Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (76 page)

Sometimes, it worked. Its payoff was obvious in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014, and this is not suprising. As the party that insists on government’s ability to solve problems and foster social improvement, Democrats need to prove government can work. Gridlock and polarization serve the interests of antigovernment conservatism by proving the opposite: that government is destined to fail and that the public sphere is rife with conflict. This in turn can lead to an abandonment of the quest for public solutions to public problems. Citizens come to feel that the best they will ever be able to do is fall back on their own individual resources. For some on the right, this would be a positive outcome.

But the costs of this style of politics to our democratic system are enormous. Conservatives have an obligation to their own tradition and to their nation to ask whether promoting a politics of showdowns and crises based on thoroughly unrealistic expectations is consistent with the highest callings of their philosophy. John Boehner, for one, decided he had had enough of this. His resignation as Speaker in the fall of 2015 was an effort to appease right-wing members of his caucus who thought he, too, had sold out conservatism. He hoped offering his head would forestall another shutdown. Boehner was
yet another victim of the cycle of disappointment and betrayal, created by promises made that could not be kept.

This is how Boehner himself saw the matter. “The Bible says,
beware of false prophets,” he told CBS’s John Dickerson on
Face the Nation
two days after he announced his departure. “We have got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know, they know are never going to happen.” In accepting the Speakership, Paul Ryan has now bet his career on the proposition that he can break this cycle.

Over the decades, the United States has taken on an obligation beyond the inescapable duties of preserving the security of its own people and advancing their prosperity: to provide a model for the world of self-rule within a democratic republic. Few would make a case that we are doing so now.

In fact, most of the world’s democracies confront contradictions that are undermining faith in public endeavor and unraveling old loyalties. Nearly all the democracies have seen dissident movements on the left and the right not unlike the Trump insurgency. In the United States, the decline of trust in traditional political parties has curiously been accompanied by a rise in partisanship. A broad desire for governments to reduce the levels of economic insecurity and expand opportunity is constrained by a loss of confidence in the capacity of government to succeed. Intense demands for change are accompanied by fears that much of the change that is occurring will make life worse for individuals and families.

This is creating a very sour mood. Abramowitz and Webster are right when they argue that “one of the most important trends in American politics over the past several decades has been the rise of negative partisanship in the electorate.” It occurs, they write, when “supporters of each party perceive supporters of the opposing party as very different from themselves in terms of their social characteristics and fundamental values.” Our current form of partisanship leads us to dislike not only the other side’s politicians, but also each other.

Conservatives would argue, with some merit, that they are not solely responsible for these developments. Yet their own flight from moderation gravely aggravates the problem. A politics of “us versus them” is further encouraged by the far right’s proclivity toward the demonization of illegal
immigrants and cultural liberals, the Republican Party’s dependence on an ethnically homogeneous coalition, and the mainstream right’s still-implicit “takers” rhetoric.

In our time, advocates and apologists for antidemocratic regimes argue that the democracies are no longer capable of managing their problems or creating a sense of social dynamism. The democracies are cast as sclerotic, inefficient, and ungovernable. In all the democratic nations, and especially our own, politicians of all parties have an obligation to counter this critique of democracy by proving once again that free governments can grapple with the problems that confront us—much as the United States did in the 1930s when the forces of dictatorship were on the march around the globe.

Nurturing tolerance, harmony, social generosity, and optimism have been particular obligations of conservatism going back to Burke. Dwight Eisenhower was certainly being romantic about America’s past when he declared that our history “has been characterized by cooperation, and not by fighting among ourselves or refusing to see the other fellow’s viewpoint.” A country that went through a civil war has had more than its share of disharmony. Nonetheless, he was right in what he said next:
“It has been a group effort, freely undertaken, that has produced the things of which we are so proud and which are represented in the American way of life.” Preserving “the American way of life”—including all that we have built since the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the civil rights years—would seem a worthy object of a philosophy that calls itself “conservative.”

Our nation needs a new conservatism that finally breaks with the direction the philosophy took in the Goldwater years, and the search for a path forward must begin with an examination of the alternative form of conservatism that the partisans of Goldwaterism were rejecting. So powerful is the ongoing effect of the Goldwater revolution that we forget there were other paths.

The central object of right-wing ire in the 1950s and early 1960s was not the liberal adversary in the Democratic Party, but those inside the Republican Party who preached a more moderate form of conservatism willing to make peace with the New Deal order while seeking to curb its excesses. It was, as
we saw in Chapter One, the approach of Dwight D. Eisenhower and it went under the name of Modern Republicanism.

