far too progressive for the party. Anderson eventually ran for the presidency as an Independent, taking a rump of Republican moderate activists with him.

Even after Romney’s fall, Nixon’s nomination did not go uncontested. As was his wont, he was the middle man, opposed from the left by Rockefeller and from the right by Ronald Reagan’s late entry after less than two years as California’s governor. And it was the South, more than any other region, that delivered for Nixon at the Republican convention in Miami Beach. He won 78 percent of its delegates, including, critically, the support of Senator Strom Thurmond and his South Carolina delegation. In 1948 Thurmond had bolted the Democratic Party to run as a Dixiecrat candidate opposed to Harry Truman’s civil rights policies. In 1964 he had switched to the Republican Party in response to the civil rights bill and Goldwater’s candidacy. In 1968 he held southern conservatives for Nixon. The southern strategy was alive and well.

What’s intriguing in retrospect is that Nixon was not fully sold in 1968 on building a new coalition of southern whites and urban Catholics around hard-edged issues related to crime, campus disorder, and, indirectly, race. In his memoir about Nixon’s 1968 campaign,
The Greatest Comeback,
Pat Buchanan described a split in the campaign along ideological lines.
The research-and-writing team—he was part of it—strongly urged an appeal to what Buchanan called the “gut vote” of middle-class constituencies angry about crime, a liberal Supreme Court, and student dissidents on college campuses. On the other side were moderates, including Leonard Garment, who was later Nixon’s White House counsel; William Safire, the future
New York Times
columnist; Robert Ellsworth, a progressive former Republican House member from Kansas; and Ray Price, former editorial page editor of the
New York Herald Tribune,
one of last bastions of liberal Republicanism.

Typical from the Buchanan camp was a two-thousand-word memo written by conservative writer Jeffrey Bell arguing that the Nixon campaign was
so fearful of mistakes that it had settled on a timid, “not taking chances” strategy. When Nixon did say something that caught public attention (Bell’s examples included his comments on the Columbia University student protests, the Supreme Court, and the crime issue) “the initial flurry of protests from the liberal press has often caused it to be modified—if not dropped.”

Bell urged Nixon to tough it out on such occasions. “Liberal commentators will accuse us of demagogy whenever we do something that is appealing,” Bell wrote. “I think we must steel ourselves to that fact.” In the margin, Buchanan reports that Nixon wrote the word “Right.”

Yet Nixon was torn, drawn as he was to his man-in-the-middle role. As Buchanan writes:

He seemed of two minds: One responded instinctively, viscerally, positively, in margin notes to what Jeff [Bell] had written. That Nixon wanted a fighting campaign. But wary of backlash, the other Nixon would heed the counsel of those who warned that he was risking becoming another Goldwater, that he was resurrecting the “old Nixon” of the McCarthy Era and the Helen Gahagan Douglas days. The battle for the soul of the Republican Party between a robust and rising conservative movement and a Rockefeller-Javits-Lindsay wing in eclipse was raging inside the Nixon staff of 1968.
Courage and Hesitation
was the title of a book novelist Alan Drury would write about Nixon in 1972. The title fit the candidate of 1968.

Buchanan’s description nicely captures how Nixon continued to behave as president. The “liberal” Nixon presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He approved the indexing of Social Security benefits to inflation. Urged on by dissident Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he pushed for the Family Assistance Plan, an attempt to establish a minimum guaranteed income for poor families. His economic policies infuriated free marketers. They included wage price controls and a scrapping of the twenty-seven-year-old Bretton Woods currency system.