Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (5 page)

Fear that Clinton might well succeed in reengineering Democratic dominance was a central factor motivating unified Republican opposition to his designs. The attack was organized by a new and harder-line congressional leadership under Newt Gingrich, and the elections of the 1990s accelerated the ideological purification of the Republican Party. Clinton once mourned that his administration was pursuing the policies of Eisenhower Republicanism, but this did have political benefits. The Clinton years saw the conversion of many Republican moderates, who remembered Eisenhower fondly, into Democrats and staunch opponents of Gingrich’s brand of conservatism.

The 1990s thus sped up the changes in the Republican Party and the conservative movement inaugurated in 1964. If moderate and progressive Republicans fled the party in large numbers during the Clinton years, southern conservatives took their place by moving decisively to the GOP in congressional contests, having long before declared allegiance to the party in presidential elections. In this context, the impeachment crisis becomes less surprising. A polarizing event was the natural consequence of a polarizing country. The impeachment of Clinton, far more than the moments of agreement between Clinton and his adversaries, defined the politics of the era and presaged the resistance Obama was to encounter.

Yet Clinton’s presidency is now more often remembered primarily as a golden age of peace and prosperity, and both George W. Bush and Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s political career, understood the need to come to terms with the new, moderately progressive political center that Bill Clinton began building. I pay particular attention to the promise and failure of “compassionate conservatism” because the underlying instincts of its champions about where the right needs to go were sound, but their efforts were severely constrained by the philosophical commitments of the larger conservative
movement. There are lessons here for a new generation of “reform conservatives,” whose efforts also play a large role in these pages.

Nonetheless, Bush and Rove largely abandoned their modernization effort, their hands forced by the hostility to compassionate conservatism among many on the right. And the attacks of September 11, 2001, fundamentally and inevitably altered the Bush presidency. The public’s eventual weariness with the Iraq War and the collapse of the economy in 2008 left the original Bush-Rove project in ruins. My account takes very seriously the claims of Tea Party conservatives and their allies that the origins of their rebellion should be traced to the failures of the Bush years and not be defined solely as a reaction to Obama.

In the end, Bush and Rove played a surprising, unexpected, and in some ways unintended role in the radicalization of the right. Bush not only missed an opportunity to create a more moderate and more broadly based conservative coalition; he also contributed—at times unintentionally—to the movement’s rightward thrust. It was under Bush that slogans about “the real America” gained currency as part of an effort to marginalize the nonconservative parts of America in the Northeast and on the West Coast. In the Bush years, Fox News became the dominant cable news network. Its new prominence made it the principal adjudicator of conservative orthodoxy. And under Bush, the cleansing of the Republican Party of all moderate and progressive influences was nearly completed. The Tea Party would do the rest.

Bush, the ambivalent modernizer, was thus left with the worst of both worlds. Progressives continued to view his presidency as a series of right-wing misadventures. Yet the right itself mistrusted a man who would, on occasion at least, defend government’s role in domestic policy, and insist upon the importance of a more culturally inclusive conservatism. The bitterness among conservatives deepened at the end of his term when he pushed for and then presided over a massive federal bailout of the banking system to prevent a financial collapse. Conservatives went into full rebellion.

Thus did American conservatism come full circle. Having made a variety of adjustments after Goldwater’s landslide defeat—under Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—many conservative activists returned in frustration to the unvarnished and uncompromising version of their creed preached not only
by the Arizona senator but also by groups on the farther reaches of the right such as the John Birch Society. The Tea Party and its media allies have regularly recycled ideas, charges, and conspiracy theories from the 1960s, the late 1950s, or even earlier.

I conclude by tracing how the fierce battles of the Obama years—both between Obama and the Republican Party and within the GOP itself—have created a politics of deadlock that will be broken only by fundamental change on the right.

There are conservatives who understand this, and I offer thoughts on a conservative reform movement that has at least begun to consider how the right might free itself from rhetoric about the “47 percent,” antigovernment shibboleths, and an aversion to any form of redistribution. At a time of rising inequality and declining social mobility, some of these reformers accept that conservatism will make itself entirely irrelevant to the nation’s challenges if it persists in its claims that capitalism’s only problems are those created by government regulators and high taxes.

Yet the reformers are themselves constrained by history, by the current makeup of the Republican Party, and by the limits placed on the conservative imagination by the movement’s continued fealty to the ideas of a half century ago. The shift away from the utopian dreams and sweeping rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and the Ronald Reagan of 1964 will have to be much bolder than most of the reformers are willing to contemplate.

Nor is it clear that Republican politicians will go even as far as the already restrained reformers would like. A few of the party’s 2016 presidential candidates dabbled in reformist ideas, but they largely stayed within the confines of orthodoxy. A partial exception was Governor John Kasich. In the Republicans’ first debate in August 2015, he was willing to break with party orthodoxy by offering an unambiguous defense of his push to have Ohio accept an expansion of Medicare under the Affordable Care Act. He offered a stirring defense of the interests of the working poor and seemed, for a moment at least, to be the incarnation of a compassionate conservatism coming back to life. In late October, Kasich excoriated his party’s moves rightward on issues ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the flat tax.
“What has happened to our party?” he asked. “What has happened to the conservative movement?” They were the right questions.

But it was Donald Trump who took control of the Republican campaign during that summer of surprises, even if his poll numbers dropped in the fall. His excoriation of Mexican immigrants and his call for deporting the roughly 11 million who had come to the United States illegally quickly won him a substantial following, even as he pushed his rivals to harder-line positions that threatened to weaken the party’s already dire standing with Latinos and Asian-Americans. Yet his attacks on the party’s donor class and his occasional comments about the rich paying too little in taxes spoke to a different kind of frustration in the movement among its less affluent supporters. That an outsider who broke all the rules of conventional politics could emerge so quickly, could so disrupt his party, and could, for a spell, so dominate its discourse spoke to the crisis within conservatism. So did the turmoil that engulfed House Republicans after John Boehner stepped down as Speaker. Paul Ryan rose to the Speakership only after coming to terms with the party’s right-wing rebels. Those who would save their tradition can no longer postpone the day of reckoning.

