Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (64 page)

Eventually,
Obama sent Joe Biden to negotiate a deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And Boehner actually let it through with mostly Democratic votes: 172 Democrats voted for it, only 85 Republicans did.

It wasn’t a bad deal. It settled an argument that progressives had been having with conservatives since the beginning of the Bush presidency, and the progressives won. The top income tax was back up to 39.6 percent, though the increase applied on family incomes of $450,000 or more, not the lower level Obama had sought. This meant the bill didn’t raise nearly as much revenue as Obama knew was needed—it secured $620 billion over a decade, less than half of what he had sought. Capital gains taxes, cut repeatedly since the 1970s, were also raised. The deal extended unemployment benefits and various refundable tax credits that are especially helpful to lower-income people. And it set the estate tax at 40 percent on fortunes of more than $5 million,
still low by historical standards, but better than the zero rate envisioned by the original Bush’s proposal.

The real cost involved Obama’s surrendering of all of his leverage for limited gains. Some 82 percent of Bush’s tax cuts were now permanent. Obama’s hopes that Congress might eventually agree to more revenue were as forlorn as his original hopes for an end to the divide between red and blue. This was his big chance. He won a principle. He got some money. But he would not get much later—except for a government shutdown.

On December 14, the cost of the nation’s permissive firearms laws was brought home when twenty children and six staff members were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Obama himself was shaken, well aware, as Alter pointed out, that he had declined to push through the tougher restrictions he knew the nation needed after a 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, when twelve people were killed. This had clearly been a political calculation: the shooting came during an election year, and Obama felt he faced enough political challenges without igniting the gun issue. After Newtown, he acted, putting forward a comprehensive, if still relatively cautious, set of proposals, including some he adopted directly through executive orders. This time was different, or so nearly everyone said. The national outpouring of sympathy for the victims and their families, and particularly for the schoolchildren, seemed to rattle even the gun lobby.

But it would not be rattled for long. Led by the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful constituencies on the right, the pro-gun forces rallied once again. And once again, fear of the gun lobby would engulf moderate Democrats no less than Republicans. It would trump the outrage of a vast majority of Americans.

Obama’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 2013, was the speech of a victor and a survivor. He used it to make a broad case for a progressive view of government, and for the particular things that government should do in our time. It was in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural and Ronald Reagan’s first. All three speeches were unapologetic in offering arguments for a set of philosophical commitments and explanations of the policies that naturally followed from them.

Obama was combative in directly refuting conservative ideas, and one passage pointedly alluded to Paul Ryan’s signature distinction. Obama insisted that social insurance programs
encouraged
rather than discouraged risk-taking, and thus a more, not less, dynamic society.
“The commitments we make to each other—through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security—these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us,” Obama said. “They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

He rooted his egalitarian commitments in the promises of the founding. The Declaration of Independence was the driving text—as it had been for Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

Obama’s refrain was “We, the people,” a reminder that “we” is the first word of the Constitution and that a commitment to community and the common good is as American as Washington, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson. The passages invoking that phrase spoke of shared responsibility—“we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.” Obama was saying a powerful “no” to the radical individualism at the heart of so much of Tea Party and makers-and-takers conservatism.

It was notable, and his critics noted it, that Obama abandoned the lofty and nonpartisan ground he had once made his own. He did not pretend that the previous four years hadn’t happened and he did not walk away from the forceful case he had been making since Osawatomie.

Neither Roosevelt nor Reagan had given in to philosophical timidity, either. Each represented poles in the long national argument on which Obama chose to take sides.

“We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it,” FDR had said in 1937. “[W]e recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. . . . We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.”

Reagan’s answer in 1980:
“In the present crisis, government is not the
solution to our problem. . . . It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people.”

Like those two bold predecessors, Obama offered his fellow citizens the “why” behind what he thought and what he proposed to do. The argument he had hoped to avoid when he sought to subsume red into blue was upon him, and he had reason to believe that his reelection had given him a chance to win it.

But the National Rifle Association had other ideas. Newtown had necessarily changed Obama’s agenda, and the nation’s. After years of defeat at the hands of the gun lobby, advocates of modest, sane restrictions on the use of firearms had reason for hope. Bravely, two senators known for sympathy for the gun lobby, Senators Joe Manchin, a conservative West Virginia Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a conservative Pennsylvania Republican, joined forces on a bill requiring background checks for gun purchasers. It was well short of gun registration, let alone a renewal of the ban on assault weapons. But passing anything would be a sign that the NRA and its even more extreme allies could be defeated. (It is hard for liberals to believe: there are more extreme groups than the NRA.)

