Republican Futures Past: March 2001

After six and a half exhausting years, it seems strange to remember that when George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, he ran not as an ideologue, but as something of a cipher. There was no talk of grand schemes to bring democracy to the middle east, no bragging about a permanent Republican majority. Bush's major campaign pledges seemed to involve not sleeping with interns and healing the vicious partisanship his own party had done so much to create. In the estimation of many analysts - left and right - there was little to separate the Texas governor from his Democratic opponent.

His candidacy seemed appropriate for a Republican party uncomfortable in its own ideological skin. As libertarian author Ryan Sager tells it, after their disastrous 1995 showdowns with President Clinton over Medicare and the budget, Congressional Republicans had fallen victim to a kind of "Vietnam syndrome," abandoning their own agenda and spiraling into an impotent rage that led them, against their own better judgment, into the impeachment fight. Meanwhile, their electoral fortunes waned. The party's 1996 presidential nominee was the favorite of neither economic conservatives (that was Forbes), nor social conservatives (Buchanan). He was a grey and uninspiring Senator who simply happened to be next in line. That year and in 1998, voters cut away at the GOP majority; by the end of the Clinton presidency Republicans seemed to stand for little but vindictiveness and unctuous sexual moralizing. Even their one significant accomplishment - dismantling AFDC - had been cast as a victory for the Democratic president.

It was in this context that the 41st president's son took to the podium in Philadelphia, in August 2000, to claim his party's nomination for chief executive. Democrats mocked the Republicans for putting more people of color on stage at that convention than ever seemed to vote the GOP line; what observers across the ideological spectrum failed to grasp, though, was how that decision, and the apparently "centrist" rhetoric of the campaign that followed, were carefully conceived elements of a strategy to revitalize and reassert a distinctly conservative politics. In retrospect, it seems more egregious that most analysts missed the significance of Bush's choice of foreign policy advisors, but a careful examination of his domestic policy team, too, might have indicated something of how ambitious a Bush administration would turn out to be.

Instead, after a scandalously resolved election, most observers would have agreed with Daniel Casse, when he wrote in the March 2001 issue of Commentary that, even before the inauguration, "George W. Bush already seemed a man condemned to a presidency of limited expectations" (pp. 19-24). We have come to view the attacks of the following September 11 as the history-altering moment that unleashed the Bush administration's ideological demons. While those events undoubtedly changed the political context in the president's favor, Casse's article, titled "Bush and the Republican Future," demonstrates how those "limited expectations" failed to reflect the true breadth and meaning of the new administration's ambitions - the agenda Bush's team had been preparing since well before the election.

Casse does not understate the dilemma facing Republicans at the turn of the century. "Bush's victory," he says, "could be viewed as marking not the beginning of a new, post-Clinton era but as the last gasp of an earlier one -- the era of muscular, confident, conservative Republicanism." Just as mainstream pundits of the 1990's warned Democrats away from economic populism, so they forecast doom for the Republican party if it failed to, in the words of the New Republic's John Judis, "jettison the socially conservative base it gained during the 80's." This particular analysis aside, Casse agrees that

[T]here is no denying that the GOP has indeed become a party in decline. Many of the issues and conflicts that energized Republicans over the past twenty years have dissipated or disappeared altogether. Even more significantly, from the perspective of presidential politics, the electoral coalition that emerged at the end of the 1970's to sweep Ronald Reagan into office no longer exists in any meaningful form.

To Casse, this state of affairs came about in part because the conservative priorities of 1980 had largely been addressed:

The Soviet Union collapsed. Taxes were cut. Confidence returned. The federal budget was balanced. In time, the party's libertarians and cultural conservatives drifted off to pursue other, sometimes conflicting, political agendas.

A neutral observer might point out that Reagan in fact left massive structural deficits, and that while he made government meaner, he in no sense made it leaner, failing -- as we've discussed in other posts -- to achieve any significant transformation of American political economy. But such criticisms are beside the point. Casse is describing the breakdown of the fusionism that had bound the conservative movement before and during the Reagan years; like Sager, he understands the failures of the Buchanan rebellion and the Gingrich revolution as being both causes and effects of that process. At the center of the breakdown, though, was a policy problem: "tax cuts, once the signature issue of the party, were no longer the galvanizing force they had earlier been." Clinton's stimulus package had both fueled the economic recovery and wiped out the marginal tax cuts theretofore cited by Reagan's supply-siders as their most significant victory. Bob Dole's tax cut proposals had failed to impress the voters, and Republicans, who had once dreamed of totally overhauling the federal tax code, were reduced to advocating "a few incremental measures" like eliminating the estate tax. And the philosophical rot at the heart of the conservative coalition was spreading:

Yet if tax cuts had lost their force as an issue, the party was also unable to come together on much else. Preparing to select a nominee for the 2000 election, the GOP could boast no internal consensus on how to reform Medicare or Social Security, and no single view on what to do with the growing federal budget surplus. Within the party, there were bitter divisions over foreign engagement and military spending. On abortion, trade, immigration, debt reduction, and antitrust policy, no unity was to be found.

Bush seemed unlikely to resolve these uncertainties. In a party whose vestigial ideological camps were the flat-taxers and the Buchananites, Bush was neither. Rather than promising a firm ideological hand, he seemed to project his candidacy as something moderate and humble. As Casse puts it:

[A] plausible reading of his campaign oratory was that, as President, Bush would be a West Texas version of his father -- an establishment Republican filled with the spirit of noblesse oblige who had promised his own version of "compassionate conservatism" and had turned out to be merely a diligent public servent with no clear sense of political mission."

