Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (56 page)

The timing of Obama’s speech was also important. He gave it shortly after the Occupy Wall Street movement had captured large-scale media attention and the imaginations of many Americans. Politically, the most surprising aspect of politics after the 2008 Wall Street crash was the absence of a large and organized protest movement on the left. The Great Depression saw a strengthening of both the Socialist and Communist parties, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC movement in California, the rise of the labor movement, vast organizations on behalf of old-age pensions, and Huey Long’s call to “share the wealth.” The lack of a comparable response during the Great Recession
was partly a sign of a weakening of the American left (and particularly the decline of organized labor) as well as the ongoing power of the pro-market swing in the intellectual world after the rise of Reagan and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the historian Daniel Rodgers noted, market metaphors pervaded almost every sphere of life.
“Market ideas moved out of the economic departments to become the new standard currency of the social sciences,” he wrote in
Age of Fracture
. “To imagine the market now was to imagine a socially-detached array of economic actors, free to choose and optimize, unconstrained by the power of inequalities, governed not by their common deliberative action but only by the impersonal laws of the market.”

If Obama often disappointed his allies on the left, it was in part because he was operating in a world in which the market was hegemonic, intellectually as well as financially. And the very radicalization of the right was enabled by a steady moderation on the left side of politics that began to take hold in the Clinton era. One unintended consequence of Third Way politics, as we’ve seen, was a compression on the left end of the ideological spectrum, which effectively moved the political center and opened further space on the right.

Obama himself did little to encourage the left. On the contrary, his impatience with the left was obvious, and an administration that found itself under constant attack from the right felt it could ill afford progressive opposition. This, too, had unintended consequences: the absence of a strong left made it easier for the right to define Obama as a “left-winger” or “Marxist,” even as Wall Street’s recovery took place at a much more rapid clip than did the restoration of middle-class incomes. If Obama was a Marxist, he was singularly unsuccessful at it.

Occupy Wall Street partly filled this void. It represented the pent-up frustrations of tens of thousands who longed for an outlet on the left and millions of Americans who wondered why Wall Street had not been held to account for its misdeeds.

Occupy was in no way comparable to the Tea Party. The Tea Party was a highly organized right-wing pressure group that was entirely comfortable operating inside the Republican Party, even if it often cast itself as an insurgency against the party’s establishment. Occupy disdained party and even electoral politics. In its mistrust of the very idea of leadership, it resembled some of the more
romantic tendencies of the 1960s New Left. It was therefore ill suited for the mainstream political fray. As the
New Yorker
’s Hendrik Hertzberg observed:
“Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics, the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two party system, the only one we have.” He asked, almost plaintively: “The Tea Partiers know that. Do the Occupiers?”

No, the Occupiers didn’t, and yet they fundamentally changed the American political debate by introducing a powerful slogan that stood in for the entire history of American progressive and left-wing thought: they spoke of the power of the “One Percent.” Suddenly the country had its attention focused not on the allegedly overweening power of government, but on the raw power of the wealthiest Americans. The issue was not how much the average American had taken out of his or her paycheck in taxes, but how small that paycheck had become relative to the rewards reaped by the very rich, particularly the financiers and hedge fund managers. The problem was not whether government had grown to 40 percent of the GDP, but how large a share of GDP growth had gone to the wealthiest 1 percent—and particularly the superrich 0.01 percent. If the Tea Party spoke of liberty (or the lack thereof), Occupy spoke of equality (and inequality). Occupy had no electoral ambitions, but it altered the terrain of the 2012 election in ways that would badly hurt Mitt Romney and greatly help Barack Obama.

Many spoke at the time of the Tea Party and Occupy movements as representing similar forces of opposition and alienation. But this view was flatly wrong, misreading both movements by trying to pretend that left-right distinctions no longer mattered. Each movement was more than just a protest; both were, in their very different ways, philosophically and politically coherent.
A
Washington Post
/Pew Research Center Poll in October 2011 found that while 64 percent of Occupy supporters were Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents, 71 percent of the Tea Party’s supporters were Republicans or Republican-leaning Independents. Among Tea Partiers, 56 percent called themselves conservative, compared with only 21 percent of Occupiers. And partisans of the two movements simply didn’t like each other. Among Occupy supporters, 64 percent said they opposed the Tea Party while only 25 percent supported it. The Tea Partiers returned the favor: 52 percent said
they opposed Occupy while 34 percent supported it. In all, only one American in ten claimed to support both the Tea Party and Occupy. Comrades in arms they were not.

The Occupy movement set the stage for Obama in Osawatomie. His speech was the inaugural address he never gave—a clear philosophical rationale for his presidency, a straightforward narrative explaining the causes of the nation’s travails, and a coherent plan for battle against a radicalized conservatism. He had decided he was more likely to win if the 2012 election was about big things rather than small ones. He sought to turn the campaign from a plebiscite about the state of the economy into a referendum about the broader progressive tradition that made us a middle-class nation. For the second time, he staked his fate on a battle for the future.