The extremism of the American gun lobby always comes as a shock to the rest of the democratic world, which sees the regulation of guns as no less normal than the regulation of cars or consumer products that are far less lethal. The radicalization of the NRA is of a piece with the radicalization of the rest of the right, and the gun issue has provided a way for opponents of regulations of all kinds—environmental, financial, workplace safety, consumer protection—to create a mass libertarian base ready to go on the attack at the mere hint of government action. Working-class and middle-class gun owners around the nation might not be ready to rally on behalf of Wall Street or a polluting business, but they could not countenance interference with their firearms. No wonder the weapons industry is the least-regulated enterprise in the country. Nor is it an accident that many of the most prominent leaders
of other parts of the conservative movement have rallied to the NRA. The NRA’s board has been a who’s who of conservative leaders, politicians and celebrities. A partial list: Grover Norquist, John Bolton, Ollie North, David Keene, Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent, Larry Craig, Jim Gilmore, Ken Blackwell, and Joe Allbaugh.

Opposition to gun control also provides the right with a second set of cultural issues alongside its arsenal of religious concerns. The gun lobby has been remarkably effective at casting its foes as coastal big-city cultural elitists who neither understand nor respect rural culture. That former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest men in the world, poured resources into the gun safety movement gave the NRA and its friends a new and convenient target.

The gun ideology is built around a reading of the Second Amendment that the Courts largely rejected until a 5-to-4 conservative majority in the 2008
Heller
case affirmed an individual right to bear arms. The awkwardly worded amendment reads in its entirety: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The gun lobby’s view of the amendment largely endorsed in
Heller
ignores its opening reference to “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state.” As Michael Waldman recounts in his fine book,
The Second Amendment: A Biography
, Justice John Paul Stevens in his
Heller
dissent returned to James Madison and the original debates over the amendment to argue that, as Waldman put it,
“the militias were—and still are—the protected party.” Stevens wrote that “there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution.” But Waldman rightly lays heavy stress on how Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, which abandoned this history, arose not primarily from a clash of legal briefs but from years of political agitation by gun rights absolutists. The Court’s ruling, he wrote, “reflected a popular consensus won by focused activists.”

And a great deal of that activism played into both the most paranoid elements of the far right and the more elevated concerns of those who called themselves “constitutional conservatives.” Liberals regularly tried to win over gun owners by visibly toting their firearms, entering duck blinds or hiking
through forests in search of deer. But most NRA members instruct such liberals that hunting is not what matters. The point of an armed citizenry is to be prepared for the moment that demands a stand against tyranny. And in the Obama era, there were many Americans who were convinced that tyranny was just around the corner. The NRA and the weapons manufacturers were highly successful in persuading gun owners that confiscation of their weapons was a real possibility. Even though the proportion of American households with firearms has been dropping, gun sales soared under Obama. It was one of the unheralded ways in which he increased the nation’s GDP.

Opponents of measures such as background checks are a small minority of the country—generously, a third of Americans, and on some gun control measures, even fewer. But particularly in rural states, the NRA strikes fear in politicians, particularly moderate Democrats who are always on the hunt for more conservative votes. Such Democrats are essential to the party’s ability to hold the Senate, a body gerrymandered by the Constitution itself to favor rural interests. Republicans of more moderately conservative views also worry about the NRA’s power in primaries, especially with the Tea Party providing their potential enemies additional ballast.

And so it was that even the deaths of twenty schoolchildren could not tame the gun lobby. When the Manchin-Toomey proposal came up for a vote on April 17, it was supported by 54 Senators representing some two-thirds of the American population. But under the new supremacy of the filibuster, 54 votes were not enough, and the measure was defeated. The flight of both moderate Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans was impressive testimony to the gun lobby’s power to intimidate. Democratic “no’s” came from Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Heidi Heitkamp, and Mark Pryor—respectively from Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, and Arkansas. Republicans who prided themselves on their reputations for reasonableness, including Lamar Alexander, Kelly Ayotte, Bob Corker, and Johnny Isakson, also cast their lot with the NRA. Only four Republicans voted yes: Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Kirk of Illinois, John McCain of Arizona, and Toomey. Two courageous “yes” votes came from Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Both faced reelection
in 2014 in states Obama had lost in 2012—and both would go down to defeat.

It was an enormous, dispiriting loss, a sign that Obama’s reelection and the Democrats’ continued control of the Senate would not make things easier. The fever remained unbroken. And things would get worse.

Even the good news for Obama was bad news that year. In the Senate, a significant group of Republicans was determined to repair the damage the party had done with Latino voters and pass comprehensive immigration reform. A startling and brutally honest postelection report commissioned by the Republican National Committee and issued in March under the rubric of the “Growth and Opportunity Project” had suggested as much. The authors noted bluntly that
“if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” Its authors added: “We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”