Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (39 page)

But many of his colleagues felt differently. “I can remember going down to my first meeting of the Republican Conference” after the election, LaTourette said, “and I thought I’d landed on another planet because the conservative guys were flying to the microphone saying, ‘It’s because we weren’t conservative enough. It’s because we didn’t stand up enough on the abortion issue, on the gun issue, on the spending issue, and so our people stayed home, and we have to find our way again.’ ”

“That’s not what the numbers showed me,” LaTourette said, but the postelection fury on the right was “the first sign of open warfare.”

Many Republicans shared LaTourette’s coolly realistic view of what happened to Bush and the party. But it became far more convenient, both for the party’s ideologues and, over time, its leadership, to locate the problem elsewhere. Thus did a combination of honest disillusionment among rank-and-file conservatives and a shrewdly fought interpretive battle allow the right to escape responsibility for Bush’s failures. If Obama’s victory and large-scale Democratic gains in Congress could be explained by the ideological apostasy of Bush and Republican congressional leaders, then the logical next steps for the movement would be obvious: return to the true faith and battle for smaller government and lower taxes. This approach allowed conservatives to avoid any concession that the country was shifting toward the center or center-left and any hint of a strategy geared toward moderation. The party’s leaders and its activists didn’t want to go there.

It might seem surprising that the collapse of the economy did not create more soul-searching on the right. The financial crisis of 2008 represented a wholesale rout of conservative ideas on taxes and deregulation. The tax cuts of the Bush years had produced, at best, a modest recovery in the mid-2000s—and, when combined with war and national security spending, they had turned the large Clinton surpluses into deficits. The economic growth of the Bush years, such as it was, did little to boost wages or median income. Even at its peak in 2007, median income in the Bush years was still below where it had stood in Clinton’s final two years in office. In Bush’s first term, job growth was negative. For the entirety of his eight years in office, the economy under
Bush produced a net 1.1 million new jobs—compared with 22.7 million new jobs in the Clinton years. And the paltry Bush-era job gains were wiped out in the first few months of Obama’s term as the costs of the collapse that began on the forty-third president’s watch mounted. Supply-side policies had failed, and only Keynesian policies pulled the country out of free fall. A conservative president was forced to turn to big government to save the banking system and the economy.

Yet if all of this seemed obvious to conservatism’s critics, it’s no shock that conservatives resisted the diagnosis. Wholesale philosophical reversals, after all, are rare.

Conservatives did what they could to blame the financial collapse on
policies in which they had, at best, a limited stake, including efforts under both Clinton and Bush to expand home ownership to lower income Americans and problems at Fannie Mae, the government-backed enterprise that supported mortgages. That many Clinton-era Democrats were complicit in financial deregulation facilitated conservative buck-passing. Since the full costs of the Great Recession were not felt until after Obama took office, it was easy to shift responsibility to the Democrats—especially since congressional Republicans let Democrats provide the bulk of the votes needed for the Wall Street rescue. So this Bush policy could be hung on the Democrats, too.

After 2008, the conservative critique of the Bush years was broadly adopted by the party’s rising political generation. It’s worth briefly jumping ahead in our story to record the triumph of this narrative as reflected in a campaign book published in advance of the 2010 elections. Offered by three prominent younger House members, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy. All would rise to leadership positions, although Cantor and McCarthy would suffer at the hands of the very movement they helped to build. Their problems would open the way for Ryan to become Speaker, a job he didn’t really want. The book’s title,
Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders,
was telling both about their own self-image and how they would sell Republican candidates that fall.

As might be expected, the volume was largely a critique of Obama and the Democrats. But its most revealing moments were those in which three prominent members of Congress—two of whom, Cantor and Ryan, had served during the entirety of Bush’s time in office—sought to separate themselves from the previous eight years of conservative governance.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Cantor wrote. “We’re proud Republicans. We just believe that our party has at times lost sight of the things we believe in, ideas like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life, and putting families first. . . . Republicans controlled Washington from 2001 to 2006. They did some good things, but they also did a lot to give conservatism a bad name.” Republicans, he added, “had become the party of Washington—instead of the party that wanted to change Washington.” Cantor’s words seem ironic in retrospect, since he would lose his 2014 primary to a Tea Party candidate who made exactly this argument.

Ryan, for his part, spoke of “the corruption that occurred when
Republicans were in the majority,” and what he had in mind were “earmarks” that involved the special spending projects favored by individual members of Congress. Without naming names, Ryan offered this rather searing indictment of his party: “They brought in more machine-like people,” he wrote. “And I think our leadership changed and adopted the position that we beat the Democrats’ machine, now it’s time to create a Republican machine to keep us in the majority. And out of that came this earmark culture.” Somehow, Ryan, the veteran member of Congress, managed to cast himself as independent of the “they” who brought in those “machine-like people.”

McCarthy, who would replace Cantor as majority leader in 2014 but whose quest for the Speakership would be upended by the Republican right in October 2015, was first elected in the face of the Democrats’ 2006 sweep. He wrote that his travels during that miserable GOP year persuaded him of “a deep disconnect between what Republican leaders in Washington were saying, and what I, as a first-time congressional candidate, was hearing.” The voters, he said, “were talking about the party’s failures—our failures—from high-profile ethical lapses to the inability to rein in spending or even slow the growth of government.” And for McCarthy, as for his colleagues, earmarks loomed as a sin so grievous it qualified as original. “The Republican base,” he wrote, “was angry about the way the party had betrayed its principles with earmarks that lacked the transparency and accountability that the public expected when taxpayer dollars were spent.”

