Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (27 page)

Bill Clinton’s victory, in the meantime, created a new set of political alignments that endure to this day. In 1992, Clinton broke the coalitions that Nixon and Reagan had built. Starting with Bush’s defeat, Republicans were to lose the popular vote in five of the next six presidential elections. New England, much of the rest of the Northeast, and the West Coast became increasingly closed to the Republicans. The upper Midwest, which had been friendly to Republicans in presidential elections even during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, now consists of either swing states or states that are reliably Democratic.

Clinton bequeathed the Democrats valuable legacies, in foreign policy and domestic policy. These were
nicely summarized by Hillary Clinton, who
liked to ask: “Which part of peace and prosperity didn’t you like?” Clinton’s ideological innovations gave Republicans fewer targets on such issues as crime and welfare. His balanced budgets made future attacks on Democrats as profligate “big spenders” problematic. Clinton sent a clear message, as the political scientist Steven Teles observed, that Democrats were now “unwilling to serve as hapless victims of the Republican campaign playbook.”

Nonetheless, the loss of the House and Senate in 1994 and the impact of the Lewinsky scandal after his reelection diminished Clinton’s ability to reorder American politics in a more fundamental way. There were limits to his New Democrat project, as Clinton signaled himself when he invoked populist arguments against excessive cuts in public programs and in taxes on the wealthy. He drew on the traditions of New Deal and Great Society liberalism even as he was revising them.

Parts of the business-friendly agenda that both he and Tony Blair pursued, particularly the deregulation of the finance industry, were seen in a much harsher light after the financial implosion of 2008 than they were as the economy roared forward in the late 1990s. The harsh criminal penalties that were part of his crime program led to widespread overincarceration, particularly of African-Americans, and came under sharp attack in the Obama years. Clinton himself acknowledged this in a May 2015 interview with CNN. Because of the way the law was “written and implemented,” he said, “we cast too wide a net and
we had too many people in prison.”

Some of
Clinton’s rhetorical concessions to the right, notably his declaration that “the era of big government is over,” also weakened already porous liberal defenses while strengthening the conservatives’ public argument.

Clinton underscored his own role in moving the political spectrum rightward with his impatient declaration about becoming an Eisenhower Republican. Democrats had taken over the role once played by moderate and liberal Republicans and this had the effect of pushing the real Republican Party toward even greater philosophical homogeneity.

Occupying this ground did not hurt Clinton politically, and neither did the state of the economy. As his term ended, he was a very popular figure. His
approval ratings in the Gallup poll throughout his last full year in office stayed within a range of 56–66 percent, consistently ahead of the scores
Americans gave the Republican Congress. The Gingrich Revolution failed to achieve the degree of change conservatives had hoped for—and failed to drive Clinton from office. If Clinton had not achieved all that he might have, he nonetheless turned back what had once seemed an unstoppable conservative wave.

How could conservatives regroup and create the durable majority that kept eluding them? A Texas governor named George W. Bush and Karl Rove, his brilliant field general, had some ideas about this, and conservatives would initially embrace them. But that white whale of a conservative realignment would not only remain elusive; it would soon move farther out of reach.

“People think oftentimes that Republicans are mean-spirited folks. Which is not true, but that’s what people think.”

“Bush was the measure of how hungry Republicans were to get back to power,” says Mike Gerson, who signed up as a Bush speechwriter in 1999 for the coming campaign.

Trim, compact, and both gentle and deliberate of speech, Gerson has the demeanor of someone who would be very comfortable as a professor. His intensity while parsing theological or ideological concepts matches that of any Marxist at a living room gathering debating the dialectics of
Capital
. Yet he is at ease challenging his own last thought or his own side’s assumptions. An evangelical Christian, he is fervent in faith but intellectually open and curious, a disposition he developed early. He says he was a contrarian in the strict Calvinist environment of his youth and observes that his father-in-law, an elder in his church, was almost removed from his position for singing in a choir at a Billy Graham revival. His in-laws’ very strict brothers and sisters in
faith did not take well to Graham’s openness to Catholics. “Very conservative Calvinists wanted to fight the Reformation every day,” Gerson observes. He says this with a smile. He clearly still respects the deep commitment of his Calvinist cobelievers, but their view of Catholics is utterly alien to him as a Protestant admirer of Popes John Paul II and Francis.

