Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (41 page)

A singularly revealing and disgraceful instance of the power of the conservative media to influence the actions of even a Democratic administration came in July 2010. The episode involved Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture
Department employee who was forced to resign after a video of her making supposedly “racist” comments about discriminating against a white farmer was posted on the Breitbart website. The video was broadcast over and over by Fox, and its commentators took the mainstream media to task for not covering the story. It was a remarkably successful tactic on the right.

For good measure, the NAACP, which typically did not follow Fox’s or Breitbart’s lead, condemned Sherrod’s comments. When the mainstream media did cover the story, they discovered that the parts of the video that had been posted wildly distorted what Sherrod has said: she had actually been offering a
critique
of stereotypes of whites. Sherrod was vindicated. But she had no interest in returning to her job and both the NAACP and the Obama administration were embarrassed. It was a media moment that simply would not have happened before the rise of Fox.

Perhaps the height of “tell them what they want to hear” journalism was Fox’s coverage of the lead-up to the 2012 election, during which many of the network’s commentators repeatedly assured their audience that, despite the public polls, Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama.

Romney, said Dick Morris, the former Clinton adviser turned conservative pundit,
“is going to win by more than five points.” The polls, he insisted, were overestimating Democratic turnout. “You have me back on the show,” he told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “You hold me accountable.” He told Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that Romney would win by a “landslide,” and said a 10-point popular vote margin was possible. Morris did face accountability. He was fired by Fox, and, to his credit, acknowledged that the loss of his contract was appropriate.
“I was fired because I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong and I was wrong at the top of my lungs.”

But Morris was not alone in predicting a Romney win. Others who took this view included Fox regulars Karl Rove (although more cautiously than Morris), Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Michael Barone, and others. In a remarkable demonstration of how conservatives had constructed a reality of their own, conservatives took to “unskewing” the polls, applying their own corrective to surveys that, they insisted, overestimated how many Democrats would turn out to vote. This statistical form of voter suppression was no more successful in 2012 than the real thing.

It fell to David Frum to call out Fox and conservative radio and, in the process, to invent a term.
“Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex,” Frum declared after the election on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe.
Joe Scarborough joined in, arguing the Right’s radio/television/website complex profited by offering a distorted view of reality. “That’s not an electoral strategy,” Scarborough said, “that’s a business strategy for them.” It proved to be a durable business. That central challenge of the right-wing media to conservatism’s long-term future was captured by the title of a paper by Jackie Calmes of the
New York Times
: “ ‘They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing’: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party.” Published in July 2015 by Harvard’s Shoreinstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Calmes’s paper offered a detailed look at how the party’s leaders had been forced to cede power to conservative talk-show hosts and outlets.
“If leaders of the Republican Party are not setting its agenda, who is?” Calmes asked. Her answer: “Once allied with but now increasingly hostile to the Republican hierarchy, conservative media is shaping the party’s agenda in ways that are impeding Republicans’ ability to govern and to win presidential elections.”

No political figure demonstrated the loss of control by party leaders more comprehensively than Donald Trump, who won support from key conservative talkers even as he dominated the mainstream media by being outrageous, interesting, and a celebrity. Trump proved to be the first conservative figure powerful enough to survive a confrontation with Roger Ailes and Fox News. Trump attacked one of the the network’s most important stars, Megyn Kelly, in boorish and sexist terms because she had asked him some probing—and journalistically normal—questions during the Fox News debate. At first, Ailes worked out an accomodation with Trump (and Kelly went on an unplanned vacation), the first indication of Trump’s media power. When Trump went after Kelly again, Ailes had no choice but to criticize him and defend Kelly. Yet none of this hurt Trump’s standing in the polls at the time, a rare moment when the network found itself outdone by a conservative politician.
“They really didn’t know what to do because their audience loves Trump,” Sherman told the conservative website-turned-network NewsmaxTV. Ailes, he said, “has really never really faced an adversary like Donald Trump. Donald Trump
is not predictable, and Roger Ailes is used to Republicans coming to kiss his ring. They all bow down to Fox News. But Donald Trump does not play by those rules and so Ailes essentially doesn’t know how to act.” Suddenly, Fox needed to look over its own right shoulder and worry that the movement the network helped build might be radicalizing even beyond the network’s own standards. Over time, in the face of continued provocations from Trump, Ailes would toughen his stand.

The libertarian writer Julian Sanchez took the term “espistemic closure” from philosophy to describe the effect of the conservative media system. “Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs and of course, Fox News,” he wrote. “Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.”

The conservative media and
epistemic closure were not the only forces at work promoting ideological purity. Skocpol and Williamson’s shorthand reference to “roving billionaire advocates” pointed to another essential ingredient to the Tea Party revolt: the proliferation and radicalization of conservative money.

Rich donors are not new to the right. Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, after all, was aired precisely because Goldwater’s moneymen insisted on doing so.
When he founded the John Birch Society, Robert Welch relied on conservative businessmen, including the Wichita, Kansas, oil executive Fred Koch. Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet of millionaires included Justin Dart, Holmes Tuttle, Alfred Bloomingdale, and Joseph P. Coors.

