Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (38 page)

The Pew Research Center’s survey, taken from September 19 to September 22, 2008, asked: “As you may know, the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions secure. Do you think this is the right thing or the wrong thing for the government to be doing?”
By a margin of 57 percent to 30 percent, Americans declared it the right thing to do.

On the same dates, Bloomberg and the
Los Angeles Times
asked: “Do you think the government should use taxpayers’ dollars to rescue ailing financial firms whose collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers’ dollars.”
This more pointed and arguably loaded inquiry (with its two references to “taxpayer dollars” and no mention of the soothing word “investing”) produced an almost exactly opposite verdict: 55 percent were against this, while 31 percent were in favor.

Americans wanted the government to save the economy. They just didn’t much like getting it done by way of sending their dollars to Wall Street firms and banks. And in an era during which we have become accustomed to opinions being tethered closely to the loyalties of red and blue, attitudes on the bailout transcended party lines. Substantial majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents gave affirmative responses to the Pew question and negative responses to the Bloomberg/
Los Angeles Times
question.

But party lines were clearer in the House vote on September 29. Even though Bush was pushing his party to support the rescue, two-thirds of House Republicans opposed it, and their opposition defeated the bill. Among Democrats, on the other hand, two-thirds voted with a president so many of them loathed. The market response to the House failure to pass the bailout was instantaneous: the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 778 points, losing 7 percent of its value.

The arguments of the conservative opponents heard that day would echo through the Obama years.
Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Republican of
Texas, said the bailout would put the nation on “the slippery slope to socialism” and create “the mother of all debt.”
Representative John Culberson, his fellow Texas Republican, took a populist tack. “This legislation is giving us a choice,” he said, “between bankrupting our children and bankrupting a few of these big financial institutions on Wall Street that made bad decisions.” Thus was small-government conservatism, which had favored deregulating financial markets, able to adopt an anti–Wall Street idiom when the time of reckoning arrived—all the while inveighing against socialism. Attacks on “corporate socialism,” long a staple of the left, soon became a Tea Party calling card.

Four days later, some changes in the bill, but mostly sheer terror over the consequences of inaction, led 33 Democrats and 24 Republicans to switch their votes and pass the rescue plan. But even on the second, successful vote, Republicans still split against the bill, 91to 108, while most Democrats, including Obama, then running for president, voted for it. Democrats would wind up with political ownership of a Republican president’s Wall Street bailout.

The conservative critique of Bush, of course, did nothing to persuade progressives to accept what to them was an absurd notion: that Bush was a closet moderate. Here, after all, was a man whose presidency was tainted from the start by an act of outlandish judicial activism. As many progressives saw it, five conservative justices effectively appointed him as president in
Bush v. Gore.
Thousands affixed “Re-defeat Bush” bumper stickers to their cars to memorialize the injustice and vow revenge. Liberal anger over the willingness of conservatives to go to the brink on impeachment became all the more ferocious after
Bush v. Gore
.

Bush’s principal domestic achievement, in the liberal view, was tax cutting—and more tax cutting. His policies not only squandered the surplus left by Bill Clinton but, when combined with the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plunged the nation back into deficits that made it harder for his successor to respond to the economic collapse when it came.

Here the right and left converged to a degree, though their respective views about what caused the deficits and why they might be a problem diverged sharply. The right saw them as created by more big-government spending. The left saw them as a barrier to needed programs to expand health
coverage and to relieve poverty and inequality. Liberals located the cause of the red ink not in a domestic spending spree—as Gerson pointed out, nonsecurity domestic
discretionary spending grew by only 2 percent between 2001 and 2006 under Bush—but in an unnecessary war and Bush’s largesse toward the wealthiest Americans.

Although it’s unusual for a liberal to say so, Bush’s failure might be seen as something of a tragedy, particularly by those who long for a less divisive and more moderate approach to politics and governing. Bush’s willingness to embrace a federal responsibility in education and in the expansion of health care pointed to the possibility of a conservatism that went beyond antigovernment broadsides. Yet as Frum suggested, Bush never sought to challenge conservative assumptions and thereby left his initiatives as policy orphans. Supporters of a more moderate brand of conservatism were isolated and ripe for attack from the Tea Party that would soon rise.

If Bush and the Republican Party were unrelenting and at times demagogic in using national security issues for political purposes, his embrace of the nation’s Muslim community and his warnings against religious bigotry were among his greatest acts of statesmanship. He never abandoned his insistence on the rights of American Muslims. But this concern faded behind other priorities, and when Bush left office, significant parts of the right felt much less constrained in their anti-Muslim campaigning. In 2010, attacks on the proposed Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan, routinely referred to on Fox News as “the Mosque at Ground Zero,” became a rallying point for the right. Gerson lamented that in demanding that President Obama oppose a mosque, his conservative allies were forgetting the lessons of his old boss’s speech at Washington’s Islamic Center just days after 9/11.
“No president, of any party or ideology, could tell millions of Americans that their sacred building desecrates American holy ground,” he wrote.
Joe Scarborough, the
Morning Joe
host and former conservative congressman, denounced “elements of our party that are marching through the fevered swamps of ideology.” But Gerson and Scarborough were minority voices in a movement shaped by the “real America” rhetoric that took hold under Bush and continued to do its work of exclusion.

