Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (4 page)

The book begins with a discussion of Ronald Reagan because all discussions of contemporary conservatism must start with the movement’s ambiguous hero, but it then moves to Barry Goldwater’s success in winning the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. The Goldwater campaign was the seedbed of Reagan’s own career, and for the contemporary right, the theme of disappointment was present at the creation. Goldwater’s victory was built on the conviction that the Republican Party’s establishment had betrayed its conservative loyalists for a generation. Phyllis Schlafly’s
movement bestseller that year,
A Choice Not an Echo,
told the “inside story” of how “secret kingmakers” and “hidden persuaders” had repeatedly betrayed Robert Taft and his conservative loyalists by handing Republican nominations to apologists for Roosevelt’s New Deal and his insufficiently anticommunist foreign policy. To examine the right-wing rebellion that led to Goldwater’s nomination is to see that so much that we now regard as new on the right—in communications, in organization, in rhetoric and in ideology—was pioneered in the 1960s. It is also to understand how the conservative rebellion was directed at least as much against advocates of more moderate brands of conservatism—notably Eisenhower and the “Modern Republicanism” he preached—as it was against liberals and Democrats.

Fearlessly campaigning on a truly right-wing program—laid out unflinchingly in his bestselling
The Conscience of a Conservative—
Goldwater set a standard for the movement that future Republican presidents would be unable to live up to, even as they nodded to many of his themes.

The conservative emphasis on moral decay was previewed in the Goldwater campaign and he sowed the seeds of a religious right with which he later became so impatient. He spoke of crime and law and order. Above all, he broke the Republican Party’s historic alignment with the interests of African-Americans and created a new Republicanism in the South built on a backlash against the civil rights movement. Race, discussed so frequently in
relation to opposition to Obama, played a much earlier and essential role in creating the new conservatism. While conservatives now play down this part of their past, conservatives at the time (including the intellectuals and ideologists associated with
National Review
) were not shy about acknowledging the role of white reaction in building their movement.

Most accounts of the Goldwater crusade, particularly from conservatives themselves, emphasize its heroic role in establishing conservatism as a legitimate and popular creed. There is certainly truth to this. Since the Goldwater insurgency, conservatives have enjoyed major successes in changing the mainstream debate. They undercut assumptions that took hold in the New Deal era about the need for regulated markets, the efficacy of active government, the benefits of redistribution, and the importance of state-provided social insurance. They helped
metaphors related to the market to become the intellectual currency not only of economics, but also of society, of psychology, even of love. They made the state anathema, and with it, high taxes.

Yet if the country moved right ideologically in important ways, it remained operationally moderate and, in many respects, liberal. It is this stubborn fact that set the conservative movement up for frustration. Those who rallied to the conservative cause in good faith believed that its promises—Goldwater’s promises—would be kept someday. Instead there was a large disconnect between promise and achievement, between ideological affirmations and the actual behavior of conservatives in office. If Americans became somewhat more ambivalent about the moral world created by the New Deal and the Great Society, they did not want to destroy all that the New Deal and the Great Society had built. Conservative politicians could propagate conservative ideas; acting on them proved much more difficult.

Government remained large because the things it spends most of its money on—retirement and health care programs for the elderly, national defense and security at home, social insurance against unemployment and other personal misfortunes—are broadly popular, even among many who are part of the conservative movement itself. Conservatives could not cut taxes and balance budgets at the same time without undermining the government functions that most Americans support. And even the “intrusive regulations” the right attacked with such relish and effect won strong support when voters
considered their concrete purposes: to keep the air and water clean; to protect Americans, particularly children, from unsafe products; to prevent injury and death in the workplace; and to regulate an economic system that can go off the rails at great cost to tens of millions, as the Great Recession showed.

Conservative politicians rallied millions of middle-class and working-class voters to their side with pledges to reverse cultural changes that began to take hold in the late 1950s and 1960s. Yet these changes were largely irreversible and cultural change continued—not because it was imposed from the top but because, as such change usually does, it bubbled up from below.

Nor could politicians reverse the fact that the United States had become an ethnically diverse nation in which white Americans will, over time, come to represent a minority of the population. It’s true that these changes were set in motion by a political decision, the passage of the immigration act of 1965 that ended a pro-European tilt in our laws. But the immigrants who later flowed illegally across the country’s southern border were not brought in by some liberal plot. They came to seek opportunity, to escape poverty (and, in some cases, violence) in their home countries, and they came because the American economy’s demand for labor exceeded both population growth and the capacity of existing immigration rules to provide it.

The Goldwater campaign did more than create a powerful ideological legacy. It also transformed the Republican Party. Moderate and liberal Republicans were pushed out and alternative understandings of conservatism were rendered illegitimate. The reshaping of the Republican coalition took place so gradually and over such a long period that it’s hard now to remember how different the present-day Republican Party is from its earlier incarnation. Until Lyndon Johnson championed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Goldwater opposed it, African-Americans were a vital part of the GOP.
Dwight Eisenhower won about 40 percent among nonwhite voters in 1956 and Richard Nixon secured about a third of their ballots in 1960. From 1964 on, African-Americans became the most loyal component of the Democratic coalition.

This was accompanied by the realignment of whites in the South, which in turn called forth a reaction from traditional Republicans elsewhere. As became obvious in the 1992 and 1996 elections, moderate white Republicans—in the
Northeast especially, but also in the Midwest and on the West Coast—steadily abandoned the party. They become Independents or converted outright to the Democrats. The change was especially dramatic in the suburbs of around Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco. These once-loyal Republican bastions became purple or blue.

