Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (3 page)

And without a major political realignment, divided government of a dysfunctional sort will be built into our political system for some time to come. While periods of split-party control have led to constructive moments in policy and governance in the past, the new divided government holds no such promise.

Electoral outcomes, of course, are not preordained, and Republicans
remain within hailing distance of winning the presidency. But the demographic odds are clear: Our current political system is most likely to produce Democratic presidents and Republican Congresses. The increasingly conservative character of the Republican Party makes fierce opposition to a Democratic executive inevitable.

The nature of our constitutional structure, particularly the makeup of the Senate, further fosters asymmetric parties by strengthening the forces of conservatism beyond their representation in the population as a whole. The Senate tilts strongly toward rural interests and conservative parts of the country: New York and California have the same representation as do Wyoming and North Dakota. Equal representation for the states gives Republicans a natural advantage. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush carried 30 of the 50 states even as he lost the popular vote to Al Gore. Translated into Senate votes, a minority share of the ballots would have yielded a filibuster-proof conservative majority based largely in the South and the Rocky Mountain West. The filibuster itself further increases the power of the smaller and mostly more conservative states: in principle, senators representing roughly 11 percent of the nation’s population can produce the 41 votes now required to block action.

The importance of rural states in the Senate also means that Democratic majorities are not synonymous with liberal majorities. To win control, Democrats need to secure seats in more conservative states by nominating moderate and moderately conservative candidates. (Their losses in 2014 were concentrated in conservative states, most of them in the South.) This complicates the task of legislating even when Democrats outnumber Republicans, as the drawn-out battle over the Affordable Care Act demonstrated. The problem for progressives is especially acute when it comes to passing even broadly popular gun control measures such as background checks. By contrast, Republican senators, representing the most conservative parts of the country, are pushed further to the right because they have more reason to fear primary losses than general election defeats. Comparable pressures are at work in the House, where the vast majority of Republicans, because of the makeup of their districts, also have far more reason to fear defeat in primaries than in general election challenges from the center or left.

The alternative to the view I offer here is that political polarization affects both
of America’s political parties more or less equally—that the Democrats have moved as far to the left as the Republicans have moved right. But this comfortable claim flies in the face of the facts. Part of the story told in this book is how Democrats became a more moderate party in response to Ronald Reagan’s victories and Bill Clinton’s reconstruction efforts. Paradoxically, the most revealing marker of the Democrats’ steady move toward the political center was Obama’s health care plan, so often characterized by Republicans as extreme and “socialist.”

The Affordable Care Act was, in truth, far more conservative than Clinton’s health care proposal in the mid-1990s and more conservative still than the plans offered by Democrats in an earlier era. (It was also more conservative than
Richard Nixon’s health care initiatives in the early 1970s.) The Obama plan was based more on market-oriented ideas from the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney’s approach in Massachusetts than on traditionally Democratic single-payer or “Medicare for all” concepts. It is one mark of radicalization that Republicans found themselves opposing ideas they once advanced themselves.

And the myth of equivalent polarization is belied by what the voters themselves say.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that among Republicans, 67 percent called themselves conservative; only 32 percent said they were moderate or liberal. Among Democrats, by contrast, only 34 percent called themselves liberal; the vast majority, 63 percent, said they were moderate or conservative. The Republicans are an unapologetically ideological party. The Democrats are not. This difference leads to another: the sharply divergent attitudes of Republicans and Democrats toward the idea of compromise. In 2013, Pew asked whether respondents preferred elected officials who “make compromises with people they disagree with” or those who “stick to their positions.”
Among Democrats, 59 percent preferred compromise-seekers; among Republicans, only 36 percent did.

It is no great revelation that Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other very much these days. But the antipathy of Republicans toward their partisan adversaries runs deeper. Pew found that
27 percent of Democrats saw Republicans “as a threat to the nation’s well-being”—but 36 percent of Republicans said this of Democrats. Among Democrats who were
consistently liberal, half said Republicans represented such a threat, but two-thirds of consistently conservative Republicans saw the Democrats in this dark light.

As it is with supporters of the parties, so it is with their politicians. In 2015, the
Washington Post
’s Christopher Ingraham reported that while both parties have sorted themselves ideologically,
the Republicans have turned much more decisively away from moderation. Ingraham noted that beginning around 1975, “the Republican Party sharply turned away from the center line and hasn’t looked back.” The Democrats, he added, “have been drifting away from the center too, but nowhere near as quickly.” Even more dramatically, Ingraham noted, the ideology scores computed by the political scientists Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the spring of 2015 showed that “in the most recent Congress nearly 90 percent of Republican House members are
not
politically moderate. By contrast, 90 percent of Democratic members
are
moderates.”