But in Goldwater’s time, business money was, on the whole, pragmatic. While many business leaders continued to fight the New Deal, many others had made their peace with a set of economic arrangements that produced widespread prosperity. The idea of spreading purchasing power to workers, even through unionization, made sense to many who became wealthy themselves as part of a broad burst of growth based on Keynesian economics.
The quintessential business organization of the postwar consensus, as John Judis argued in his book
The Paradox of American Democracy,
was the middle-of-the road,
consensual Committee for Economic Development, many of whose founding members had been on FDR’s Business Advisory Council during World War II. Even when the Establishment was conservative and Republican, it instinctively leaned against a more radical right. Indeed, the core complaint of Phyllis Schlafly in
A Choice Not an Echo
in 1964 was precisely that Establishment Republicans were effectively allies of New Dealism who regularly foiled the hopes of the conservative grass roots. On this, she spoke for many in her movement.

But in reaction to the regulatory advances pushed by a new consumer movement led by Ralph Nader—a large number of them signed into law by Richard Nixon—business began to embrace much harder antigovernment positions.
In the 1970s,
as Judis noted, many “corporate leaders and bankers abandoned their commitment to disinterested public service and to a politics that transcended class.” They “turned against union organizers, environmentalists and consumer activists with the same resolve that an older generation of business leaders had turned against the AFL, the IWW and the Socialist Party.”

This was the era when corporations and trade associations began creating political action committees on a large scale. It’s also when corporate philanthropy and large donors began building new free-market think tanks, reviving older ones, and developing strong ties with universities.
A Virginia lawyer named Lewis Powell, whom Nixon would appoint to the Supreme Court, wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became a manifesto for the new business activism. “The American economic system is under attack,” Powell declared. “The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be
survival
—survival of what we call the free enterprise system. . . .”

Powell was obsessed with the influence Nader had accumulated (calling him the “single most effective antagonist of American business”) and he urged business leaders to finance sympathetic professors, to monitor school textbooks and the media, and to demand “equal time” for pro-capitalist speakers.

The future Supreme Court justice was knocking on an open door, and the 1970s saw the birth of the Heritage Foundation, the revitalization of
the American Enterprise Institute, and the establishment of the Business Roundtable. The same period saw the rise of K Street as Washington’s lobbying center. As Judis noted, the number of businesses with registered lobbyists in Washington rose from 175 in 1971 to 2,445 in 1982. The number of corporate offices increased from 50 in 1961 to 500 in 1978, to 1,300 by 1986. Between 1978 and 1986, the number of trade associations nearly doubled, from 1,800 to 3,500, and the number of people they employed doubled from 40,000 to 80,000. Beginning in the 1970s, Washington became a very different place.

The shift of business groups to the right continued in the 1990s when business found itself under pressure from Republicans in Congress to take firmer ideological positions. Even before the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, a signal moment came during the battle over Clinton’s health care proposal. Initially, leading business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, were prepared to work with the administration on behalf of reform. Since so many businesses—particularly large manufacturers of cars and steel—provided coverage for their employees, reform could be seen as being in their interest. Employers who offered coverage often subsidized, through family policies, employers who didn’t. But business support crumbled because of pressure from two directions. In an odd turn, conservative Republicans lobbied the business lobbyists to push them away from reform. Upstart conservative business groups, such as the National Federation of Independent Business, launched assaults and membership raids on the Chamber of Commerce, pushing it away from Clinton. The national Chamber has since become even more loyal to Republican positions, although local Chambers are often less ideological.
And businesses opposed to Clinton’s reforms, including the smaller insurance companies and enterprises such as restaurants and fast-food chains that hired thousands of low-wage workers, were far more vocal in opposing Clinton’s plan than were businesses that supported it—often with qualms going in.

The growing power of finance had a complicated relationship to the new stream of antigovernment feeling. It was not initially obvious that Wall Street, the hedge funds, and the venture capitalists would be a force for conservatism. Democrats raised substantial funds from the financial world, both because
many in its ranks were liberal, particularly on social issues, and because the Clinton administration was broadly sympathetic to financial deregulation. But after the 2008 crash, the performance of Wall Street came under heightened attack from the left. Democrats proposed higher taxes on the wealthy (ironically, back to the levels under Clinton, who was nonetheless seen as more friendly to business than Obama), including increases in the low capital gains tax rates enacted under Bush. Curiously, the wealthiest people in the country came to see themselves as beleaguered and ostracized—even as their share of national income continued to grow.

Conservative and Republican money took a further turn rightward as political campaigns became more expensive and various barriers to money’s penetration of politics—in custom and in law—began to fall. The
Citizens United
decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 was the Magna Carta of big money in politics. In principle, these changes were ideologically and politically neutral: rich Democrats could increase their influence alongside rich Republicans. In practice, not only are there more rich Republicans, but the most ideologically committed conservatives were far more prepared to invest resources on a large scale to influence the political debate. Moreover, wealthy Democrats were, on the whole and with some notable exceptions, more interested in social and environmental issues than in progressive economic policies. Wealthy conservatives, on the other hand, were passionate advocates of deregulation and opponents of anything that smacked of “socialism.”