Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (14 page)

All this happened gradually, until there were no liberals and only a few moderates left. The shape of what was coming could have been discerned in 1976.

Reagan’s 1976 campaign was a triumphant defeat. His rise to the White House began not in 1980 but in 1976. That’s when he established himself as not only the undisputed leader of the conservative movement but also the most popular figure in his party.
He gave conservatives a rallying cry they would use for decades by “raising a banner of no pale pastels but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand.” In introducing his account of Reagan’s glorious loss,
Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All
, conservative activist and writer Craig Shirley observes:
“Without Reagan’s 1976 campaign, Americans would not have
witnessed the reordering of the two major political parties and the shift in our political universe. . . .”

Ford had hoped to rout Reagan, and the accidental incumbent did well in the early primaries. But mid-campaign, Ford ran head-on into the power of the conservative movement in the person of Jesse Helms in the North Carolina primary. Reagan rolled to a series of subsequent primary victories, particularly in the South, and briefly went ahead of Ford in the delegate count.

Three aspects of the Ford-Reagan battle are instructive for what would come later. First was the power of single-issue politics—and, in particular, the ability of conservatives to use a single issue to dramatize a larger point or drive home a broader attack. For Reagan, it was opposition to turning over the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. (The issue would later serve him well against Jimmy Carter, too.)
“When it comes to the Canal,” Reagan would say, to raucous approval from his crowds, “we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” Few politicians had anticipated that the issue would be decisive, and even conservatives such as Barry Goldwater approved of making a deal with Panama. But as Rick Perlstein noted in
The Invisible Bridge,
the issue also stood for something else.
He cited David Keene, a Reagan organizer who would play a large role in the conservative movement. Keene was surprised by the power of the canal question, which was getting very little play in the newspapers. It would not be the first time that conservatives would respond to a cause that the mainstream media had seen as marginal. For Keene, the canal stood in for larger fears about American loss of influence in the world—a logical conclusion after the Vietnam debacle. “The issue I sense,” Keene said, “is ‘The empire is in decline.’ ” Such feelings were at the heart of conservative and right-wing critiques of Kissingerian diplomacy: a belief that Ford and Nixon, under Kissinger’s tutelage, were accommodating decline rather than reversing it. (In 2015, Donald Trump would appeal to the same impulses by using a Reagan slogan, “Make America Great Again,” as his own.) The Panama issue gathered force during Jimmy Carter’s administration when American hostages were seized in Iran and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Reagan would establish himself then as the champion of renewing the United States’ global power.

Nineteen seventy-six also brought the first indications of the intensity of
the right’s opposition to abortion.
Roe v. Wade
was only three years old, and the early stirrings of religious activism against the decision would lead to the rise of the Christian Right. Abortion would, for some time, be the premier single issue, with gun rights close behind.

In struggling for the Republican nomination, Ford was continuously required to accommodate his more conservative foes. He had already dumped Rockefeller as his vice president, announcing a year in advance that he would choose a different running mate.
“The conservative challenge drove Ford to the right,” Kabaservice wrote. “For many moderates, his rhetoric on school prayer, busing, government spending and abortion began to sound uncomfortably like Reagan’s.” Ford even distanced himself from his own approach to international affairs. “We are going to forget the use of the word
détente,
” he said.
Fearing that whatever they might do would only weaken Ford and help Reagan, “progressive Republicans were largely paralyzed,” recalled Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias of Maryland, a lion of liberal Republicanism (who, at the age of eighty-six, a little more than a year before he died, would endorse Barack Obama in his first campaign for president).

To further mollify Reagan’s forces, Ford let through a platform plank on “Morality in Foreign Policy.” It was a barely veiled rebuke to his own policies and a calculated insult to Kissinger, his secretary of state. When it came to selecting a running mate, Ford would have preferred William Ruckelshaus, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, or Senator Howard Baker, who rose to fame for his even-handedness during the Senate’s Watergate hearings. But to satisfy Reagan and the right, Ford picked Senator Bob Dole. Dole was then seen as a fighting conservative, though like so many others of traditional conservative inclinations, he would later be regarded as a moderate.

A pattern was set: even when moderate conservatives won, they secured their victories only by appeasing the militants.

Yet there was one discordant note for Reagan early in the campaign that spoke to the difficulty conservatives faced in translating their principles into practical and popular policies.
Reagan might have won the nomination in 1976 but for one particularly bold idea, a plan “to cut $90 billion from the federal budget and slash income taxes while simultaneously balancing the
budget, all of this to be achieved by transferring spending authority to the states.” For the right, it had everything: budget cuts, tax cuts, and enhanced states’ rights.
But there was a catch, as Kabaservice noted: “This would also transfer a massive taxation burden to the states, which New Hampshire residents quickly realized would end their freedom from state income and sales taxes.” Ford won the New Hampshire primary, narrowly, and built a lead that Reagan’s later surge could not overcome.

Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but radical changes in the structure of benefits and taxes, even in the name of conservative principles, are often viewed skeptically by voters. They reflect a different kind of “conservatism,” temperamental rather than ideological, and wary of radical changes. It was, as Goldwater had already learned, often at odds with the philosophical demands of the conservative movement.