Gerson adds that his mother “was never that conservative” and became part of the charismatic renewal that affected both Protestants and Catholics around the country in the 1970s and was especially strong in the St. Louis area. It was a movement of the spirit that emphasized joy and conversion rather than heretic-hunting. It was an orientation to faith that clearly influenced Gerson. He would remain a faithful contrarian, loyal to his party and to those for whom he worked, but not without the dissidence that led his father-in-law to sing in Billy Graham’s choir.

It says something about Gerson that the first presidential candidate he actively supported was not a Republican but a Democrat, a fellow evangelical named Jimmy Carter—and against Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Gerson was sixteen years old at the time, and he made the case for Carter in a high school debate. “There wasn’t much to recommend the Republicanism of Nixon and Ford when it came to evangelicalism,” said Gerson, noting that Carter, by constrast, had appeared on the cover of
Time
when the magazine published a story about his born-again Christianity. The future president’s religious orientation was treated by the media at the time more as an anthropological oddity from a distant land than as a vibrant chord of the American religious chorus. “These were things that were revolutionary in political discourse at that time,” Gerson recalls. By 1984, the Democrats’ firm support for abortion rights and what Gerson came to see as their hostility to religion converted him to Reagan and the Republican Party. But his earliest independence from conservative Republicanism marks him out from so many movement conservatives for whom either Goldwater (nominated the year Gerson was born) or Reagan defined a lifetime of commitment.

Gerson, by temperament and early experience, seemed destined to the almost Sisyphean undertaking of reforming and transforming the causes to which he pledged his fidelity. What attracted Gerson to George W. Bush was precisely his new candidate’s willingness to do things “purposefully and early
in the campaign” to distance himself and his party “from both cultural pessimism and libertarian ideology.” In the Bush campaign, he says, “I found a perfect environment with a party that was uniquely poised to accept a candidate like this.” Bush, he said, “was not reflecting some broad consensus within the Republican Party; he was challenging the consensus within the party.” Many conservatives were willing to back the son of a president they considered an apostate—and as someone who seemed to be seeking a new direction for conservative movement—simply because they wanted to win.

Gerson was a real catch for the Bush campaign. Having left politics for a brief and happy stint as a writer for
U.S. News & World Report,
he was well known and liked within the journalistic class Bush would be courting. But Gerson’s hiring was itself a symbol of Bush’s apparent determination to do things in a new way.

Gerson was a compassionate conservative before Bush made the term popular. A movement that Bush himself is often credited with inaugurating, it began its life in the mid-1990s under Clinton. One of its leading promoters was Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican for whom Gerson had also written speeches.

The compassionate conservatives were quite conscious of conservatism’s shortcomings. They worried about the sense of indifference their allies often conveyed toward the poor and to the social pain the budget cuts they championed might create.
“We should not ignore the potential for suffering in our cities when government retreats,” Coats said at the time. “There is not—and could never be—a government plan to rebuild civil society. But there must be ways to actively take the side of people and institutions who are rebuilding their own communities and who often feel isolated and poorly equipped.”

The roots of compassionate conservatism could be traced to a 1977 manifesto issued by the sociologist Peter Berger and the Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus,
To Empower People
. (Neuhaus later became a Catholic priest and, having started his political life on the left, became a conservative who grew close to Bush during his presidency.)
Berger and Neuhaus highlighted “those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.” They emphasized neighborhoods, families, churches, and voluntary associations. Their book might be seen as laying the
philosophical foundations for the implicit ideology of working-class Reagan Democrats. Reagan’s emphasis in 1980 on family, work, and neighborhood bore Berger and Neuhaus’s inspiration.

