Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (40 page)

Obama, Davis said, couldn’t reach this group, but he also argued that the new president didn’t seem to try. “He’s not talking to those people,” Davis said. “He’s talking to a different alienated group.”

It was a telling observation: Americans were now divided even in their alienation.

That the Tea Party had a powerful political impact is obvious. But as we began to see in Chapter One, it was far more
a new form of something old
than an altogether innovative political venture.
New York Times
reporter Kate Zernike published a fine, fast-off-the-mark journalistic account of the Tea Party movement in 2010 titled
Boiling Mad
.
A year later, the British academic Dominic Sandbrook published a good book of his own called
Mad as Hell
. But Sandbrook’s volume was not about the Tea Party. Its subtitle summarizes its story:
The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right
.
Alan Crawford, a conservative, wrote
Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment,
to warn that in its efforts to exploit popular fears and anxieties, “the Right had been transformed into an institutionalized, disciplined, well-organized, and well-financed movement of loosely-knit affiliates.” His book was published in 1980. Large parts of the conservative movement had been angry for a long time.

The Tea Party was the newest manifestation of an old set of political habits. Academic analysts moved quickly to train the big guns of social science on the movement and concluded that the economic and cultural components could not be separated. In a sense, “economic issues” had become “cultural issues.”

The political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto were most explicit among the scholars in linking the new forms of right-wing activism to
the oldest strains of the American far right. In
Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,
Parker and Barreto invoked theories from the 1950s and early 1960s, advanced by the historian Richard Hofstadter, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, and others, tracing movements of “the radical right” to anxieties over lost social status in a rapidly changing country.
Groups facing such displacement, Parker and Barreto argued, “will use any means at their disposal to forestall what they believe is a loss of social prestige as social change takes root.” They were far from alone, particularly on the left, in using Hofstadter’s famous essay,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics,
to explain the Tea Party. They noted Hofstadter’s description of the citizen who saw himself as “spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for ruin.”

“We believe that people are driven to support the Tea Party from the anxiety they feel as they perceive the America they know, the country they love, slipping away,” they wrote in 2013, “threatened by the rapidly changing face of what they perceive as the ‘real’ America: a heterosexual, Christian (mostly) male, white country.” They added: “They not only wish to halt change; if we are correct, Tea Party supporters wish to turn the clock back.” Parker and Barreto noted the repeated insistence of Tea Party members that their movement was not racist, but concluded that
“true believers in the Tea Party tend to harbor
much, much
more group-based hostility than true skeptics of the movement.” They used italics to underscore how strongly they believed their data pointed in this direction.

In
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson used their interviews with grassroots Tea Party activists to show that the movement was not, in fact, opposed to all government programs. Unsurprisingly because so many of the movement’s members were past or near retirement age, Tea Partiers strongly supported government programs such as Medicare and Social Security, but opposed most others, particularly Obama’s health care expansion. Seen one way, the Tea Partiers were engaged in simple, self-interested behavior, protecting “their” programs while condemning government spending on behalf of people unlike themselves. But
Skocpol and Williamson’s respondents had a rationale for the distinction they drew: They saw traditional New Deal benefits as earned through a lifetime of hard work.
What concerned them, Skocpol
and Williamson wrote, was “being stuck with the tax tab to pay for ‘unearned’ entitlements handed out to unworthy categories of people.” These “unworthy” groups—“freeloaders”—included immigrants, low-income Americans, and the young. Skocpol and Williamson go out of their way to avoid blanket charges of racism against the movement, and cite data and their own interviews suggesting that many of its members held complex views on race.
Nonetheless, the two scholars noted that a “sense of ‘us versus them’ along racial and ethnic fault lines clearly marks the worldview of many people active in the Tea Party.”

Skocpol and Williamson were careful not to pretend that the Tea Party could be understood simply as a spontaneous eruption. It also reflected long-term changes in the structures of influence on the right.
“Grassroots activists, roving billionaire advocates, and right-wing media purveyors—these three forces, together, create the Tea Party and give it the ongoing clout to buffet and redirect the Republican Party and influence broader debates in American democracy.”

If the Bush years prepared the ground for this new, particularly aggressive round of fury on the right, the new factors Skocpol and Williamson identified gave it its shape and reach. It was Goldwaterism and, in some cases, Birchism on steroids.

The new forms of conservative media were essential to the rise of a newly militant right and allowed its ideas to become part of the mainstream discussion in an unprecedented way. Conservative ideas gained traction in an interaction among an expanding conservative broadcast industry, a substantial presence on the Web, and large conservative inroads in publishing. All this gradually played back into the traditional media.

It’s common to focus on conservative radio and television, but conservative books also played an important part in transforming the movement, as we saw initially in Chapter One. The right-wing bestsellers of the 1950s and 1960s, often issued by publishing houses set up for the sole purpose of pushing particular volumes, were never recognized on the formal bestseller lists. But from the 1970s on, mainstream publishers came to realize how hungry the right and far right were for books. It was one of many ways in which American conservatives defied liberal clichés about them. Once marginal—and marginalized—ideas found new audiences.

