Muzzled (9 page)

The power of debate to shape the nation is clear again during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, as well as later around the foreign-policy debates that led to U.S. involvement in World War I.

In the years between 1890 and the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the Supreme Court put in place laws to foster an aggressive brand of capitalism in the United States. It enforced a strict reading of the “freedom to contract,” which included striking down state laws on minimum wages, doing away with limits on how many hours an employee could be required to work, and making it more difficult to unionize workers. The economic collapse of ’29 sparked a major debate about the ability of “robber baron” capitalists to regulate and maintain the stable economic markets essential to the nation’s future. In 1932 President Roosevelt responded by offering America a vision of a muscular federal government taking a commanding role in the nation’s economic affairs. A new Supreme Court set aside legal precedents to open the nation’s door to vast new federal regulation of monetary policy, to allow minimum wage laws, to allow child labor laws, and to make it easier for unions to organize workers. The immediate results of FDR’s New Deal programs in putting Americans back to work proved popular and helped FDR’s Democrats win control of the White House and both houses of Congress (they would keep the White House for seven out of nine terms between 1933 and 1969); they also converted many African Americans from allegiance to the party of Lincoln.

But political triumph did not stop the debate between free
markets and government regulation. “I fear [Roosevelt’s Social Security policies] may end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European,” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, said of the president and his Social Security plan. “It will … add great strength to the political demagogue. It will assist in driving worthy and courageous men from public life. It will discourage and defeat the American trait of thrift. It will go a long way toward destroying American initiative and courage.” Hastings and other Republicans challenged Roosevelt on diminishing the rights of individual states to control their own commerce, as well as unwarranted intrusion through federal regulation of commerce. Social Security drew particularly harsh critiques from Republicans as an attempt to “Sovietize America.”

The contest of ideas about the federal government’s role in restraining the worst instincts of big business and its role in providing a social safety net to protect Americans from economic hardship continued for decades. It can be traced from FDR’s time through arguments over President Johnson’s Great Society programs to recent efforts to enact national healthcare legislation. In the 1950s, the future president Ronald Reagan entered the debate, speaking out in opposition to proposals for what became Medicare, which Reagan called “socialized medicine.” Reagan warned that if the government got in the business of health care, it would cripple the nation and Americans in the future would “spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in the United States where men were free.” This enduring debate extended to questions about the use of federal government spending to stir economic activity. As early as 1948 conservative
scholar Henry Rottschaefer wrote, in commentary that seems like the early-twenty-first-century conservative rebuttals to President Obama’s policies, that the country was on a track away “from individualism toward socialism, from acceptance of an economic system operating in response to the profit motive to belief in … government planning.”

Between those familiar lines of liberal-versus-conservative jousting over social and fiscal policy, a series of shifts took place in how Americans debated. In the years after World War II the right wing revitalized itself as the party of strong, flag-waving opposition to communists. The Republican Party became the home of people who drew their identity as the true guardians of American liberty, with a continued focus on the threat of government growing too big as a result of New Deal policies. The intense, often singular vigilance against communist influences in American life offended Democrats, who did not see the need for the fierce anticommunist attitude. It did not help that some Republicans labeled Democrats “fellow travelers,” “soft” on communists, and even “anti-American.” By 1958 the John Birch Society had been launched as a conservative group with a limited, hard-line agenda—battling communists and rolling back FDR’s big-government programs. The Birch Society sometimes ventured into extremism, such as when members hinted that President Eisenhower, a former general and a Republican, was a communist agent.

But the fervor of the John Birchers proved to be a tonic for Republicans. The Birchers shifted the center of the GOP away from Wall Street to Middle America. Their embrace of patriotism and traditions offered simple, clear themes that stirred grassroots voters and drew media attention to the Republican
Party. Their attacks on liberal elites who did not understand the threat of communism, on people in academia, and on Hollywood also drew attention, although some of it had anti-Semitic undertones. A few conservative intellectuals, notably the writer William F. Buckley, offered a more sophisticated brand of Republican identity. Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater, drawing on Western, libertarian, and conservative ideas of protecting individual rights, made a significant contribution to this contest of ideas about the nation’s priorities with his book
The Conscience of a Conservative
in 1960.