From the beginning, as John Judis wrote, William F. Buckley Jr.’s
National Review
was
“utterly contemptuous of Eisenhower and his policies.” Eisenhower,
National Review
wrote, “is a man more distinguished for his affability and skills in reconciling antagonisms than for a profound knowledge of his country’s institutions.” Buckley told his friend Alistair Horne, the British historian: “Eisenhower was above all a man unguided and hence unhampered by principle. Eisenhower undermines the Western resolution to stand up and defend what is ours.”

Early in
The Conscience of a Conservative,
Goldwater singled out Modern Republicanism and its leading interpreter, Arthur Larson, an Eisenhower aide, for opprobrium. Goldwater was vexed by a passage from Larson’s 1956 book,
A Republican Looks at His Party,
asserting that the “underlying philosophy” of Modern Republicanism was a belief that “if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function of the federal government.”

Larson’s formulation was simply a restatement of the first Republican president’s dictum. The legitimate object of government, Abraham Lincoln said, was “to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” But Goldwater equated Larson’s view with that of Democrat Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, who had said that the New Deal “conceived of the federal government as the whole people organized to do what had to be done.” Goldwater saw both men guilty of “an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government,” and provided the Tea Party with its text. “There is no reference by either of them,” Goldwater wrote, “to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government.” Thus was Lincoln Republicanism cast as the enemy of constitutional conservatism.

Larson had defined Eisenhower’s alternative conservative approach this way:

Now we have as much government activity as is necessary, but not enough to stifle the normal motivations of private enterprise. And we have a higher degree of government concern for the needs of people than ever before in our history, while at the same time pursuing a policy of maximum restoration of responsibility to individuals and private groups. This balance, together with a gradual restoration of a better balance between federal and state governments, is allowing all these elements of society to make their maximum contribution to the common good.

Larson certainly lacked Buckley’s fluency and dash, but he was describing a sober yet hopeful form of conservatism that had taken hold across much of the West at the time—in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Party in Britain, for example, or in the Christian Democratic Party of Konrad Adenauer in West Germany. After a dreadful depression, a world war, and genocide in Hitler’s Germany, moderation was a very attractive disposition. The democratic right across the West accepted a role for government in tempering the workings of a market economy that all participants in politics at the time knew was capable of hurtling toward chaos.

In a 1955 speech, Gabriel Hauge, an assistant to Eisenhower who later became a leading New York bank executive, defined “the economics of Eisenhower conservatism.” Ike, he said, stressed “free markets and private initiative” and “the tradition of incentive and reward.” But he also recognized that programs from the New Deal era “met real needs” and had thus “been integrated into the American way.” Eisenhower’s conservatism, Hauge said, was “neither standpattism nor reaction” and did not “seek to stop the clock of progress or turn it back.”

Eisenhower himself offered the clearest definition of his philosophy in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961. The speech is best known for his warning against the power of
“the military-industrial complex,” which, as libertarian conservatives would note, was a caution against big government and its alliance with big business. But the speech as a whole was a powerful plea for balance and prudence. Ike was unapologetic in using the word “balance” over and over. He called for “balance in and among national programs—balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped-for advantages—balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.”

He concluded: “Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”

This was thoroughly Burkean and so, too, was his rejection of the idea that “some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” In facing down communism, he argued that the country needed “not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle.” Ike was not afraid to talk about complexity, or patience.

In a passage that many libertarians can still appreciate, he warned of the lure of government money and how it could affect the freedom of intellectuals. He feared the “prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money” and worried that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” His fiscal conservatism showed through with his insistence that the nation “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” And he defended the role of negotiations in foreign policy, urging nations to “the conference table,” which, “though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”

He concluded with the hope that “in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

Commenting on Eisenhower’s speech, William Galston, who had served as an aide to Bill Clinton, recalled that
“in a moment of exasperation, the president I served once complained that we’re all Eisenhower Republicans now.” Galston’s conclusion: “We could do worse.”

And so could today’s conservatives. It is a mark of how much conservatism has changed that even to cite Eisenhower as anything but a “moderate” or even a “liberal” seems strange. Many conservatives still cannot accept in their ranks a man who declared: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and elimate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

But in thinking about their political ancestors, conservatives need to
ponder the costs of their sharp turn away from his legacy. He was certainly fiscally prudent, reducing the debt as a
share of GDP from 71.4 percent when he took office to 60.4 percent when he left. Yet within the framework of prudence and balance, he was willing to use the federal government in substantial and innovative ways to solve postwar problems. He left lasting monuments by inaugurating the Interstate Highway System and establishing the first student loan program under the National Defense Education Act, following the model of the GI Bill in broadly expanding access to higher education. It’s worth noting that long before the rise of the religious right, Eisenhower presided over a much larger public role for religion. As noted earlier, it was under Eisenhower that “Under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” became the nation’s motto. Yet Eisenhower-style public religion lacked the hard edge that religious conservatism would develop later.