Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (68 page)

Instead, he laid out what he would do if he had a more cooperative Congress. Obama’s agenda was specifically organized around the interests of middle-class American workers. Thus did he offer redistributive tax proposals—cuts for the middle class, increases for the very wealthy—even as he called for guaranteed sick leave for all, expanded child care, free and universal access to two years of community college, and equal pay for equal work.

He even offered encouraging words to organized labor. “We still need laws that strengthen rather than weaken unions,” he said, “and give workers a voice.” And his single most combative line came in renewing his support for an increase in the minimum wage. “If you truly believe you can work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year,” he told the assembled members of Congress, “go try it.”

Yet he ended a pugnacious speech by revisiting and defending his signature notion that “there wasn’t a liberal America or a conservative America.”

“Over the past six years, the pundits have pointed out more than once that my presidency hasn’t delivered on this vision,” he said. “How ironic, they say, that our politics seems more divided than ever. It’s held up as proof not just of my own flaws—of which there are many—but also as proof that the vision itself is misguided, naïve, that there are too many people in this town who actually benefit from partisanship and gridlock for us to ever do anything about it.”

He stuck by his notion in principle, but did so in a way that was an implicit rebuke to his opponents on the farther ends of the right, calling for moderation in the face of polarization, even on an issue as divisive as abortion. “We still may not agree on a woman’s right to choose,” he said, “but surely we can agree
it’s a good thing that teen pregnancies and abortions are nearing all-time lows, and that every woman should have access to the health care that she needs.”

And on immigration, he asked his opponents to embrace an idea that many of them could never accept. “Passions still fly on immigration,” he said, “but surely we can all see something of ourselves in the striving young student, and agree that no one benefits when a hardworking mom is snatched from her child, and that it’s possible to shape a law that upholds our tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.”

The reponse from Obama’s opponents was not encouraging.

Mitch McConnell, Obama’s most wily adversary, embodied the contradictions of a Republican Party and a conservative movement aware that their election victory would require them to demonstrate their ability to “govern”—even though they could not let go of their conviction that stymieing Obama was still their most important task.

On election night, McConnell, a veteran of thirty years in the Senate, savored a reelection margin far wider than the pundits and the pollsters expected. Having spent the previous six years doing all he could to obstruct Obama’s program, his appointments, and his political standing, McConnell’s reward was to achieve his lifelong ambition of leading a Republican majority in the United States Senate.

And so McConnell tried hard the day after he won to sound the notes of conciliation that were once standard currency among legislative leaders.
“When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think it means they don’t want us to do anything,” he said, promising no government shutdowns and debt ceiling disasters on his watch. “I think they want us to look for areas of agreement.”

But such graciousness had been missing from his victory speech the night before.
“For too long, this administration has tried to tell the American people what’s good for them—and then blamed somebody else when their policies didn’t work out,” he told his raucous supporters.

And the man who has spent the vast majority of his working life in the nation’s capital added this: “What the current crowd in Washington is offering is making us weaker both at home and abroad. . . . Friends, this experiment in big government has lasted long enough!”

His election night roar was, perhaps, McConnell’s final tribute to a campaign stump speech riff that came to him by reflex. But the contrast in tone and purpose between his two sets of remarks defined the choice McConnell and his party would need to make—not only about its attitude toward Obama’s final two years but also about the future.

When McConnell declared that “this experiment in big government has lasted long enough,” he was obviously describing his view of the Obama presidency, but he also sounding a conservative battle cry that went back to the Goldwater years. The conservative movement had been resisting “this experiment in big government” since the Roosevelt administration. Again and again, conservatives were promised that this election victory, and then the next, and then the next, would finally rout the statists and return the nation to the smaller government they were certain our Founders had in mind. And again and again, conservatives were disappointed. Neither Nixon nor Reagan nor either President Bush could fulfill a promise that, in truth, most Americans did not want kept.

And in the second decade of the twenty-first century, conservatives were forced to grapple with a problem that their own doctrine was ill-suited to confront. With inequality rising, wages stagnating, and upward mobility stalling, the economic market itself was failing to live up to the promises conservatives regularly made on its behalf. These class discontents broke through in the 2012 Republican primaries and were central to Romney’s defeat.