The Republican Party also became the home of what was described by politicians in the Vietnam War era as the “silent majority,” those frustrated by the rise of racial tensions in big cities and growing protests against sending the U.S. military to fight communists in the tiny, distant country of Vietnam. GOP politicians gained votes by giving voice to calls for law and order in big cities and support for troops abroad. The passage of civil rights laws, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, acted to polarize the Far Left and the Far Right, with each side labeling the other as racist. It was a period that saw a realignment of the political parties, as they began, in the words of law professor Richard Pildes, to “define themselves along different, more ideologically coherent, and polarized lines.”

After LBJ’s bold civil rights actions, the white South (and thus the South electorally) was all but lost to the Democrats, and as a result their coalition reconfigured and absorbed new support from the black community, urban centers, and new-left factions of youthful progressives, feminists, unions, and the antiwar movement. The Democratic Party became more
diverse in the latter half of the twentieth century, even as its ideology became more rigid. Meanwhile, the influx of white Southern voters to the Republican Party also gave a new religious tinge to conservative politics. Thanks to the Supreme Court decision in
Roe v. Wade
, abortion became a polarizing issue as religious conservatives and Christian Right groups, uniting against it, emerged as major voices, driving white, mostly Baptist churchgoers in unprecedented numbers to the Republican Party. Unlike those of earlier eras, many of the debates of the seventies and eighties over critical social issues gained definition and power from third-party groups like the Christian Right. And politicians, to gain favor with these groups, began tailoring their positions on key issues to fit the litmus test. It became increasingly difficult for politicians to express respect for opposing points of view. Discussions among leading political figures and among leading academics were increasingly derided as elitism. Debate, too, fell into disrepute, because nuanced positions and compromise threatened to dull the sharp edges of critical wedge issues—communism, gays, forced integration, the right to have a gun. Real debate presented a threat to people whose fixed political positions gave them strong identities as crusading liberals or law-abiding conservatives.

Economic shifts, too, changed the nature of political discourse in the second half of the twentieth century, as white-collar jobs for college graduates eclipsed blue-collar, industrial employment. More low-wage labor jobs moved overseas, and the number of Americans in labor unions shrank. More educated, affluent Americans—especially whites—moved to the suburbs, removing themselves from racially turbulent cities
with higher taxes and higher crime rates. In the midst of so much social and economic upheaval, the desire for simple, clear answers and stability put a premium on fixed political positions. “Whereas Democrats held fast to their New Deal liberal and internationalist vision,” St. Louis University history professor Donald Critchlow wrote in describing the political shifts at the end of the century, “Republicans represented the fears of white middle-class and religious voters through a political platform of low taxes, national defense, preservation of family values, regulation of social morality, and opposition to policies that affirmed racial, gender, or sexual preferences in the public sphere.”

With personal identity and political identity so closely linked, there was a big jump between the 1970s and the 2000s in Americans expressing strong identification as Republicans or Democrats. Among the nation’s political leaders in the House, the percentage of moderates decreased from 30 percent in 1976 to 8 percent by 2002. In the Senate the proportion of members who identified themselves as moderates in the same period fell from 41 percent to 5 percent. Candidates seeking office had to be less willing to speak out and more willing to fit into a liberal or a conservative box.