In the final analysis, diligence is probably the last quality anyone might ascribe to our 43rd president, but what matters here is that "compassionate conservatism," which looked so much like a symptom of moderation, was in fact intended as a vector of radical conservatism. And this is precisely the point of Casse's article: "Bush's emphasis on aiding the poor, the disabled, and minorities not only differentiated him from other Republicans but formed the banner under which he advanced what were some truly bold ideas."

What was compassionate conservatism? If it sounded like little more than a focus-grouped public relations slogan, its architects were aware of the charge. In a series of articles published before the election, Bush's domestic policy mentors repeatedly emphasized that, in the words of Stephen Goldsmith, compassionate conservatism was a "coherent, principled philosophy." Or, as Myron Magnet put it in a 1999 Wall Street Journal op-ed, "far from being an empty slogan, it is a well-formed domestic policy agenda."

But what kind of agenda? "At its core," said Magnet, "is concern for the poor -- not a traditional Republican preoccupation -- and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans." But the other notion at the core of compassionate conservatism was that in affirming that responsibility, conservatives could transform the nature of government itself. Goldsmith, a policy advisor to the Bush campaign, wrote that "compassionate conservatism serves as a true bridge from the era of big government as a way to solve social problems to a new era in which we will have a full and healthy trust in the people of this nation to govern themselves." The bridge metaphor is important: in blunter political terms, compassionate conservatism was designed to use the rhetoric of social solidarity to make possible the dismantling of social insurance.

It's perhaps Marvin Olasky (pdf) who presents this equation most clearly. Olasky, commonly described as the father of compassionate conservatism, argues that as long as the public believes that big government helps the poor and limited government does not, voters will choose big government. This is what stands in the way of the longstanding economic conservative dream of truly reducing the size of government. The goal for a compassionate conservative is to use taxpayer money to wean people off of government services. The compassionate conservative believes in using tax dollars to fight poverty -- but it should be done by funneling the money straight into the coffers of local faith-based organizations. The compassionate conservative believes in collecting Social Security taxes -- only to divvy them up and send them right back to individuals for investment in the stock market.

Goldsmith's line about trusting "the people of this nation to govern themselves" reflects the sort of small-is-beautiful attitude that underpins much compassionate conservative rhetoric. Indeed, Olasky's own prose can seem downright anarchist, rhaposidizing about micro-level community organizations taking over from federal bureaucracies. It's also blatantly meant to appeal to religious voters, putting faith-based groups -- even, explicitly, those without any legitimate qualifications -- at the center of its project.

There's too much to compassionate conservatism to unpack here. I'll address some of its major flaws -- and look at its future -- in later posts. In the meantime, I only want to consider what George W. Bush's campaign was attempting to do by embracing Olasky and his fellow-travellers.

For one thing, in the immediate political term, they were trying to get around a brand problem. Casse suggests that the compassionate conservative theme was aimed at "disassociating [Bush] in the public mind from either the confrontational stance of the Gingrich years or the more libertarian impulses of the Reagan era." As he points out, the Bush campaign kept Republican Congressional leaders like Trent Lott, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay "at arm's length," preferring "a mostly new cast of Republican faces, all apparently selected to emphasize the racial, ethnic, and even ideological diversity of the party."

And this -- like the multiracial cast of the Philadelphia convention -- indicates another of the purposes of compassionate conservatism: to improve the GOP's performance among minority voters. One of the major preoccupations of the Bush circle has been to increase the Republican share of "the black vote" and "the Latino vote"; this goal has informed the Bush administration's decision-making from the very beginning -- as when Karl Rove advised the president to halt the naval practice bombardment of Vieques -- up through the recent battles over immigration. It's not a priority shared by everyone in the party: the Buchananites, of course, want no truck with it, and the immigration fight put the White House sharply at odds with Congressional Republicans, whose district-by-district political calculations were very different. Nonetheless, by helping to address the social concerns -- and religious faith -- of minority voters, compassionate conservatism promised to be an element in this party-building strategy.

It also looked like a way to revitalize the existing conservative coalition, by rearticulating the fusionist logic that had, until recently, held the coalition together. If social and economic conservatives had been drifting apart, compassionate conservatism offered an argument for them to renew their vows: economic conservative ends could be achieved -- could only be achieved -- by social conservative means. Given the importance to the party of evangelical voters and libertarian donors, it seemed a promising arrangement.

Finally, compassionate conservatism was a strategy by which Republicans could move traditionally Democratic issues onto their own turf. Its architects recognized that the GOP simply could not win if it refused to account for the public's interest in Social Security, health care, and education. Compassionate conservatism offered a way for Republicans to engage these issues without betraying their economic conservative base, by emphasizing, in Casse's words, "efficiency, flexibility, and the encouragement of private initiative." This effort, in turn, helped voters see President Bush as "someone like me" -- concerned with domestic matters that mattered to the public yet which had been routinely dismissed by Republicans as little more than fodder for the red pen. The compassionate conservative could say to voters, "I want to improve Social Security and public education." He could, at the same time, say to economic conservatives, "I have a plan for privatizing Social Security and education."

For progressives, the biggest problem with compassionate conservatism is clear: it's essentially a massive pyramid scheme. Basing its "concern for the poor" on an endless series of opportunities to opt out of social insurance, it threatens to undermine social insurance altogether. To economic conservatives, of course, this is meant to be its selling point.

In Casse's early 2001 analysis, this formula looks like a winner:

For how long will voters abide Democratic leaders who remain steadfastly against any use of private accounts for Social Security? How supportive will the public be of Democratic insistence on opposing the use of school vouchers in every case, even for the poorest children? Should the left wing of the party stick to its guns, and should Bush succeed in winning over some centrist Democrats and independents, he may well end up moving these traditionally "Democratic" issues onto the Republican side.

