Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (42 page)

Thus did the inclination to purify and purge the Republican Party of liberal influence affect donors no less than the rank-and-file. If liberals had largely been driven out of the party by the time of the Gingrich Revolution, the new imperative was to drive out moderates and even politicians who were moderately conservative, lest they use their influence to do business with Democrats. As the Republicans who voted in primaries became more uniformly conservative, the purges became easier to execute.

The Club for Growth, one of the innovative new-style conservative groups, focused primarily on punishing Republican apostasy on the tax issue.
“We want to be seen as the tax cut enforcer in the party,” said Stephen Moore, a conservative writer and activist. Moore founded the group with Thomas L. “Dusty” Rhodes, who worked on Wall Street and served as president of
National Review
,
and Richard Gilder, a longtime supply-sider who made his fortune in the securities industry. As the pedigree of the group’s founders suggests, keeping taxes on investment income low is the Club’s priority.

The Club made its first big splash in 2004, backing Representative Patrick Toomey’s primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania.
Specter barely survived, with 51 percent of the vote, and he needed the support of the entire Republican establishment, including President Bush, to pull off his narrow victory. After his defeat, Toomey took over as president of the Club, serving until he launched his second Senate race in 2010. The threat of the primary drove Specter out of the Republican Party. In the fall, Toomey finally got his Senate seat, winning narrowly in the Republican tide.

The poster brothers for
the new right-wing money were Charles and David Koch, Fred Koch’s children. The Brothers Koch had a long history of financing libertarian ventures and spent many years operating outside the confines of the GOP. They provided the funding to establish the Cato Institute in 1977 and it became a respected intellectual redoubt for libertarian thinking. Its philosophical consistency gave Cato a nonpartisan feel. It was quite critical of the Reagan administration both on foreign policy (Cato was noninterventionist) and in the domestic sphere (Reagan-era spending, particularly on the military, was still far too high for the taste of Cato’s scholars). In 1980, David Koch joined the Libertarian Party ticket led by oil executive Ed Crane. Since the Supreme Court had ruled that candidates for office could spend as much on their own campaigns as they wished, running for vice president freed Koch from any limits on his contributions to the Libertarian campaign.

The Koch brothers’ centrality to so many forms of libertarian philanthropy in the 1970s led their critics to dub them “the Koch-topus,” a term Brian Doherty, the leading historian of the movement, mocked as referring to “a supposedly strangling, controlling monster of multiple limbs.” In his book
Radicals for Capitalism,
Doherty noted that the Kochs, working closely with Ed Crane (he had been Ed Clark’s campaign manager and served for many years as president of Cato) were the primary funders of not only Cato and the Libertarian Party, but also of two impressively edited magazines,
Inquiry
and the
Libertarian Review.
They also financed Students for a Libertarian Society, a
group that sought to capture some of the feel of the sixties New Left’s Students for a Democratic Society, and many other libertarian enterprises. Crane came in for his share of criticism, too.
When libertarian dissidents were not criticizing the Koch-topus, they were attacking the “Crane machine.”

In light of the Koch brothers’ subsequent history, this period is fascinating because it marked a time when libertarians saw an opening on the
left
side of the political spectrum, a strategy the Koch’s were underwriting.
Inquiry,
for example, drew on the adversary culture of the left, included many liberal-leaning writers in its pages, and emphasized libertarian issues—from civil liberties to social liberalism to noninterventionism in foreign policy—that appealed to progressives. For a time, libertarians believed that their path to power (or, since they were libertarians, to
dismantling
state power) passed through an alliance with the individualist currents on the left.

This strategy had the potential of working on particular issues. But given the devotion of liberals to regulation and the welfare state, it was bound to be a dead end, as the Koch brothers came to realize. Over time, they moved toward alliances with like-minded Republicans, not only libertarian purists such as Ron Paul but also top political figures such as Dick Armey, the House majority leader under Newt Gingrich. In the 1990s, Koch-allied organizations fought the Clinton administration on regulatory issues, energy policy, and health care.

That the Kochs’ fortune came from oil put them in a long tradition of right-wing funders: in American history, the extractive industries were almost always allied with the right, even when they received substantial benefits from government. This alliance was strengthened in the George W. Bush years, when large parts of the administration’s energy program, its authorship overseen by a task force led by Vice President Dick Cheney, amounted to the oil and gas industry’s wish list. Fearing a backlash against the administration’s ties to Big Oil, Cheney and Bush’s aides fought to keep the task force’s deliberations secret.
A 2007
Washington Post
report confirmed what the critics had suspected: the task force had, indeed, relied heavily on officials of the major energy companies for advice.

With Obama’s election, the Koch infrastructure and Koch dollars were there to take the lead in organizing the opposition. In the summer of
2010,
New Yorker
writer Jane Mayer made the Kochs famous (much to their dismay) by chronicling the central role played by Koch-supported groups in lending logistical and financial support to the Tea Party insurrection. The town-meeting strategy in the summer of 2009 would have been impossible absent the backing of well-financed groups such as FreedomWorks, headed by Armey, and the Koch-organized Americans for Prosperity.

Mayer described a visit to Washington by David Koch “to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity gathering.” From the Kochs’ point of view, she wrote, it was a heady time:

Obama’s poll numbers were falling fast. Not a single Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care, or much else. Pundits were writing about Obama’s political ineptitude, and Tea Party groups were accusing the President of initiating “a government takeover.” In a speech, Koch said: “Days like today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this organization, five years ago. . . . Thankfully, the stirrings from California to Virginia, and from Texas to Michigan, show that more and more of our fellow-citizens are beginning to see the same truths as we do.”