What’s remarkable is that the book contained no second thoughts about policies and actions that had plainly hurt the Republicans in 2006 and 2008: the Iraq War, the Schiavo case, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, the tax cuts and the other economic policies that ended in the Great Recession. Yes, McCarthy said, the “first step was admitting how the party had lost its way.”
But his indictment involved only a single count: “Under Republican leadership in the early 2002, spending and government got out of control.”

Meet the new Republican orthodoxy. It was the same as the old Republican orthodoxy, but held even more fiercely, in the manner of the penitent.

Skepticism about the George W. years would haunt Jeb Bush’s campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from its inception.

Jeb, rather bravely, courted some of the opposition he faced from the right
by declaring that a Republican candidate needed to be willing “to lose the primary to win the general” and insisting that he would refuse to “fake anger to placate people’s angst.” He told a party not eager to hear it that it needed to embrace immigration reform and the reality of a diverse America—and chose to deliver part of his announcement speech in Spanish. For some in the party, Jeb Bush seemed to promise the necessary course correction from its Tea Party detour, much as George W.’s 2000 campaign tried to pull the party back from the excesses of the Gingrich Congress.

Yet Jeb’s posture only aggravated his problem of being seen by many on the right as the embodiment of all that went wrong with both Bush presidencies. “The Bushes have always underestimated the depth of the base’s dissatisfaction with their policies,” Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk radio host, told the
Washington Post
in June 2015, when Jeb’s effort hit a low point, “and they take the criticism personally.” A McClatchy-Marist poll of Republicans and Independents who leaned Republican in March 2015—taken at a moment when Bush was running relatively well—confirmed his weakness at the right end of the party.
He drew 26 percent against the rest of the Republican field among moderates, 18 percent among conservatives, but only 7 percent among those who called themselves very conservative.

When Jeb formally announced his candidacy on June 15, 2015, his mother, Barbara, was there. His father and his brother were not. And his campaign logo, “Jeb” plus an exclamation point, did not include the word “Bush.” His campaign clearly realized the problems his family legacy created for him. And no one took more gleeful advantage of Jeb’s weakness with the right than Donald Trump, who made him the target of some of his harshest and most derisive barbs. After a poor performance in a CNBC debate in late October, Jeb fell to as low as 4 percent in some national polls.

George W. Bush did too little to change the party and the movement, but just enough to provoke a fierce reaction on the right. Barack Obama would win election because of Bush’s failures—and soon became the object of the backlash they provoked.

But it was not just Obama’s election or Bush’s failures that created the Tea Party. There were deeper forces at work pushing conservatism in new directions—and also back toward the right-wing radicalism of the 1960s.

“This change taking place in the country is really scary to me.”

The surprise is that the Tea Party was a surprise. When the Bush presidency ended, the country was angry and frightened, and the conservative movement was in shock. The elation over the election of Barack Obama among the young, African-Americans, and Democrats was matched by the disappointment and, in some cases, horror in the parts of the country that did not identify with the nation’s young and urbane president. This discontent was bound to find an outlet. More than a third of the country is reliably conservative, and at least a fifth of it regularly identifies with views well to the right of center. History suggested that the far right is always less constrained when liberals are in power—and when the failure of a conservative regime stokes suspicions that its concerns had never really been taken seriously.

Before picking up the narrative from the end of the Bush presidency, it’s important to see that much was happening only barely beneath the surface of politics, outside the boundaries of Rove’s game plan and not much noticed by liberals. The forces of conservative rebellion, barely kept in check at the end of the Bush years, were ready to march.

Traditional conservative politicians tried to explain the rise of this New, New Right—how many “new’s” are required can be debated—as a reaction to specific policies pursued by the new Obama administration. Doing so made it easier to corral the protesters into traditional forms of politics. Thus was the Tea Party seen primarily as a reaction to soaring deficits created by the recession itself and by the stimulus program Obama initiated to revive a staggering economy. It was also cast as a revolt against a new health care law that expanded a welfare state that so many conservatives already considered too big. Tea Partiers themselves gave these explanations plausibility, since the stimulus and Obamacare were always at the top of their own lists of grievances.

But many discerning politicians on the right understood that something deeper and less easily explained by individual issues was at work. For the Tea Party was largely a movement of older Americans, almost all of them white. Most were loyal to very traditional social views and unhappy with cultural changes that its members saw as taking the country away from them. Some were bothered by the election of the first African-American president and many more were upset by the forces he represented: the young and the urban, the secular and the sophisticated, the vast new populations of Latinos and Asians, and a scientific and technical class that seemed to own the future even as factories closed and blue-collar jobs disappeared.

Vin Weber, a loyal conservative since his days as the young Goldwater enthusiast, captured the vague but powerful sense of discontent. “I think people look at television and fashion and movies, and maybe particularly older people . . . and they say: ‘This is not good. It’s not the way I grew up,’ ” he said. “You take all that together and older, largely white, but not entirely white, people, think, ‘This change taking place in the country is really scary to me.’ ”

Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and a Reagan-era veteran, encountered the same fears.
“I’ll tell you the expression I heard starting in 2009 and ’10 that I never heard before in my life,” he said. “ ‘I’m afraid my children and grandchildren are not going to inherit the same country I inherited.’ ”

And former representative Tom Davis, one of the party’s best political strategists, suggested that the feelings made manifest in the summer of 2009 reflected an explosive combination of social unease and economic rage.

“Look at these people economically,” Davis said of the Tea Party’s supporters. “These are the people who are still struggling. They haven’t seen any benefit under Bush or Obama. Their wages have been stagnant. They watch their country go through two failed wars, and now you’ve got an economic meltdown coming at the end of [Bush’s] term. The world’s changing around these people. There’s going to be a reaction to this.”