And that, combined with other trends, could prove a turning point for his party.

Casse sees compassionate conservatism for what it was meant to be: an "ambitious project of realignment." His only worry is that Bush's "reticent and stumbling speaking style" might undermine the president's efforts to make his case.

Some Republicans still blame Bush's poor communication skills for the apparent failure of compassionate conservatism in the years since 2001. Certainly they've been a factor, particularly in his inability to convince the public to embrace Social Security privatization -- though there's plenty of evidence that the idea itself turns voters off. Moreover, much of the resistance to compassionate conservatism has come from the economic right, who have reeled in horror at the costs associated with the White House's efforts to "transform" Medicare and education. What was once sold as a means to economic conservative ends is now routinely denounced as a disastrous "big government conservatism," which has in turn been made a scapegoat for the Republican defeat in 2006. Meanwhile, of course, events six months after the publication of Casse's article would offer Rove a more potent political weapon, leading the way for Bush's transformation into a "war president."

The White House has never entirely given up on compassionate conservatism. But, having failed to make significant inroads among minority voters, having left fusionism even more ragged than they initially found it, and having lost the confidence of the American public, the compassionate conservatives find themselves isolated in a party whose new crop of presidential frontrunners are likely to ignore them altogether. The irony is that the most promising ideas for what might constitute the next conservatism -- we'll look at them over the next few weeks -- are not too dissimilar from those propagated by people like Olasky, Magnet, and Goldsmith. Given the confusion and strife among conservative ranks, however, those ideas might struggle to find patrons.

The Republican future of March 2001 suggested no catastrophic attacks, no "long wars," no Abramoffs or Abu Ghraibs. Nor did it anticipate just how fractured the conservative coalition would eventually become. In the months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Republican future might not have looked particularly bright, but to those who thought compassionate conservatism could offer a way to revitalize the party and the movement, there might have been, at the very least, a sliver of light on the horizon.

Labels: Commentary, compassionate conservatism, George Bush, Reading Conservative History, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:44 PM 0 comments

  Re-Reading Reagan: Commentary Reacts

A few weeks ago I noted Jonah Goldberg's puzzlement over the lack of reaction among neoconservatives to John Patrick Diggins's new biography of Ronald Reagan (which I still haven't read yet). The point was that Diggins, a liberal, apparently makes the case that Reagan was a great president - but, on the foreign policy front, this was very much in spite of, rather than thanks to, the efforts of the Gipper's neoconservative advisors. Goldberg took this thesis as an attack on the current neocon resurgence, arguing that much of the Diggins book was preoccupied with "tendentious, odd or as ill-advised attempts to find the roots of the Iraq war in the Reagan Administration." And he wondered at the silence from neocon organs like Commentary and the Weekly Standard.

Commentary, anyway, has finally fired back - though rather half-heartedly. Diggins's work is relegated to the back end of Dan Seligman's brief two-part review of Reagan-related books (the first being John O'Sullivan's panegyric). Seligman reports scornfully that Diggins is committed to arguing "the folly and perfidy of neoconservatism and all its outlets (not excluding COMMENTARY)."

Diggins’s main point is that Reagan’s neoconservative advisers were unrealistically fearful of Soviet military might, and darkly suspicious of any efforts to negotiate with the Russians. In the story line that follows from this, Reagan became a peacemaker only because in his second term he finally chose to break away from the “neocon hard-liners” on his staff who counseled “victory, not peace,” and instead decided to negotiate with the Russians.

Seligman argues that Reagan's $2 trillion military buildup - and the fact that he appointed all those neocons in the first place - make a mockery of the notion that the president was ever trying to avoid confrontation.

That buildup, of course, was begun by Jimmy Carter - a fact that conservatives never fail to conveniently forget. And the fact that Reagan hired hawks doesn't negate the fact that he may later have broken with them. But what interests me most about Seligman's review is its defiantly single-minded reading of history:

In his introduction, Diggins squarely rejects the common view that Reagan was a lucky bystander, that the USSR was crumbling anyway, and the President just “happened to be in the right place at the right time.” Yet as the book progresses, he takes a completely different tack. “The process of liberalization that Gorbachev introduced in Moscow,” Diggins writes at one juncture, “eventually brought down the entire edifice of the Communist state.” At another junction, he declares that “It was not Western policy that caused the breakup of the Soviet Union but the failure of the political process within the Soviet Union.”

Reagan’s reputation will undoubtedly survive these wobbles. Diggins’s reputation as an intellectual historian may not fare so well.

Diggins's thesis, implies Seligman, refuses to acknowledge Reagan's "key contribution" to the USSR's downfall. But even if one accepts that Reagan played a role in that collapse, how is that admission betrayed by the recognition that many - indeed, most - of the immediate and underlying factors leading to fall of the Soviet Union were internal? Must we now give Reagan all the credit? This is great-man historicizing taken to a ludicrous extreme: let's just go ahead and erase every other actor and factor from the history books.

It may not be Seligman's intent to make that point, exactly. But it is the rhetorical effect of his argument, and it reflects the extremely dangerous neoconservative mindset - Manichean, self-aggrandizing, and obsessively single-minded. It's no wonder these people got us into the disaster in Iraq.

Labels: Commentary, John Patrick Diggins, Neoconservatives, Ronald Reagan

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:35 AM 0 comments

  Republican Futures Past: 1983

In November 1982, during a time of recession and 10 percent unemployment, American voters punished President Ronald Reagan and the Republican party, expanding the Democrats' majority in the House of Representatives by 27 seats.