To understand what has happened to governance, it’s essential to understand that polarization is
asymmetric
. As Hacker and Pierson demonstrated in their 2005 book,
Off Center,
on issue after issue Republican leaders and their rank-and-file alike have moved much further to the right of the median American view than Democrats have moved to its left. In their influential
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,
Mann and Ornstein, veteran and historically moderate academic analysts of Washington’s ways, were simply reflecting the reality of the new Washington when they described the GOP as “ideologically extreme,” “scornful of compromise,” and “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” As a result, they wrote, the
traditional Washington habit of seeking “solutions that move both sides to the center” is now “simply untenable” because “one side is so far out of reach.”

This is not simply a view from the center or the left. David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush and the author of the president’s famous “axis of evil” line, became a conservative apostate because of his urgent pleas calling his movement away from the philosophical precipice.

“Over the past five years,” Frum wrote in the summer of 2014, “the American right has veered toward a reactionary radicalism unlike anything seen in American party politics in modern times.”

What happened to conservatism?

I come at this question as an unapologetic liberal of social democratic inclinations and a temperate disposition. But I also ask it as someone who has written—in my books
Why Americans Hate Politics
and
Our Divided Political Heart,
and elsewhere—with a respect for the conservative tradition that is rooted in my own experience. I grew up as a conservative in a conservative family and still remember what it felt like as a twelve-year old to watch Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater and to know at that moment that the right had finally found a champion who could win someday. It’s an experience I shared with millions of conservatives, and I’ll be noting the speech’s electrifying effect later in these pages.

Conservatism is thus not some exotic, irrational creed to me, even if my own views moved toward the center-left many years ago. On the contrary, I offer this book in part because I continue to believe that a healthy democratic order needs conservatism’s skepticism about the grand plans we progressives sometimes offer, its respect for traditional institutions, and its skepticism of those who believe that politics can remold human nature. It’s true, as Corey Robin argued in his stinging critique,
The Reactionary Mind,
that conservatism at its worst
is primarily interested in preserving the power of existing elites at the expense of “subordinate classes.” In our history, conservatives have, indeed, resisted movements on behalf of the rights of African-Americans, workers, women, and other groups facing exclusion. But at its best, as Philip Wallach and Justus Myers have written,
conservatism is a “disposition” that “has the most to offer societies that have much worth conserving” and offers “incremental adaptation” as an alternative to radical change. Conservatism of this sort tries to pull us back, as Edmund Burke wrote, from “rage and frenzy” and prescribes in their place “prudence, deliberation and foresight.”

My unhappiness with today’s conservatism thus arises neither from a visceral hostility to the tradition itself nor from a blindness as to why conservatism is so attractive to so many of my fellow Americans. I write instead from a profound disappointment that has, at times, congealed into anger over
what the movement has become and how it is has made governing our country so difficult. Often, today’s conservatives seem ready, even eager, to trade prudence and deliberation for the very rage and frenzy that Burke scorned.

Yet if I do not disguise my point of view, I try to tell the story straight. This book is in large part a work of history married to my own reporting through much of the period it covers. It brings together ideas and politics and is thus peopled by politicians and campaign advisers as well as thinkers and writers. I revisit some of the episodes I discussed in
Why Americans Hate Politics,
published in 1991, but often write about them in a different key. I hoped then that a modernized conservatism could rise in tandem with a liberalism being brought up to date for the twenty-first century. This book looks back on parts of that earlier history with the knowledge that conservatives chose to move in a very different direction.

My reporting includes a series of in-depth conversations and interviews with a group of conservative politicians, thinkers, and commentators carried out in 2014 and 2015 explicitly for this book. I say more about these discussions in my acknowledgments, but the insights these discussion partners shared were essential to this account and are reflected throughout. It was especially generous of them to give their time to someone who, they knew, held political views quite different from their own and was embarked on a project that would be critical of their overall perspective. Their openness suggests that it is still possible, even in our contentious time, for people of divergent views to engage in productive conversation.

This book appears in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign. I certainly hope that readers will find its exploration of how modern conservatism has come to its current pass useful to the choices they will be making, and I discuss the early contours of the 2016 Republican presidential contest in the context of my overall story. This is not, however, a campaign book. Rather, it is an attempt to look back on the longer history of the American right and forward to a transformation of conservatism that I believe is essential to the well-being of our republic. The struggle for a new conservatism will long outlast this year’s campaign and require political and intellectual initiatives that, with few exceptions, conservative politicians are not yet willing to contemplate. But only by correcting the path they are now on will Republicans and
conservatives be able to break free of a narrative of disappointment that has held their party and their movement captive for a half century.