In the 1992 election, with political polarization on the rise, President George H. W. Bush was viewed by many fellow Republicans as a political moderate and was seen as insufficiently conservative. That led to a primary challenge from conservative commentator and former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, who spoke of President Bush’s inattention to a national “culture war” over family values, gay rights, welfare, and the growth of government and taxation. The “culture war” required
red-blooded conservatives to do battle in the fight over social values. They also had to be resolutely opposed to taxes. The “too moderate” label pressed on President Bush—a war hero, former head of the CIA, and Reagan’s vice president—might as well have been translated as a charge that Bush was too willing to listen, debate, reconsider, and respond. “Moderate Republican” became a slur against Bush. Buchanan’s primary challenge to the sitting president focused on social issues. Meanwhile, businessman Ross Perot challenged him on tax policy. In the general election Perot harassed Bush for failing, in the face of rising debt, to keep a 1988 campaign pledge on taxes—“Read my lips. No new taxes.” Perot got 19 percent of the general-election vote, a record for an independent, with the overwhelming share of that support coming from President Bush’s base, paving the way for President Clinton’s victory. Bush’s defeat made clear that politicians in office can’t risk changing position in response to changing realities, unless they want to stir challenges among supporters in their base.

That rigid polarization increased as Republican opposition to President Clinton—epitomized by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America—led to Democrats losing the majority of the House for the first time in nearly half a century. Politicians kept any errant thoughts to themselves to allow their base of supporters to label them as safely and predictably as possible on the liberal or conservative side. Any variance from orthodox policy on the Left or Right became a hot topic on talk radio, particularly conservative talk radio, which grew phenomenally during the early nineties. Bob Grant in New York, Mike Siegel in Seattle, and Rush Limbaugh “coast to coast” became, in the words of the
New York Times
, “precinct
captains” who enforced conservative orthodoxy on Republican candidates while stirring anti-Washington, anti-Clinton, antiliberal biases that transformed every conversation about political issues into a confrontation. Conservative talk radio made the 1994 midterm election a referendum on President Clinton, a man they mocked for three hours a day, five days a week as a dangerous liberal pushing the country to the socialist left with his elitist Yale law degree and his feminist wife. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994 in the so-called Republican revolution, the Republican freshman lawmakers made Limbaugh an honorary member of their caucus.

Liberal orthodoxy also came to the fore as President Clinton, in response to the failure of popular left-wing proposals to allow gays to serve in the military and reform the healthcare system, tried to regain his political footing with a policy called “triangulation,” in which he made himself into the man in the middle, reaching out to the polarized Left and Right. That did not sit well with his liberal base. Clinton was labeled a “New Democrat,” code for a Democrat willing to turn away from the legacy of the New Deal that had dominated his party for more than half a century. Even before Republicans gained control of Congress and threatened to make Clinton a one-term president,
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert wrote: “There is some question now as to whether there is any principle for which Bill Clinton will fight.… He has established a long and consistent … pattern.… The disappointment and disillusionment with President Clinton are widespread.”

Herbert’s column showed how inflexible the Left was toward politicians who veered off the party message. But it also
cut to the heart of an era in which politicians refused to admit to who they were—how they had acted with regard to drug use, sexual behavior, taxes, and family. They kept their thinking on major policy issues hidden as well. Even in formal debates there was little expectation of a real exchange of ideas among political candidates. Typically in primary and general-election debates, candidates refused to agree to formats that allowed for timed debate with point and counterpoint. They kicked out the League of Women Voters, the group that had historically hosted debates, so they did not have to negotiate the rules with anyone who might insist on actual debate. Instead, candidates agreed to joint news conferences in which they answered questions from well-known journalists. The operative rule was for politicians to play it safe by repeating their fixed positions on issues. The media, for its part, previewed debates as if they amounted to horse races, focusing on who was leading and who had to catch up and saving special attention for a put-down or insult of an opponent. It was the era of CNN’s
Crossfire
, a show I worked on as a cohost. There was no room for conservatives and liberals to have a reasoned debate of the issues on
Crossfire
. Differences drove the ratings. The producers wanted people shouting, not talking, to one another. I used to joke that the ideal
Crossfire
guests would be Louis Farrakhan on the Left and David Duke on the Right.