The failure of compassionate conservatism is another cause for regret, even if it was destined to founder as long as Bush refused to resolve its inherent
tensions. The movement could claim one major monument: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. Gerson, the compassionate conservative pioneer, opens
Heroic Conservatism,
his book about the Bush years and the future of his cause, with a description of the Oval Office meeting where Bush approved the program. Gerson then moves his narrative to an AIDS clinic at a squatter’s camp in Uganda, and offers an uplifting take on what politics can sometimes achieve.
“In that Oval Office meeting, and in the slums outside Kampala,” he writes, “I saw one of the high points of political idealism in American history: an American president, out of moral and religious motivations, pledging billions to save the lives of non-citizens, with no claim to American help other than their humanity.”

Yet Gerson was under no illusions, and his book, while a defense of Bush’s Iraq project, was also a protest against what he saw as a rise in cynicism and a collapse of idealism.
“A retreat from idealism and ambition, at this point in our history,” he warned, “would be a disaster for Republicans, for conservatives, and for America.”

Compassionate conservatism never won traction among Republicans in Congress except when it could be used a battering ram against liberals for their supposed hostility to government partnerships with faith-based groups. (In fact, Obama would direct more money to faith-based groups than Bush did.) Compassion was transformed into a rationalization for cultural warfare—yet even this was not enough to excite the conservative base. As Gerson told me, Republican leaders like Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, as well as committee chairs, “were not interested in seriously considering the domestic policy approaches the Administration might have on things that might be considered ‘compassionate conservatism,’ particularly if they cost money. . . . You had a lack of enthusiasm on Capitol Hill and a gradual diminishing enthusiasm in portions of the White House out of frustration.”

David Kuo, who worked at Bush’s faith-based office and left in disappointment, offered a tougher assessment.
“From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White house wants,” he wrote in 2005. “It never really wanted the ‘poor people stuff.’ ” In 2006, he wrote a scathing book called
Tempting Faith: The Inside Story of Political Seduction,
expanding this critique and offering evidence that faith-based grants were used for political purposes to shore up Bush’s evangelical base.
Kuo, who died of cancer in 2013 at
the age of forty-four, said he could not get away from the idea that there was something wrong with “taking Jesus and reducing him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy.”

There is a plaintive quality when Gerson looks back to 1999 and his devout hope then that Bush could transform conservatism by “challenging the consensus within the party.” It turned out, he says, that Bush “was not reflecting some broad consensus within the Republican Party” for change. Bush’s 2000 moment, he says, “really reflected a party that wanted to win, not a party that had been persuaded.”

“I came to believe,” Gerson concluded, “that Bush’s victory didn’t change the party.”

Indeed it had not. The party’s core constituencies continued to move rightward and faced steadily weaker internal opposition. Moderates tended to come from swing districts and were thus disproportionately represented among the Republicans who went down to defeat in the Democratic wave elections of 2006 and 2008.

The energy in the party, Steven Teles observed, was still organized around tax cuts and smaller government.
Noting that 9/11 and the war in Iraq had given Republicans a new national security strategy for reaching swing voters, he argued that compassionate conservatism “again became an answer to an electoral question that no one was asking” and “never captured the commitment of the party’s core factions, and was viewed skeptically by many of them.”

“Whereas tax cuts, regulatory relief, gun rights, and opposition to abortion have large mobilized interests able to enforce party orthodoxy through credible threats of electoral retribution,” he continued, “compassionate conservatism does not.”

And then came the financial crisis that Frum called the “epic disaster in 2008.” It discredited conservative economic doctrine in exactly the way the Great Depression had nearly eighty years before. Tax cuts had not shored up the economy. Financial deregulation—approved by the Gingrich Congress, but signed, it should be said, by Bill Clinton—had opened the way for Wall
Street chicanery. The rising inequality aggravated by conservative policies led to stagnating or declining blue-collar incomes which, in turn, encouraged families to take on additional debt to maintain their standards of living. Prosperity based on growing debt rather than rising incomes proved to be a very fragile flower. Ironically, the crash was one of just two factors that the
Weekly Standard
’s Fred Barnes had said could get in the way of the Republican realignment he had predicted four years earlier, but he quickly dismissed its likelihood.
Citing Walter Dean Burnham, the great academic specialist on realignments, Barnes had written: “For Republicans to slip into minority status again, he says, it would take a monumental party split like that in 1912 or ‘a colossal increase in the pain level’ of Americans as happened with the Great Depression. Neither is likely.”

In fact, the second came to pass. And while the GOP did not formally split, it found itself divided and disillusioned.

Activist conservatives truly believed that blame for their travails rested with Bush and not their doctrine. Mulvaney says his decision to seek elective office in 2006 was “fueled with the disappointment I had with the Bush administration.” For moderate conservatives such as Representative Steve LaTourette of Ohio, who left Congress in 2012, it was a source of mystery and frustration that his more right-wing colleagues attributed the party’s thrashing in the 2006 elections and its subsequent defeats to big-government conservatism and Bush’s philosophical inconsistencies. The facts, he told me, pointed elsewhere. “I looked at the data, and I think the data shows that everybody that was a Republican showed up and voted for Republicans, everybody that was a Democrat did the same, and we lost 58 percent of the independents because of the war was pretty unpopular by 2006, because George W. Bush was pretty unpopular, because it was the six-year-itch election for a president. I thought that was it.”