The following January, as the new Congress took its seats, Commentary Magazine published an essay by James Nuechterlein titled "The Republican Future" [pp. 17-25]. Responding to conservative disappointment, Nuechterlein argued that the results constituted "no realignment, no repudiation" - only a "gentle rebuke." Still, there was no denying the fact that "the Democrats remain the majority party in America."

A quarter-century later, we're accustomed to remembering the 1980 election as the 'Reagan Revolution.' But in the wake of the '82 midterms, Nuechterlein suggested that Reagan had originally earned only a "tentative mandate" - one that Republicans should endeavor to renew despite their midterm defeat. Nuechterlein is clear about the stakes involved:

Reagan is no ordinary President. He is our most ideological chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt, and he intends as consequential a revision of our political economy as did FDR. [...]

[Reagan's] political fate will resonate through our political culture with an urgency that no American will be able to disregard.

The starting point for Nuechterlein's effort to divine that fate is his review of a pair of books published shortly before the midterms. The first, by a Heritage Foundation analyst and former Time Magazine writer named Burton Yale Pines, forecast the emergence of a "traditionalist" movement that would, Pines predicted, transform American culture as much as its politics (click here for a New York Times review of the same book). The second appears to have represented an interesting moment in the evolution of Kevin Phillips, the Nixon strategist who has since become a vehement critic of the right.

By "traditionalism," Nuechterlein tells us, Pines meant:

a revolt against dominant modernist liberal values in virtually every area of public and private life: economics, politics, education, family relations, religion, crime and punishment, and the intellectual world. He means defense of private enterprise; advocacy of growth over redistribution ... preservation of the nuclear family as a cultural norm (which implies, among other things, anti-feminism and repudiation of gay rights); defense of religious orthodoxy and opposition to secular humanism... and an overriding skepticism and fear of government plans to build, by rationalist enterprise, the good society.

The mass evangelical re-entry into electoral politics had only begun recently, during the Carter years, so we might not be surprised that it apparently doesn't quite occur to Pines or Nuechterlein to give this phenomenon the label we know it by today: the Christian Right.

"Fusionism" is another term that neither author uses, even though it is the very concept that frames each author's concerns about the prospects for the future of this new traditionalism. Nuechterlein cites the divide between traditionalists on the one hand, and "conservative and neoconservative intellectuals, corporate executives, and mainline Republicans" on the other. "In Pines's view," we're told, "these two groups seldom communicate." History, of course, tells us that they would learn to communicate quite well before very long.

Still, Nuechterlein is not quite ready to jump in with both feet. While he concedes that the left has unfairly maligned honest conservatives, he points out that

there are crazies, zealots, and fanatics on the right, and there is no greater obstacle to the progress of a responsible conservatism than the perception ... that the Right is inhabited only by inadequate and unhinged personalities.

He criticizes Pines for the latter's "popular-front mentality" - the idea that "there are no enemies on the right." Conservatives will ruin themselves, says Nuechterlein, "if they do not distinguish themselves from the know-nothing fringe." One hardly need point out the irony of the fact that "no enemies on the right" was the concept behind the "11th Commandment" devised to protect Ronald Reagan himself. For the time being, at any rate, Nuechterlein takes comfort in the "apparent failure of right-wing dogmatists to achieve their objectives" in the '82 elections - especially given how organizations like the Moral Majority had inspired liberal fundraising efforts. The message he wants to reiterate is that "a conservative is not at all the same thing as a radical of the right." Twenty-five years later, unfortunately, that message is not so clear.

In Post-Conservative America, on the other hand, Kevin Phillips appears to have predicted a descent into extremism of a somewhat different sort: "radical reactionary upsurges and the emergence of 'a species of European corporate statism.'" Nuechterlein feels compelled to refute Phillips's thesis, which does indeed come across as overly pessimistic - but which is grounded in an otherwise astute analysis of the dilemma with which conservatives would ultimately be faced. Phillips, it seems, argues that Reagan's coalition of economic conservatives, old-line Republicans, and the social right, cannot hold. Ultimately, Phillips says, social conservatives simply aren't on board with the Reaganite dream of remaking America's political economy. Nuechterlein summarizes:

Reagan's program of budget cuts, monetarist restraint, and reduction in marginal tax rates ... held little attraction for the populist Right. That group was more interested in reductions in property taxes - the Proposition 13 phenomenon - than in progressive income tax rates, and its anti-business instincts ... made it suspicious of monetarism. [...]

Moreover, the populist Right's generalized animus against big government did not preclude its expectation that the federal pork barrel would remain accessible to itself. While Reagan's middle-class supporters wanted cuts in welfare, Phillips argues, they were not prepared for the widespread reductions in social programs that the administration's policies called for.

Phillips's pessimism lies in how he predicts this contradiction will resolve itself: with Balkanization, radicalization, and "revolutionary conservatism" demanding massive but illiberal government intervention in the economy, leading even to joint government-business central planning. Thus the European-style corporatism he fears, bearing the possibility of authoritarian politics along with it. What Phillips refers to is, essentially, a variety of fascism.

Nuechterlein derides this apocalyptic vision, arguing that there is no reason to believe that the right will disintegrate into radicalism on account of tensions between economic and social conservatives. Defending Reagan against charges of intellectual inadequacy, Nuechterlein says that

Reagan has already brought a good deal more coherence into American politics than it has experienced in recent years. He has, first of all, united the conservative movement and turned the Republican party into a vehicle of that movement.

And anyway, if social conservatives dislike the president's economic policies, there's no other place for them to go - certainly they won't turn to the Democrats, and any third party would be a waste of their time. Ronald Reagan, according to Nuechterlein, would remain firmly at the head of the conservative coalition. And there was no reason to believe that the project would fail:

The Reagan administration may wind up in ultimate frustration, but Phillips's Chicken-Little analysis simply comes to early in the game for us to believe it is anything but predetermined.