The result of the southern realignment and northern counter-realignment is easily measured. The Republican contingents elected to the House in 1960 and 2008 were of roughly equal size: Republicans won 174 seats in 1960 and 178 in 2008. But in 1960, 35 of those Republicans represented districts in New York and New England while only 8 hailed from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. Among the 2008 Republican House members, only 3 came from New England and New York; 73 represented the old Confederate states. Even in the election of 2014, a banner year for Republicans nearly everywhere, the balance shifted only slightly: Republicans from the former Confederate states outnumbered those from New York and New England by 9 to 1. No wonder northern Republican congressional leaders like former House Speaker John Boehner could be described by a formula often applied to the pre–Civil War Democrats: these Republicans were often northern men of southern convictions. The South was now the dominant force in Abraham Lincoln’s party.

Latinos have, on the whole, long been a Democratic group, but they have not been immune to appeals from Republicans.
As recently as 2004, George W. Bush, a strong supporter of immigration reform, secured more than 40 percent of the Latino vote. But as the party’s critics of liberalizing immigration statutes became louder and angrier, Latinos fled.
In 2012, Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of their ballots. Even more surprising was Romney’s paltry 26 percent among Asian-Americans, a group that had often been hospitable to Republican candidates.

Republicans have also suffered large losses among women, particularly the college educated. Until the 1980 election, there was no identifiable gender gap. To the extent that there were gender differences in voting, women tended to be more conservative than men. Now women vote consistently more Democratic. The defection of women means that conservatives and Republicans have lost yet another moderating influence—not only on social issues such as
contraception and abortion but also on public spending, since women on the whole are more sympathetic to expenditures for safety net programs, education, and other public goods.

All these changes were first set in motion in 1964.

Goldwater’s defeat was Richard Nixon’s opportunity. Everything about Nixon is complicated, and this is certainly true of his relationship to American conservatives. They regarded him as a friend and an enemy at different moments in his political career, and never fully settled on a final judgment. The struggles within Nixon himself, among his 1968 campaign advisers, and inside his White House modeled the battles that would rage inside the Republican Party into our time. Nixon was a political entrepreneur and innovator who brought the party’s Southern Strategy to fruition. He began creating the “New Majority” that Goldwater conservatives thought would be their legacy. Yet Nixon was also an instinctive moderate who signed a large stack of regulatory and environmental legislation that laid the basis for the new liberal state conservatives would rebel against. His foreign policy realism, especially his opening to Communist China, infuriated large parts of the right. Even Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal produced ambivalence on the right. Some conservatives were inclined to defend him, if only to stand up to his enemies in “the liberal media” and among Democrats in Congress. Ronald Reagan stuck with Nixon to the end. Others, like Goldwater—he delivered the bad news to Nixon that his support in the Republican Party had collapsed—were appalled by his abuse of power. And many conservatives believed that Nixon simply got his comeuppance for having harvested conservative votes only to pursue liberal policies on a host of issues. The post-Goldwater cycle of disappointment had begun.

Nixon’s Watergate travails provided an opening for Democrats, but it proved to be brief. They swept the 1974 elections with a new breed of “Watergate babies,” many of them reform liberals whose rise signaled the party’s slow transformation from a bastion of urban labor into a redoubt of suburban progressives. A then-obscure but resourceful Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination in 1976 by being everyone’s second choice. He beat all the party’s factions, one by one—the old segregationists represented by George Wallace, the Cold War labor
liberals (many of whom were or became neoconservatives) represented by Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and the middle-class progressives represented by Morris Udall. But this also meant that Carter lacked a strong base of his own in the party. He simultaneously alienated the Cold Warriors for being insufficiently bellicose, and the liberals for being insufficiently committed to their goals, notably national health insurance. The Cold Warriors defected to the Republicans and the liberals, led by Senator Edward Kennedy, challenged him in the primaries. As if he didn’t have troubles enough, Carter was engulfed by gas lines, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the economic calamity of stagflation. The way was open for Reagan, the man conservatives always knew was destined for the White House.

If Nixon proved to be no conservative hero, Reagan was the conservative hero who, like Nixon, understood the limits on what he could achieve. The reemergence of a more radical right in our time would seem paradoxical because Reagan was thought to have accustomed conservatives to the disciplines of power. As president, he sanded some of the rough edges off the movement and pushed it away from conspiracy-mongering and intolerance. He left intact many of the legacies of the New Deal, the most important elements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and large parts of the regulatory state that grew during the Nixon years. Conservatives rarely confess to disappointment over this. Instead, in a political version of displacement, they hold these sins against his successor, George H. W. Bush. By arguing that it was Bush, not Reagan, who betrayed their hopes, those at the right end of the Republican Party could continue to extol the purist Reagan of 1964, who had insisted that the battle was against those whose goal was “to impose socialism.” They have been fighting “socialism” ever since.

The rebellion on the right against Bush’s decision to sign a tax increase in 1990 created a new norm within conservatism: opposing all tax increases became the single most important test of philosophical loyalty. Bush’s defeat in 1992 was a trauma for conservatives who assumed that Reagan’s victory was the beginning of a long period of conservative dominance. It was an illusion that would reappear after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection.

The 1990s, to which I turn next, saw several turning points. Bill Clinton’s election opened the way for a Democratic experiment that took account of conservatism’s
triumphs after the Johnson years even as it attempted to restore a centrist-leaning progressivism to dominance. Carter had tried to change the party along similar lines. But where Carter was seen by many of the Democratic factions as embarking on a hostile takeover—none of them saw him as one of them—Clinton was largely accepted as fostering changes from the inside. And the changes were much more readily accepted by the party after the intervening twelve years of Republican rule.