She quoted David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, in frustration over media coverage of the Tea Party that tended to overlook the sources of its financing. “What they don’t say,” Axelrod observed, “is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Charles and David Koch, thanks to Mayer’s article and subsequent attacks on them from Democrats, became the most visible symbols of the new conservative money machine. But they were by no means alone, and it was not only liberals who were calling attention to their role in transforming the right. Writing in
Foreign Affairs
magazine, Frum described the rise of a group he called “The Radical Rich.”

Who were they? One of them was the venture capitalist Tom Perkins. He had written for the
Wall Street Journal
“from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco” about “the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’ ”

Perkins was not the only wealthy American offering Nazi analogies. As
Frum noted, the financier Stephen Schwartzman “equated Obama’s attempt to raise taxes on hedge funds with Adolph Hitler’s invasion of Poland,” while Kenneth Langone, one of Home Depot’s cofounders, “warned that liberal arguments about income inequality reminded him of Nazi propaganda.”

The radical language reflected radical views. Mitt Romney’s “gaffe” about 47 percent of the country falling into a hopeless dependency on government, Frum argued, was not a gaffe at all. “Wealthy Republicans had been talking that way all through the Obama years,” he said. During the 2012 campaign, “the radicalization of Republican donors propelled the party to advocate policies that were more extreme than anything seen since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.”

“One would normally expect wealthy Republicans to value predictability and stability,” Frum concluded. “But if they perceive their country to be predictably and stably hurtling toward socialist oppression, then even the richest will demand massive resistance by any means necessary.”

Americans wearing Revolutionary War costumes and shouting about the president’s birth certificate did not build the Tea Party all by themselves. Earnest, less flamboyant middle-class ideologues who were persuaded that liberty was under threat were not alone, either. A radicalized conservatism also had support—essential support—from wealthy, highly successful Americans just as intent on taking their country rightward.

There were, finally, more subtle ideological and demographic changes that scrambled received wisdom about the forces at work on the right.

For decades, the conservative movement was easily enough described as a coalition of free-market advocates, including libertarians, social traditionalists, and anticommunists. The great achievement of Buckley,
National Review
, and Frank Meyer’s “fusionism,” as we’ve seen, was to patch together an ideology that held these forces together in one movement. But fusionism was always in jeopardy of flying apart. The libertarian revolt of the 1970s reflected the impatience of free-market advocates who shared neither a belief in tradition nor faith in the foreign-policy interventionism that the robust anticommunists demanded. And many of the traditionalists did not share the
near-absolute faith in capitalism that animated the economic conservatives. Russell Kirk, traditionalism’s great expositor and defender, could be disdainful of this view.
“Conservatism is something more than mere solicitude for tidy incomes,” he wrote, and he insisted that “economic self-interest is ridiculously inadequate to hold an economic system together, and even less adequate to preserve order.” Some of these tensions emerged again in the debate over compassionate conservatism.

Free enterprise and anticommunism were the dominant keys of Goldwaterism, even if the themes of the controversial campaign film “Choice” and some of Goldwater’s own speeches offered hints of a strong strain of traditionalism just below the surface of his movement. It was not until the late 1970s that traditionalism got a strong mass base and organizational muscle with the rise of the religious right.

The new religious movement was, first and foremost, a reaction against the gains of social liberalism in the 1960s and a cry of protest from parts of America that felt disrespected and ignored by cultural and coastal elites. At a minimum, these white evangelical Christians wanted respect and acknowledgment.
“The religious person is entitled, if not to prevail, at least to be heard,” the conservative writer Terry Eastland insisted in 1981. These Christians were enraged by liberal victories in the 1960s and 1970s across a broad front: Supreme Court decisions banning prescribed prayer in public schools, new legal tolerance for pornography, and the
Roe v. Wade
decision legalizing abortion (although many evangelicals were, early on, far less hostile to the decision than Catholics). The sociologist Nathan Glazer captured the spirit of the new religious conservatives well in a 1982 essay. The religious right, he wrote,
“may be on the offensive, but it is, if I may use the phrase, a ‘defensive offensive,’ meant to get us back to, at worse, the 1950s, and even that is beyond the hopes, or I would think the power, of Fundamentalist faith.” On the other hand, viewed from the point of view of progressives trying to preserve victories for civil rights, women’s rights, and social tolerance, pushing the country back to the 1950s seemed a very aggressive move indeed.

The religious right was not simply a spontaneous eruption. Leaders of the conservative movement were searching in the 1970s for ways to mobilize new voters—and to split off constituencies from the old New Deal coalition. “The
New Right is looking for issues that people care about,” said Paul Weyrich, a major movement figure who was one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation. “Social issues, at least for the present, fit the bill.”

The Supreme Court’s
Roe v. Wade
decision legalizing abortion angered many Catholics and mobilized the Catholic hierarchy. Working-class Catholics had begun to defect from the Democrats in substantial numbers in the 1950s, returned en masse to John F. Kennedy in 1960, largely stuck with Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but began defecting again in 1968. In 1972, Richard Nixon narrowly defeated George McGovern among Catholics. The
Roe
decision created new reasons for them to view the Republicans warmly. The conservative political class was ready to encourage them and sought to link conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals in common cause. In 2004, Bush engaged in an unprecedented effort to target conservative Catholics on social issues alongside white evangelicals.