Looking back, certain things do in fact seem to have been predetermined - not by Phillips's analysis, but by economic and political reality. Reagan achieved no consequential revision of American political economy - to echo Nuechterlein, the so-called Reagan Revolution ended in no realignment, no repudiation of the New Deal. As Michael Kinsley has described,

Federal government spending was a quarter higher in real terms when Reagan left office than when he entered. As a share of GDP, the federal government shrank from 22.2 percent to 21.2 percent—a whopping one percentage point. The federal civilian work force increased from 2.8 million to 3 million [even excluding Defense Department employees]. [...]

And taxes? Federal tax collections rose about a fifth in real terms under Reagan. As a share of GDP, they declined from 19.6 percent to 18.3 percent.

For context, Kinsley compares this record to that of President Clinton, under whom the federal civilian workforce shrank, and federal spending grew at half the rate in real terms - and was reduced as a portion of GDP by twice as much - as it had under Reagan. Even during Reagan's term, monetarism was abandoned and Laffer Curves were quietly put away. All in all, Reagan managed some modest cuts in non-defense discretionary spending, but made no dent on entitlements and ultimately racked up massive deficits which forced his successors to raise marginal tax rates, thus wiping out the one Reagan legacy that conservatives have been able to cite as a great triumph of supply-side economics. And, of course, the rise in marginal tax rates under Clinton only fueled the economy.

One might cite Clinton's deceleration of government spending as evidence for a Reagan Revolution that remade the American political context and forced even Democrats to join the small-government bandwagon. Conservatives have often referred to Clinton's pronouncement in his 1996 State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." This, we are told, is evidence of Reagan's triumph. But the argument mistakes rhetoric for fact (and Clinton's next sentence was a reaffirmation of the need for activist government: "But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.") And the explosion of government spending under the conservative George W. Bush essentially puts the myth of the Reagan Revolution to bed.

The irony of all this is that the failure of the Reagan Revolution turned out to be a good thing for the Republican party. By avoiding significant budget cuts, Reagan was able to retain the support of the social conservatives who have come to constitute the party's base - and who, contra Pines, were always much more interested in culture than in political economy. Thus the right was not forced to split, and Phillips's dark hypothesis was never tested. The conservative movement may have been saved by its own hypocrisy.

True supply-siders are well represented in the ranks of conservative intellectuals and donors. But they have never had a significant electoral base of their own. The latest Pew Political Typology, for instance, finds that so-called "Enterprisers," who are "strongly pro-business" and "oppose social welfare," constitute only 11 percent of registered voters - dramatically underscoring the extent to which Republican fortunes lie in the hands of "pro-government conservatives." As Phillips and others have pointed out, the populist embrace of right-wing economics extends only as far as the occasional tax revolt will carry it. The Friedmanites have developed various coping strategies in response. They've over-idealized the Reagan years. They've blamed Democrats for blocking the conservative economic program. They've searched for silver linings. But over the past six years, they've had little cover for the failure to advance their agenda - and the result has been a series of noisy complaints about their own party - and especially Bush. In fact, the current administration has, with its "compassionate conservatism," sought a way out of the dilemma facing economic conservatives. But that's for the next installment.

The Republican future of 1983 was fraught with promise and peril. Ultimately it neither realized its promise nor succumbed to the peril. The fusionist conservative movement did not in fact achieve a revolution under Reagan, but neither did it disintegrate into fascism. Rather it has perpetuated itself by a kind of mythmaking: overstating both its successes (as exemplified by Reagan and Newt Gingrich) and its supposed powerlessness under Clinton and the first President Bush. The movement has held more political power than it will admit, but it has accomplished less than it would like to believe. Yet this dual myth has benefited conservatives: it has held the movement together and given it impetus, providing a vision of what conservatives might achieve and a hunger to overcome the political obstacles standing in the way.

But in the era of total conservative government, this sustaining myth ran aground. The obstacles to implementation of the conservative agenda were no longer just political, but structural; conservatives, with only feeble Democratic opposition, and the guiding star of the Reaganite ideology showing the way, were forced to navigate waters far more difficult than they had imagined. This was the dilemma that would confront President George W. Bush, and it was in many ways a legacy of a president who proved, in the end, to be a great actor - but not much of a revolutionary.

Cross-posted at Progressive Historians.

Labels: Commentary, conservatives, Reading Conservative History, Ronald Reagan

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:39 PM

  Republican Futures Past: 1956

Among American political journals, Commentary Magazine has had one of the more intriguing histories. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, the publication's initial purpose was to help engage Jewish intellectuals in the nation's political and cultural conversations. Under founding editor Elliot Cohen - who brought on board writers like Nathan Glazer and Irving Howe - Commentary's editorial line was liberal anti-Communist. Following Norman Podhoretz's takeover in 1960, the magazine moved sharply to the left, only to begin a swing in the other direction by the end of the decade, as Podhoretz and his cohort turned against the so-called New Left (they also reacted against perceived anti-Israeli sentiment in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War). By the mid-70s, liberal/left intellectuals were referring to Commentary's contributors as "neoconservatives" - a somewhat pejorative term meant to denote former leftists who had since become, in Lewis Coser's words, "intellectuals in retreat." Before long, the Commentary circle had become an influential - if sometimes uneasy - part of the conservative movement.