This choice had obvious political benefits for an incumbent presiding over a still-ailing economy, and it confirmed Obama’s shift from a defensive crouch to an aggressive philosophical attack. It was his boldest move since he decided to go all-out for health insurance reform even after Scott Brown’s victory.

In drawing upon TR, Obama tied himself unapologetically to a defense of America’s long progressive and liberal tradition.
The Republican Roosevelt, after all, drew his inspiration from the writer Herbert Croly, whose book
The Promise of American Life
can fairly be seen as the original manifesto for modern liberalism. Thus did Tea Party’s radicalism encourage a shrewd politician to take on a task that Democrats have been reluctant to engage in since Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy.

Obama was remarkably direct in declaring that the core ideas of the progressivism advanced by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were right, and that the commitments of Reagan-era supply-side economics were wrong.
He praised TR for knowing “that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can” and for understanding that “the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest.”

He also eviscerated supply-side economics as a theory promising that “if we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger.”

“But here’s the problem,” Obama said. “It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the fifties and sixties. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

His attack that day was on the specifics of conservative policies, but also on the fundamentals: “In fact,” he said, “they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” He added:

I am here to say they are wrong. I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.

That brief passage was interrupted three times by applause. Obama had found his message.

A White House that just a few months earlier had been obsessed with the political center was suddenly not at all wary, as a senior adviser put it to me at the time, of extolling “a vision that has worked for this country.” But this lieutenant also noted that Obama implicitly contrasted the flexibility of the Rooseveltian progressivism with the rigidity of the current brand of conservatism. The official pointed to Obama’s strong commitment to education reform, including his critique in Osawatomie of “just throwing money at education.”

“You can embrace [the progressive tradition] if you can make the point that philosophies and political theories can evolve as facts on the ground change,” the adviser said. The liberalism Obama advocated thus contained a core of moderation that the ideology of the Tea Party did not. Obama realized that the path toward moderate voters would pass through a wholesale critique of the immoderation of the right.

For months, progressives had asked why Obama had not invoked the populist language of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his attacks on “economic royalists” and “the privileged princes” of “new economic
dynasties.” What progressives often forgot is that FDR offered these words only when his first term was almost over, in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt did not become a full-throated economic populist until the election was upon him—and only after he was pressed by a left and a labor movement that demanded more of him.

Facing his own reelection and pushed by an Occupy Wall Street movement that made economic inequality a driving political issue, Barack Obama discovered both of his inner Roosevelts. It would work for him, as it did for them, and the Republicans did what they could to make it easy.

Some political insurgencies grow out of presidential campaigns. Both the 1964 Goldwater movement in the Republican Party and the 1968 antiwar Democratic campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had long legacies. But the Tea Party was an antipresidential movement. It arose in reaction to both Bush and Obama and was not particularly taken by John McCain’s 2008 campaign, even if it had loved his choice of Sarah Palin. Tea Partiers had made their mark in a midterm election, with its smaller and older electorate, and while they had scattered victories in more moderate or liberal states, they were strongest in the reddest of red states.

Nor was there a single designated Tea Party candidate in the 2012 primaries, although Representative Michele Bachmann tried hard to play that role. Romney, the putative front-runner, was not an obvious Tea Party choice, even if he had run to McCain’s right in 2008. Yet the Tea Party left an indelible mark on the 2012 Republican contest by creating a mad scramble to the right.

The Romney who opened his campaign on that beautiful day at Bittersweet Farm wanted to use enough antigovernment rhetoric to satisfy the right but otherwise run a relatively mainstream campaign capitalizing on economic discontent. His campaign guru, Stuart Stevens, was much taken by the British Conservative Party’s 1979 campaign against an incumbent Labour Party. It was the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power.
In particular, he admired a poster depicting a long unemployment line under the slogan
LABOUR ISN’T WORKING.
He openly borrowed the motif, producing a virtual copy of the poster under the heading
OBAMA ISN’T WORKING.
The theory of the Romney campaign, by no means exotic or irrational, was that there was enough unhappiness in the country to give Obama’s Republican opponent an edge. Romney could win the election—as long as the campaign stayed focused on Obama and the economy. And, of course, as long as Romney could win the nomination.

But in a field of right-wing candidates, and with a very conservative electorate, the second objective derailed the first. Romney was forced to move right and had to spend so much time attacking his opponents to keep them at bay that he never got around to building a positive case for himself. Many moderate voters suspected that Romney didn’t believe all the right-wing things he was saying. This, in their view, made him a safe alternative to Obama. But many conservative voters also suspected Romney didn’t believe all the right-wing things he was saying. His Republican opponents had every interest in aiming straight at this tension in the Romney strategy, and Democrats cheered them on. In the process, Romney made enough mistakes—many of them encouraged by the nature of his party and the state of conservative ideology—that he moved the focus away from Obama and toward himself.