For Reagan, 1976 was a temporary setback. He came very close to winning, and he learned a great deal in the process. He would prove himself quite capable of flexibility when success demanded it.

It is easy to forget that in defeating Ford, Jimmy Carter came close to overturning the entire conservative electoral project. Dealing a mighty blow to the Republicans’ southern hopes, Carter swept the South, winning every former Confederate state except Virginia. In the thirteen elections from 1960 to 2012, Carter would be the only Democrat to carry Mississippi and Alabama. Carter carried Texas and South Carolina, something no Democrat would do again through the 2012 election. Carter’s southern coalition, moreover, fulfilled the populists’ dream from the 1890s by drawing a class line across the South, allying African-Americans with whites of more modest income. Key southern counties that had voted for George Wallace in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1972 voted overwhelmingly for Carter in 1976. Because of Carter’s strength in the rural South, he was the last Democrat to carry a majority of the nation’s counties: 1,711. In 2012, Barack Obama won a slightly larger share of the popular vote than Carter. But since his support was concentrated in metropolitan areas, Obama carried only 692 of the nation’s 3,113 counties.

But Carter’s breakthrough was short-lived. His presidency was not without real achievements. The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is one of the enduring legacies of his years in office. The Panama Canal treaty created political problems for Carter, but it, too, was enduring and helpful to American relations with Central and South America. Carter’s emphasis on human rights in American foreign policy helped pave the way for some of the successes Reagan enjoyed later. By associating the United States with this cause, Carter helped undo the damage done to America’s image during the Vietnam years and weakened the Soviet Union in the global ideological struggle. He also pushed the pace of democratization in South America. The move toward economic deregulation began under Carter, not Reagan, and so too did the military arms buildup.

But these last achievements did Carter little good among liberals (even if some of them, including Ted Kennedy, supported deregulatory moves in the interest of consumers). Carter disappointed the left by failing to push for national health insurance and was cool to labor law reform that might have strengthened the union movement. Kennedy’s challenge to Carter in the 1980 presidential primaries was a sign of liberal frustration, but Kennedy also picked up blue-collar votes in many states that would eventually transfer to Reagan. In any event, Carter was hit by a series of crises—stagflation, the energy crisis, soaring interest rates, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—that would have made his reelection difficult even with a more unified party.

There were also forces at work not entirely within Carter’s control, and these would shape conservatism in important ways. The inflation of the 1970s, later accompanied by rising unemployment to produce “stagflation,” had a double effect. It undercut confidence in traditional Keysenian economics because its prescriptions no longer seemed to be working. It also led to sharp increases in taxes on moderate-income families. The first resulted in the rise of supply-side economics, which were really very old-fashioned conservatism in attractive new clothes. The second set off a tax revolt.

The most celebrated example, California’s Proposition 13 enacted by the voters themselves in 1978, was, in part, an unintended consequence of long-term prosperity. The state’s growth led to astonishing increases in property values: between April 1974 and April 1978, the price of the average house in
Los Angeles County rose by 120 percent. The higher values were translated into higher property taxes. Inflation also drove nominal (but not necessarily real) incomes higher, pushing middle-class voters into tax brackets never intended for them. “When inflation blended with tax schedules to push up rates,” wrote the liberal economics writer Robert Kuttner, “hard-pressed consumers were in no mood to tolerate rising taxes, as they might have been a decade earlier when times were good.”

On the surface, the 1978 mid-term elections rendered a mixed political verdict. Democrats suffered a net loss of only three seats in the Senate, for example, because most of the Republican pickups were offset by Democratic gains. But Republicans cut into Democratic territory and did well in contested terrain. They picked up two seats in Minnesota (one in a special election called after the death of the liberal giant, Hubert Humphrey) and also defeated Democratic incumbents in Maine, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Colorado. These shifts, combined with the roiling discontent over taxes epitomized by the Proposition 13 campaign, were a harbinger of what would come two years later.

In the meantime, conservatives used their time out of power to strengthen their institutions and to foster an intellectual offensive through newly empowered think tanks. This created a new narrative that proved popular across the media: liberals were out of ideas while conservatives were enjoying a policy renaissance. That many of the conservative ideas were rooted in the worldview of Calvin Coolidge was acknowledged by some conservatives—there was a vogue, particularly among supply-siders, for neckties bearing Coolidge’s image—but less noticed elsewhere.

Reagan’s 1980 victory over Carter was overwhelming, a crushing 489–49 triumph in the Electoral College.
In a three-way race, with John Anderson representing the old liberal Republicanism as a third-party candidate, Reagan secured 50.8 percent of the vote, to 41 percent for Carter and 6.6 percent for Anderson. Reagan’s election felt like an earthquake because it was. The twelve seats the Republicans gained in the Senate suggested that this was more than a personal victory, a view underscored by the defeat of a who’s who of Democratic liberals—George McGovern, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Warren Magnuson, and Gaylord Nelson.