All of this makes digging around in the magazine's archives a fascinating exercise. Having bought myself a subscription, I've been doing just that - and I've come across a trio of articles that provide very interesting insight into how the conservative movement has transformed the Republican party over the past half-century. Each piece - from 1956, 1983, and 2001 - attempts to make predictions about the future of the relationship between conservatives and the GOP, and how that relationship affects political prospects for both the movement and the party. Over the next three days or so, I'll do a post on each article.

The first, from the November 1956 issue (pp. 482-5), is a review, by the now-legendary historian Seymour Martin Lipset, of a book about the history of the Republican party by conservative professor Malcolm Moos. Bemoaning a dearth of academic interest in the major American political parties, Lipset praises Moos's engaged but evenhanded account of the GOP. Moos, an Eisenhower Republican, is apparently willing to document the party's failings as much as its triumphs. It comes a shock to the modern reader when, listing examples of such mistakes, Lipset includes "the antagonism to a strong Executive which has characterized the GOP for the past thirty-six years."

Equally striking is the tradition that the "conservative" Moos celebrates. Lipset summarizes:

Lincoln's leadership; Mark Hanna's far-sighted "progressive conservatism," which recognized in the late 19th century that a stable society would require strong trade unions and that reformist groups did not constitute a challenge to private capitalism; the Progressive Republicans in the early part of this century who fought the excesses of big business power; William Howard Taft, who prosecuted trusts and whose administration sponsored Constitutional amendments for the income tax and the direct election of Senators; and Taft's son Robert, who backed public housing for the poor, and who in 1953 was willing to defend the right of Communists to teach.

It was Robert Taft's death in 1954 - along with the end of Joe McCarthy's reign of demagoguery (which falls on the "failures" list) - that left a void on the Republican right for the nascent conservative movement to fill. November of 1956 was too early for Moos or Lipset to recognize the implications of this. The National Review was only a year old, Barry Goldwater just an unusually-energetic freshman Senator.

What's fascinating is how Lipset and Moos are interested in the historical arc of the Republican party as the story of the development of progressive, not movement, conservatism. Lipset provides a thumbnail sketch of the party's foundational coalition: an alliance of northeastern middle-class conservatives in the Federalist tradition, nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, and Free Soilers. He doesn't discuss the ideological and regional incoherence of the Whig coalition that preceded the Republicans, but he does point out that, with the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, the Republicans became the first American political party to secure a lasting marriage between northeastern conservatives and a mass agricultural base (in the Midwest). As Lipset recounts, the northeasterners would dictate the party's industrialist economic policy, while the Midwesterners, in response, would give birth to a reformist progressive tradition.

And yet, by the 1950s, it was the northeastern wing of the GOP that represented progressivism, while the Midwest had become the party's conservative heartland. Among the reasons Moos and Lipset cite for this development are the decline of the nation's rural population - which meant the rise of a conservative bourgeoisie in Midwestern towns (the "middle-sized conservative businessman who is opposed to trade unions, high taxes, and government regulation"), and the increasing internationalism of northeastern capitalism, which went along with a greater willingness to tolerate trade unionism and social welfare policies.

If you've read Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, you'll recognize this alignment as the powder keg of the mid-50s, when the resentments harbored by "middle-sized" Midwestern businessmen - of unions, of communism, of taxes, of regulation, of foreign entanglements, and of the liberal northeastern Republicans who were accomodating it all - needed only a political spark to explode. Again, Lipset can't be blamed for failing to see this, nor for failing to predict the additional layer of extremism that would come as a result of the Republican strategy of tapping into the white Southern reaction to the civil rights movement after the 1960s. And his attempt to make a prediction about the future of the GOP is grounded in a reasonable analysis. But the historical irony is impossible to miss.

Lipset cites Moos's observation that, when the mid-20th century GOP was out of power, most of its Congressional delegation was drawn from safely conservative districts:

But a Republican running for governor in an industrial state that has a strong Democratic party, or running for the Presidency, must appeal to independent and Democratic voters who will not vote for a reactionary. And so one always finds Republican governors pitted against Republican Congressmen at national conventions, and since 1936 the former have almost invariably succeeded in pushing through a Presidential candidate of their own persuasion.

The result of all this was that Republicans tended to be conservative in the minority but moderate when in power. The Democrats, by contrast, tended to be more progressive in power than out of it. This was because their safest Congressional seats - the seats the party was most likely to hold in a time of weakness - were in the South!

Clearly, things have changed since 1956. The loss of the South - along with a number of other factors - has flipped the dynamic of the Democratic party so that it, like the postwar GOP, is more centrist after it has won than after it has lost. But the Republicans have changed, too. Lipset's model was, in fact, predictive in the near-term. He correctly forecast that the conservative Richard Nixon, if he made it to the White House, would govern from the center (dirty tricks notwithstanding):

One may safely hazard the guess that not even the succession of Nixon to the Presidency would affect this pattern, for Nixon and the party leaders know that a Republican President must be spokesman of the most liberal element in the party.

In fact, this prediction, made with the 1960 election in mind, held true even after two additional cycles had passed.

But the tectonic plates of American politics would shift in the meantime. The conservative movement that was born around the time of Lipset's writing would grow in influence, as it drew support from reactionary populism not only in the Midwest, but in the South and in the Sunbelt. Conservatives would note Nixon's role as spokesman for the liberal wing of the GOP, and resolve to bring an end to such political imperatives. Lipset's 1956 model of the American political landscape would become obsolete by the end of the 70s. Lipset himself was not willing to predict that the Republican party would become as progressive as Moos hoped, but, he said, "neither is it likely to become the tool of deep-dyed reactionaries." It was a reasonable deduction given the calculus of the time, but the calculations have changed.