To end the cycle of disappointment and betrayal, conservatives will have to stop making promises they cannot keep. They will have to accept in practice what many acknowledge in theory: that to be successful and grow, a market economy requires a rather large government and a significant commitment to social insurance. They certainly do not have to embrace all cultural change uncritically, but they will need to accept its inevitability if they wish to preserve what is most valuable in our national tradition. And they would do well to acknowledge that the business of running a competent government in a racially and culturally diverse nation requires tolerance and compromise.

Doing these things is not antithetical to conservatism. On the contrary, these imperatives are in keeping with conservatism’s historical mistrust of ideology and with the advice of Edmund Burke, who said that those who aspire to statesmanship must combine “a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve.”

This history is thus offered as a plea to American conservatives from the other political shore. For the sake of their own cause but also for the good of the nation they revere, conservatives must recover the idea that extremism in pursuit of their political goals actually is a vice, and remember that moderation in approaching the problems of governing is a virtue.

“You can choose your Reagan.”

“I was 13 years old. . . . There was one afternoon my father called me into the room and he said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to watch this. You’ve got to see what this man is saying.’ And there in the TV was this former actor from California. And he looks right at me. He looked right at my father. But he was really speaking to an entire nation. And he said things to us that intuitively made sense. He talked about liberty and freedom. He talked about balanced budgets. He talked about traditional values and personal responsibility. And my father looked at me and said, ‘Well, son, we must be Republicans.’ And, indeed, we were, and are. That’s the party I joined.”

On a late June night in Mississippi in 2014, Chris McDaniel offered this warm invocation of the Gipper to open what most thought would be a concession speech. McDaniel had just lost a bitterly contested Republican runoff to incumbent senator Thad Cochran. The result came as a shock to McDaniel and his supporters. Just three weeks earlier, he had run first in the primary, only narrowly missing the majority he needed to avoid a second
round. Incumbents forced into runoffs usually lose in Mississippi. Cochran won anyway.

As it happened, it was not a concession speech at all. McDaniel pledged to fight on and contest the outcome—in Reagan’s name, of course—though his efforts ultimately failed. The decisive votes against McDaniel in the second round came from African-American Democrats who had crossed into the Republican contest (as they were allowed to under state law) to defend their state’s seventy-six-year-old incumbent.
“There is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats,” McDaniel insisted. “This is not the party of Reagan.”

McDaniel had a point. The coalition Cochran put together and the way he did it was anything but orthodox by most conservative standards. McDaniel, a Tea Partier who embodied a kind of libertarian marriage with neo-Confederates, had a fair claim to being the new model of the old Reagan alliance. McDaniel’s antigovernment fervor extended to refusing to say whether he would have voted for emergency assistance for his own state after Hurricane Katrina.
“That’s not an easy vote to cast,” he had explained in an interview that came back to haunt him. The summer before, he had delivered the keynote address at an event sponsored by a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that continues to think the wrong side won the Civil War.
“The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution,” the group declares on its website. “The tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.” McDaniel added a strong dose of evangelical Christianity to his appeal. “There is nothing strange at all about standing as people of faith for a country that we built, that we believe in,” he had declared in his nonconcession.

By virtually all reasonable standards, Cochran was a staunch Mississippi conservative. But he was also a proud appropriator who worked amicably with Democrats to pass budgets that included plenty of money for projects of local interest that knew no party affiliation. This was his sin, not only in McDaniel’s eyes but also in the view of Washington-based antispending groups such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. Both backed McDaniel.

Cochran’s campaign, of necessity, turned into a textbook lesson in the contradictions of antispending conservatism. If the ideologues and some of the Washington-based groups disliked Cochran for his relaxed attitude toward the flow of Beltway dollars, many Mississippi Republicans, especially business groups and the politicians who ran local governments, were grateful for his genial approach to federal largesse, particularly in securing the billions that helped rebuild the Gulf Coast communities after Katrina.

“By God’s grace, he was chairman of appropriations for two years during Katrina, and it made all the difference in the world,” former governor Haley Barbour told me a couple of weeks before the primary. With Cochran slated to head up the Senate Appropriations Committee again if the Republicans took back the Senate, the state’s establishment desperately did not want him to retire. “A whole lot of different people said, ‘Thad, don’t put yourself first. Put Mississippi first. You owe it to us to run again,’ ” Barbour recounted. When Cochran finally assented, the Barbour organization went to work.

Pause for a moment to consider that a state known for its deep antipathy to Washington—for having, as the Confederate veterans group would insist, a very particular view of “the rights guaranteed by the Constitution” to the states—just happens to get
$3.07 back from the federal government for every dollar it sends in.
It ranks number one among the states in federal aid as a percentage of state revenue. Big government in Washington might still have been the enemy in Mississippi, but its dollars were as welcome there as in any of the country’s most liberal precincts.

The 2014 Republican Senate primary in Mississippi provided a particularly pointed lesson in the tensions and contradictions within contemporary conservatism. Federal spending is an evil, except when the money comes into your own state. African-Americans will be left to the other side, except when a conservative politician needs them. Since the GOP primary electorates are often too conservative to nominate a candidate with wide appeal beyond the Republican base, temporarily borrowing the other side’s base is permissible in emergencies. And if you are a Republican, you can declare that whatever you are doing would have been blessed by Ronald Reagan.