Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (44 page)

Romanticizing the present is no less common than romanticizing the past. It can’t be forgotten that a view of the 1950s as a quiet, consensual time leaves out a great deal. It sweeps aside McCarthyism, which sought to
marginalize many liberals and all of the left—an approach to politics that lived on long after Joe McCarthy’s 1954 censure by the Senate. The 1950s saw the first glimmerings of a dissenting sensibility that would blossom in the 1960s into a counterculture and new engagements with civil rights and women’s rights. The civil rights movement, after all, might be said to have commenced its long march on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.
It found its voice four days later when a twenty-six-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. rose in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to declare that “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” The Beat Generation went “On the Road” in rebellion against the proprieties of an era that publicly revered religion, the nuclear family, and the virtues of a quiet domestic life. Mainstream critiques of conformity—
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, The Status Seekers
—also planted the seeds of revolt. And, of course, a new conservatism found a powerful voice when
National Review
published its first issue in the same year that Rose Parks refused to move.

Nonetheless, every era has its tensions, and there is much truth in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s elegant summary of the conventional wisdom on the Eisenhower years as a time when conflict went to sleep.
“Where his predecessors had roused the people, he soothed them,” Schlesinger wrote at the end of Ike’s term. “[W]here they had defined issues sharply, he blurred them over.” The distinguished historian who was championing John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy offered his summation of Eisenhower’s accomplishments with some impatience but a certain grudging respect for the historical role he had played. “The nation needed an interval of repose to restore its psychological balance,” Schlesinger wrote, “and repose was what President Eisenhower gave them.”

It was Barack Obama’s peculiar role, and the central contradiction of his political promise, that he, too, wanted to soothe the nation while also championing a new era of change and reform. In a sense, he wanted to be Eisenhower and Kennedy at the same time—and, at that, to be even more of a change agent than Kennedy set out to be.

It was first as a soothing presence that he entered the national consciousness on the evening of July 27, 2004, when he offered the Keynote Address
to the Democratic National Convention that would send John Kerry into battle against George W. Bush. At that point, Obama was only a state senator from Chicago’s South Side. He would not win his seat in the United States Senate until the fall. Not since Ronald Reagan gave “The Speech” in 1964 has a single address accomplished so much for a politician. Just as conservatives and Republicans across the country knew from the moment they saw Reagan on an October night in 1964 that he was destined to be their leader, so did millions of progressives and Democrats suddenly decide that evening that they had discovered a national savior of their own.

The speech was remarkable because it offered its own romantic hope for national unity at a time of deep division—even as it reflected the nation’s jangling discords. It was an unapologetically partisan address on behalf of Kerry’s presidential candidacy, yet its main theme was how much the country longed to put partisan and ideological fractures behind it. Obama simultaneously sharpened the lines of distinction with Bush’s Republican Party and dismissed the philosophical and cultural differences that had set Americans against one another.

In light of how deep the nation’s divisions remained more than a decade after Obama gave his speech, it’s useful to revisit exactly why it resonated at the time. Early on, he offered a classic progressive view of the costs of inequality to Americans who had once counted on middle-class jobs at middle-class wages.
Obama, like Reagan, used stories and concrete examples as his materials to paint an ideologically congenial portrait of the country:

Fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents, I say to you, tonight, we have more work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico, and now they’re having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour; more to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back the tears wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on; more to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her who have the grades, have the drive, have the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.

But Obama was well aware of the natural response of Republicans to such rhetoric: to claim that Democrats assumed the need for government plans and programs to remedy the situations of each of these citizens, and millions like them. He thus offered a kind of pre-rebuttal, dismissing the attack before it was launched:

Now, don’t get me wrong, the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks, they don’t expect government to solve all of their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead. And they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you: they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.

They know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.

Having dismissed the straw man that Democrats always defaulted to government solutions, he then insisted that government did, indeed, have the wherewithal to ease the nation’s burdens. “People don’t expect government to solve all their problems,” he declared. “But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.” Nothing radical here: “just a slight change in priorities” would do the trick.

The lead-in to Obama’s famous peroration on behalf of national unity was an assault on the Bush-Rove shameful designs. “Now even as we speak,” he said, “there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” Obama wanted to divide the country between the dividers and everybody else. And then came the words that electrified the country:

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?