The reactionaries have, by now, completely extinguished the progressive tradition in the Republican party. The GOP seems to be equally conservative in and out of power, though its varying confidence levels and the theoretical dilemmas within the conservative movement can provide something of an illusion of ideological diversity.

In the long run, American politics tends not to reward parties with narrow ideological range. Now that the postwar conservative movement has reached a rather vexing crossroads, and the GOP looks more vulnerable than it has in a long time, it's difficult to forecast where the party will go next (and it will partially depend, of course, on choices made by the Democrats). But the lesson of the Republican future of 1956 is that the party has found itself embarked upon a very different path than the one historians might have had reason to predict.

(Cross-posted at Progressive Historians.)

Labels: Commentary, conservatives, Reading Conservative History, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:29 PM 2 comments

  Everything I Say Is a Lie

I've finally remembered to check out Commentary Magazine's new blog, "Contentions." Commentary has long had its own special brand of high-gravitas loopiness, so I expect great things from the blog.

And there does seem to be some promise. Witness Kevin Shapiro and Max Boot stumbling and tumbling over global warming and the right's standards of evidence.

Boot starts it out almost rationally:

Conservatives like to think of themselves as hard-headed, flinty-eyed realists who draw conclusions based on the way the world actually works, not on the way they would prefer it to work. They deride liberals as sentimentalists who never let facts interfere with their preferred policy prescriptions, whether in favor of the minimum wage or arms control. Yet there are some issues on which conservatives will not let any amount of evidence shake their own faith-based politics. Global warming is a prime example. [...]

[T]oo many on the Right still refuse to acknowledge the basic reality that the climate is changing in potentially dangerous ways due to human activity, and that we need to reduce carbon emissions to address this looming crisis. Skeptics can always dredge up a rogue scientist or two to buttress their case, just as liberals can always find an economist or two to make the case for raising the minimum wage. But why should a few fringe figures dictate governmental policy?

I would think supporters of the invasion of Iraq would be more sympathetic to arguments for preventative action based on the best available intelligence.

Indeed: we don't want the smoking gun to be the climate equivalant of a mushroom cloud.

Sensing a chance to dramatically up the surreality quotient, Kevin Shapiro fires back:

I thought that Max Boot’s analogy between the conventional wisdom on climate change and the pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s WMD’s was an apt one. But I’m not sure why he concluded from this that conservatives should abandon their skepticism about efforts to “fight” climate change by curtailing CO2 emissions. It seems to me that one should logically draw the opposite conclusion—namely, that we ought to be wary of the “consensus” of “experts” on matters where the uncertainty is large, the stakes are high, and political pressures are at work.

Ah-ha! Thus, the neoconservatives' own bamboozlement of Americans - based on manipulated intelligence, shoddy or even faked "evidence," and the testimony of experts who all agreed that they couldn't actually find any WMDs in Iraq - is now used as justification, by those same neocons, for global warming denial.

Shorter version: "The fact that I lied to you proves that I can't trust you to be honest."

Labels: Commentary, Contentions, global warming, Kevin Shapiro, Max Boot

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:04 AM 1 comments

  This Week in Conservative Organs: Exile on K Street

As Republican ex-staffers scramble to secure whatever lobbying jobs are left, our conservative organists this week take up the burden of advising the newly minoritized GOP legislators as to just what, exactly, they should do with themselves for the next two years.



The National Review Online offers a "symposium" on the key question: "How can the GOP show some constructive leadership during the Democrats' first 100 legislative hours?"

Veronique de Rugy, "a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute," suggests they start by "reforming the supplemental spending process."

The increased reliance on supplemental spending is problematic because the lack of detail in supplemental budget requests — combined with their expedited approval process — leaves little room for congressional oversight. In addition, the reduced budget discipline for supplemental bills attracts earmarks and other projects that wouldn’t be funded on their own merits. [...]

Addressing the supplemental-spending shell game that Capitol Hill and the White House have been playing for years would save taxpayers roughly $100 billion per year.

Would Republicans magically manage to pass such reforms without Democratic support? I have no idea. Maybe the Democrats would go along. After all, why wouldn't they want to give the GOP's main domestic priority a boost:

That would make it easier for the GOPs to try to make their tax cuts permanent.

Former Congressman David McIntosh suggests that Republicans "should boldly propose ideas to further reduce taxes and eliminate unnecessary and wasteful government spending." McIntosh also insists that the GOP "vigorously oppose proposals that increase the size and scope of the federal government." To McIntosh, the minority is an opportunity for the Republicans to once again become "the party of ideas." No doubt the Republicans would find it refreshing to be just the party of ideas again, as those ideas haven't served them very well when they've been the party of power.

Grover Norquist, having helped drown the GOP majority in a bathtub, suggests the Republicans do only one thing: "Lose." Lucky for them Norquist is such an expert at that!

For the next two years conservatives will not be able to pass any useful legislation through the House of Representatives. Memorize that sentence. Place it on your PC screensaver. Use it as your message on your answering machine. A discreet but easily accessed tattoo would be helpful. [...]

Republicans in Congress need to use the first 100 days and the next two years to lose. Propose House rules that keep the present GOP requirement for a 3/5 vote to raise taxes. And lose. Propose House rules that term limit committee chairmen — the old GOP rule only applied to Republicans. And lose. Propose a tax cut. And lose. Heck, get denied an actual vote. Have a procedural vote. And lose. Propose an end to earmarks. And lose. Write welfare reform part three. And lose.

You know what? I agree with this.

I know, I know - it's all part of a clever strategy to make the Democrats look bad. Professor John J. Pitney Jr. has more:

To the limited extent that they can offer amendments and alternatives, they should force the Democrats to show whether they are as “moderate” as the conventional wisdom has depicted them.