The conservative publishing boom was enabled by the vast expansion of conservative broadcast media, an interactive process exemplified by Glenn Beck’s role in championing old John Birch Society books. We’ve already seen that conservatives had long sought to penetrate radio and television through far-right programs like H. L. Hunt’s
Life Line
and
The Dan Smoot Report
in the 1950s and 1960s and Bill Buckley’s sophisticated, lively, and mainstream
Firing Line.
But the end of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration freed stations from the need to provide alternative viewpoints. Conservatives quickly colonized large parts of the AM radio dial, which was in search of new programming as music migrated to FM in the late 1960s. Rush Limbaugh was the father of them all, starting his syndicated radio show in 1988. His success spawned many imitators. Conservatives who already believed that the mainstream networks media were biased against them finally had their own voices—and treasured them.
It is no accident that conservatism’s steady movement back to the ideological purity of the Goldwater years parallels the rise of conservative radio.
Radio talkers on the progressive side of politics never developed the loyalty or reach of the conservatives—liberals seemed to prefer news programs—even as progressives such as Bill Press charged that conservative owners of radio chains favored conservative talk over moderate or liberal alternatives. Whatever the cause, conservative on-air minutes now outnumber liberal minutes by a ratio of at least 10-to-1.

Roger Ailes, who helped Richard Nixon learn how to use television in 1968, tried for a while to turn Limbaugh into a television star. It was not to be. But rather than give up on his ambition, Ailes simply went bigger. He founded Fox News in 1996 and, as we saw in Chapter Four, the network took off during the Clinton impeachment saga. It got another push in the Bush years, particularly after the attacks of 9/11. In January 2002, it passed CNN as the number-one cable news network. It has stayed number one ever since, even if it suffered some viewership declines during parts of the later Obama years. It was on the upswing again during the Trump Summer of 2015 and the Republican presidential debate the network sponsored in August 2015 drew an astonishing 24 million viewers. It was,
Ad Week
’s “TV Newser” website reported, “the
highest non-sports cable program of all time” and “the highest-rated cable news program of all time.”

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the rise of Fox in strengthening forces
on the right of the Republican Party, and on the right end of conservatism itself.
“Ailes built Fox into an entire political universe,” wrote Gabriel Sherman in his biography of Ailes,
The Loudest Voice in the Room
. It was political innovation on a large scale. Before Fox News, there had never been an explicitly ideological television network. And its ideology was closely linked to Republican politics. As Sherman noted, after Fox hired Sarah Palin in the fall of 2009, Ailes had five prospective Republican presidential candidates on his payroll: Palin, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and John Bolton. Santorum and Gingrich would go on to become Mitt Romney’s most durable challengers for the Republican nomination in 2012.

Fox turned Glenn Beck, with all of his touting of old Bircher ideas, into a national celebrity. Even Ailes was surprised at how quickly Beck caught on.
“I’ve never seen anyone build an audience this fast,” Ailes told his executives, according to Sherman. At his peak, Beck reached over 3 million viewers a day.

Fox has played a unique role in politics because of the unusually close relationship rank-and-file conservatives have developed with the network. Liberals have no comparable devotion to any broadcast outlet, including MSNBC, Fox’s progressive prime-time rival, which began losing audience share after the 2012 election and softened its liberal leanings in 2015. A PRRI/
Brookings Institution survey in June 2014 underscored how different the left and the right are in their media loyalties. Asked which broadcast news source they trusted most, Republicans issued an unambiguous verdict: 53 percent of them said Fox News, and no other alternative came close. The traditional broadcast networks were second at 22 percent, with CNN a distant third at 9 percent. Among self-described conservatives, the numbers were comparable: 49 percent chose Fox, 19 percent the broadcast networks, and 13 percent CNN. And among conservative Republicans, 56 percent chose Fox.

By contrast, there was no dominant broadcast source for Democrats and liberals. Only 10 percent of liberals and Democrats, and just 11 percent of those who identified as both liberal and Democratic, listed MSNBC as their most trusted source. The old broadcast networks came in first (31 percent of Democrats, 24 percent of liberals), followed among Democrats by CNN at 26 percent and public television at 14 percent. Among liberals, second-place choices scattered—
The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart and public television both came in at 17 percent, CNN at 16 percent.

Not only does no network on the left or center play the dominant role that Fox does on the right; Fox also appears to have a strong impact on the views of its audience. At the least, since cause-and-effect are difficult to establish, those who most trust Fox constitute the most right-wing part of the Republican Party. Fox News Republicans were far more likely to regard themselves as members of the Tea Party movement (35 percent) than non-Fox Republicans (15 percent). Only 42 percent of Republicans who most trusted Fox News supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally, compared with 60 percent of other Republicans. Fox News Republicans were far more forceful in their opposition to same-sex marriage: 76 percent were opposed to it, including 47 percent who were strongly opposed. Among non-Fox Republicans, only 57 percent opposed same-sex marriage, and only 31 percent did so strongly. The Fox difference was not confined to social issues. Fox News Republicans, for example, opposed increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by a margin of 64 percent to 33 percent. Non-Fox Republicans favored the wage increase, 56 percent to 41 percent.

Fox would eventually play a central organizing role in the Tea Party rebellion, prodding the movement along, serving as a bulletin board for its demonstrations, broadcasting its successes in the summer of town meetings in 2009, and mounting a sustained attack on Obama and his presidency. Its commentators did not always trouble themselves over whether an accusation was true. Thus did the network “report” that Obama had attended a “madrassa” as a child in Indonesia. (He hadn’t.) The network gave expansive play to the idea that that Obama had not been born in the United States and could not produce a birth certificate, a cause championed with particular energy by Donald Trump. (When the president did produce his birth certificate, he shut down some but not all of the birthers. Trump, for one, continued to express skepticism.) Fox regularly amplified charges from the conservative Web, often taken at face value without much, if any, checking.