If the effect of the speech on Obama’s career was similar to that of Reagan’s on his own trajectory forty years earlier, their respective tactical and emotional purposes were very different.
Reagan had intentionally drawn sharp ideological lines—the goal, he said, was to stop “the advance of socialism in the United States,” an objective he associated with Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats. Reagan wanted to disturb the peace and shake the consensus, precisely because the consensus of the time supported New Deal liberalism.

Obama, by contrast, wanted to reestablish consensus and restore national unity. He saw the nation’s divisions over cultural questions and national security as fodder for Republican exploitation and sensed that, if left to itself, the nation’s cultural trajectory—“we’ve got some gay friends in the red states”—would eventually head in a moderately liberal direction. Obama sought to turn Rove’s strategy on its head: if the country were united culturally and patriotically, voters like the Maytag worker and the young woman who wanted to go to college would cast ballots in their own economic interests for progressives.

The keynote was the beginning of a four-year effort by Obama to push back against forms of polarization that had empowered the right and weakened the left. Especially notable was his understanding of how liberals and Democrats had alienated themselves from many religious voters, a view
reflected in his 2006 speech to the “Call to Renewal” conference of progressive religious leaders. His approach was not so much to attack the religious right as to undercut its appeal by realigning liberal attitudes toward faith.

There were, he said,
“some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word ‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.” After describing his own religious awakening, Obama instructed his allies that “if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at—to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own—then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.”

He argued that “the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms” and said flatly that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”

Obama was not about to alienate liberals and was careful to call on conservatives “to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice.” He added: “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

But the thrust of Obama’s speech was a call for progressives to engage not simply with religion in general, but with the most theologically conservative among their fellow citizens. “If we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for,” he said, “then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway.”

If religion was one element of the polarizing dynamic that Obama proposed to detoxify, his very identity promised to “turn the page” on the even more vexing problem of racial division. A man of biracial origins who chose to identify himself as black, Obama embodied the very struggle that had torn the nation apart from the time of the arrival of the first African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Obama could speak a new language on race, which in fact harkened back to the unifying language of civil rights
Christianity, which was a multiracial and hopeful creed. Obama’s emphasis on hope, his talk of struggle, organizing, and movement-building, his repeated invocations of “the fierce urgency of now”—all openly echoed the vocabulary of a civil rights cause steeped in the Scriptures. In particular, he tended to invoke Martin Luther King Jr.’s most conciliatory themes, not the side of the great civil rights leader capable of expressing great anger over injustice. In trying to move the racial dialogue forward, Obama was drawing it back to a time when so many pastors and rank-and-file believers successfully allied with liberalism.

It was the combination of Obama’s acute sensitivity to the promise and the power of civil rights Christianity combined with the country’s yearning for a new departure that gave his campaign the feel of a religious revival. In his “Change We Can Believe In” slogan, the word “believe” was at least as important as the word “change.”

Obama constantly returned to the paradoxical reality of race in America—exceptional progress combined with continuing discrimination and injustice.
“To think clearly about race,” he wrote in his pre-campaign book
The Audacity of Hope
in 2006, “requires us to see the world on a split screen—to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want, while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.”

It is an irony that a politician who would find such as large share of the white working class (particularly in the South) opposing him engaged in an ongoing effort to link the struggles of African-Americans and Latinos with those of disadvantaged whites. “These days,” he wrote in his book, “what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts: downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.” Obama’s relentless focus on economics was more successful than is often allowed. In key states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, he won enough white working-class votes to win in both 2008 and 2012.

Also ironic (painfully so) in light of Obama’s multiracial approach to politics was the storm over old sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the pastor
who had converted him to Christianity, that emerged in the midst of the primary battle. The very title of Obama’s book came from a Wright sermon and Obama had been open about a relationship with Wright that seemed defined by a father-son bond that Obama never had with his natural father. The anti-American anger of some of Wright’s comments from his pulpit that ABC News broadcast reflected sentiments utterly at odds with the civil rights Christianity that Obama was preaching. All of them came to be summarized by a single statement by Wright that no candidate for president could be associated with. “God damn America!” Wright had shouted after describing a long string of American injustices and misdeeds.