Indeed. And what are these radical, loony ideas that will descredit the Democrats? Er... the minimum wage hike. And pay-as-you-go budgeting. I can hear the strains of the "Internationale"...

ALSO AT NRO: David Hogberg [note to self: name jokes are the lowest form of humor] darkly predicts that whatever the Democrats do about health care, they'll just end up making it cost more; Donald Luskin just knew that the Democrats were only pretending to care about the deficit; and K-Lo advises Mitt Romney: "Say it loud: I'm Mormon and I'm proud!"




You read this stuff and there are some articles that just seem to deserve special acclaim for diving boldly through the looking glass. It's so perverse it's almost unanswerable. Starting today, I'll be conferring a special award to teh most awesomely l33t mind-bender of the week.

So the inaugural Up-Is-Downism Award goes to R. Emmet Tyrrell, founder and still champion at the anti-Clinton scandal sheet, theAmerican Spectator. R. invites us to sympathize with the dilemma now facing President Bush, as this gentle uniter finds himself thrown to the ravenous Democratic wolves. Some excerpts [subtext in bold]:

The story here in this great city is that President George W. Bush, leader of the vanquished Republicans, is reaching out [middle finger extended] to the triumphant Democrats on Capitol Hill. [...]

What the Republican base might find reassurance in is that this is not a New Bush. He came to Washington believing in this sort of collegiality. He thought he experienced it in Texas with a Democratic legislature. He imagined he would experience it in Washington. My guess is that one of his greatest disappointments as president is that there has been so little consensus in Congress and so much partisanship. [No doubt Karl Rove was equally disappointed.] [...]

Mr. Bush spent most of his adult life as a businessman, not as a politician. For about two decades, as Mr. Bush was working in [failing upward through] the private sector and the likes of Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons were politicking, a growing partisanship was overtaking politics.

Okay, I just have to stop for a moment and catch my breath, make sure everyone's paying attention here now, because this next part is just absolutely delicious. Ready? Ok.

The Clintons and their cogenerationists were the main reason for it.

Ohhhhhhh MAN that's some good stuff. Oh yeah, sorry - the subtext:

[Says the rag that made its entire name and reputation with a series of vicious Mellon Scaife-funded partisan slanders on the Clintons!!]

Okay, it goes on, but I think we've seen more than enough to declare a winner.

ALSO AT THE AMSPEC, Quin Hillyer outlines conservative resolutions for the new year: support the 'surge,' embiggen the military, kill the nanny state, take a bite out of crime, and be really, really ethical. Meanwhile, "The Prowler" begins the political deathwatch for Republican Senators Warner and Sununu, and Pia de Solenni says there are two kind of women: women who want to get married and thus end up having lots of lonely premarital sex (and here she coins the phrase of the week: "sex without context"), and women who don't care about other people and thus remain happily chaste. (She also earns bonus points for using examples from Sex and the City without even knowing the characters' names, referring to Samantha only as "the promiscuous blonde.")




AT THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Fred Barnes wishes President Bush would shut up about Social Security and start talking up Health Savings Accounts. Any deal that Bush could make on Social Security would be unacceptable to conservatives ("Were Bush to approve a substantial tax increase without any compensating reform, he would sever his last solid link with conservatives"). But now everyone's talking about health care, and here conservatives have a chance to get in at the ground floor. Plus, it wouldn't require horse trading!

To extend their use, Bush doesn't need the approval of Democrats, most of whom oppose HSAs. Legislation passed in the lame duck session of Congress made it easier for companies and individuals to sign up. All that's required of the president is to mount the bully pulpit to spread the good word about HSAs and promote their use.

You know, this is actually legitimately dangerous. Conservatives can never kill the great liberal innovations like Social Security. But they can kill health care reform before it starts. That's exactly what Barnes is advocating.

MEANWHILE AT THE STANDARD, Louis Wittig is baffled by Al Jazeera English, which seems almost as fair and balanced as Fox News, if only they wouldn't talk about Arabs so much; and Victorino Matus says "Saddam got off easy:" why, they didn't even desecrate his body!

ZIPPING THROUGH... At the neoconeriffic Commentary Gabriel Schoenfeld frets that the election of Keith Ellison and the existence of a handful of Democratic congresspeople with less than 100% ratings from AIPAC mean that the Democrats are turning into the Hate the Jews Party. Meanwhile, Joshua Muravchik, who once almost ended up on the Ali G. show, manages to argue that: 1)Borat is a great movie because it's mainly about making fun of people in the Third World, and 2)Criticizing Israeli policies is more anti-Semitic than singing "throw the Jew down the well".

FINALLY, the paleocons at The American Conservative feature a special liberal guest star: Glenn Greenwald, who wonders why none of the talking-head war cheerleaders have been made to answer for their foolishness:

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

ALSO, Steve Sailer demonstrates the dark side of communitarianism, denouncing free market social Darwinism but also American cultural diversity. It seems that people - especially brown people - just don't like each other very much. Proposed solutions: martial law, IQ tests, or universal Christian fundamentalism. Take your pick.

AND FINALLY, Tom Piatak reviews Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, whose title is something like Why 9/11 Was the Liberals' Fault. Piatak's a little taken aback by D'Souza's fondness for sharia law, but his reaction is less interesting than D'Souza's thesis, which goes like this:

1. They hate us for our freedoms
2. Liberals are the ones who use freedoms
Ergo,
3. They hate us for our liberals.

It's nice to see the conservatives and the terrorists have something in common. Whatever gets your rocks off.

Labels: American Conservative, American Spectator, Commentary, conservatism, conservatives, National review, TWICO, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:24 PM 2 comments