But this approach had little impact on the actual policies of the Reagan administration, and while Jack Kemp preached a similar gospel when he was George H. W. Bush’s housing secretary, the elder Bush took little interest in it.

Clinton showed more signs of engagement in these ideas than did either of his immediate Republican predecessors. The welfare reform bill he signed included a provision authored by Senator John Ashcroft, a Missouri Republican of deep evangelical conviction, establishing “charitable choice,” which eased the flow of government money to religiously based social welfare efforts. Thus was the first “faith-based center” at a federal agency established by Clinton. Appropriately, in light of Kemp’s earlier interest in “empowerment,” it was set up at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it was headed by a progressive Catholic priest. Bill Kristol’s observation that Clinton-style Democrats were often more open to new conservative initiatives than Republicans or conservatives themselves applied to compassionate conservatism.

Its rise in the 1990s coincided with a growing interest on both the right and the left in the idea of “civil society.” Civil society thinkers focused on institutions that were independent of the state but not organized, as businesses are, primarily as actors in the economic market. These were the places, as the theme song from the television show
Cheers
put it, “where everybody knows your name,” and a good deal else about you, too. They were churches and synagogues and mosques, Little League, bowling leagues and soccer clubs, Shriners, Elks, and Rotary clubs, book clubs, neighborhood watch groups, and countless other organizations that brought people together. The left insisted that trade unions were also classic examples of civil society, a position that conservatives found easier to accept when the unions were in communist Poland than in the United States. In fact, the idea of civil society became especially popular after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. By maintaining underground and then increasingly public opposition movements to repressive regimes, the Eastern European rebels—personified by Vaclav Havel in
Czechoslovakia and typified by the Solidarity union movement in Poland—showed that even the most vigorous police states could not stamp out all vestiges of independent social life that survived in cafés and churches, workplaces and families. Progressives (particularly the community organizers among them) championed these grassroots activists. So did conservatives, who saw civil society as an alternative to the state.

“For too long in modern America,” wrote Coats and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in 1998, “politics and public debate has tended to focus on the role of government and the rights of individuals. It has neglected the layer of institutions that raise our children, enforce an informal order in our neighborhoods, and even reclaim our lives when we fall and fail.”

The imperative, Coats and Santorum wrote, was to
“take the side of people and institutions who are rebuilding their own neighborhoods, and who often feel isolated and poorly equipped.” Civil society, they argued, “can be coaxed and nurtured, not engineered. It will not be rebuilt by government. Nor will it be rebuilt by ‘no government.’ But it must be encouraged to rebuild itself.”

It was easy enough for liberals to be skeptical of the compassionate conservatives, who sometimes seemed to be suggesting that you could solve any social problem by throwing a church at it. They spoke so much about personal pathologies that needed healing they made it easy to forget that most poor people had perfectly good values and worked very hard for very little. Even the most organized, most churched, and most moral communities can’t make it with little income and with shrinking tax bases—and enterprise zones could do only so much.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to write off compassionate conservatism as simply a gimmick. It was, to begin with, an attempt on the part of some of its sponsors to reestablish Republican and conservative bonds with minority communities, and particularly with African-Americans. Many of the most committed compassionate conservatives acknowledged that the southern strategies pursued from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan (and even the first President Bush with his Willie Horton campaign) were built on white reaction to civil rights, and at times, on racism itself. Conservatives who rallied to this new set of ideas insisted that their movement and the Republican
Party would never make progress with African-American voters until this legacy was shed. Jack Kemp would tell any audience that would listen: “No one cares what you think until they think you care.” The compassionate conservatives wanted to reverse this history, their hopes captured well by the scholar Steven Teles:
“Instead of embracing racial resentment, compassionate conservatism preached, Republicans should rebrand themselves as the party of racial solidarity—the allies of the moralizing agents of the inner cities.”