Republicans realized these issues could no longer be swept aside. And so they at least began talking about them. Thus did Speaker Boehner open the new Congress declaring that
“too many are working harder only to lose ground to stagnant wages and rising costs.” Thus did Jeb Bush launch the first stages of his presidential campaign by setting up a fund-raising organization called “Right to Rise PAC,” whose double meaning involved his hope for a conservative revival and his promise to put forward ideas that would help
“all Americans to rise up” and “to move up the income ladder.” Thus did Marco Rubio advance his own presidential aspirations with a book called
American Dreams
and a promise to end what he called “opportunity inequality.”

The skeptic might write off such pronouncements as a tribute to the miracles that focus groups and polling can call forth. And as Obama argued in his
State of the Union address, the strengthening economic recovery undercut the Republicans’ claims that his policies had failed to restore the economy’s health, so his conservative critics had to focus their criticisms on the tasks still to be completed.

Yet the Republican Congress that took over in 2015 did not seem to take this rhetoric particularly seriously. Its opening efforts focused on yet more attempts to repeal or gut Obamacare; an all-out attempt to block the president’s executive actions on immigration; building an oil pipeline; and chopping away at the Wall Street reforms. The shutdown habit died hard and the new Republican Congress went right to the edge of temporarily shuttering the Department of Homeland Security in its campaign to block Obama on immigration. But the filibuster, the Senate Republicans’ friend during Obama’s first six years, was now a Democratic weapon. Senate Democrats refused to vote for a funding bill that undercut the president’s immigration moves. Republicans, knowing they now held the copyright on the word “shutdown,” also knew they had to back off. In early March, they did. There was no shutdown, and Republicans hoped conservative judges would block Obama’s efforts on behalf of immigrants.

Later that month, the budget bills passed by the House and Senate hardly sent a signal that conservatives were taking a new approach to inequality. On the contrary, they included many of the same old cuts, many magic tricks to claim a deficit reduction total of $5 trillion over a decade, and an effort to finesse a fight between deficit hawks and defense hawks by moving military spending outside the boundaries of the old sequestration targets. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated, once again, that more than two-thirds of the cuts came in programs for low- or middle-income Americans.

The new talk about inequality thus had no connection to what was happening on the floor of the Republican Congress, but it did mean something. One of the most revealing indicators in politics is when one side of the political debate is forced to talk about the problems that the other side defines as most pressing. The side engaged in such code-switching reinforces the worldview of its opponents and suggests a retreat from its own ideology. This is exactly what happened after Ronald Reagan’s victory, when Democrats
peppered their speeches with praise for “markets” and “entrepreneurship” and redefined social spending as “investments in human capital.”

In his 1984 book on the era,
The Neo-Liberals,
Randall Rothenberg pointed to one of the key slogans of the revisionist Democrats who were arguing that their party needed to reach beyond the ideas of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“The solutions of the thirties,” they said, “will not solve the problems of the eighties.” Was this beginning to happen in reverse? Would conservatives begin to acknowledge that the solutions of the eighties would not solve the problems of the second decade of the twenty-first century?

Bold talk of a new “reform conservatism” suggested a willingness to modernize and moderate, but the right had been there before with compassionate conservatism, a slogan full of promise but short on detail. The question was whether the right was offering a new gloss on old ideas or seeking a genuine breakthrough.

To the surprise and consternation of party leaders who continued to hope they could ride but contain the anger on the right that they stoked, an entirely new threat to their power emerged in the summer of 2015. The rage among grass-roots conservatives had not dissipated and neither had the disaffection among working-class Republicans. Donald Trump, the billionaire deal-making television star, would emerge as the unlikely champion of both groups. Freely criticizing his foes inside and outside the party as “losers” and “morons,” Trump seized Reagan’s old promise to “make America great again” as his own. He even tried to trademark it. The earnest efforts of policy specialists and intellectuals to tweak the old ideology would confront a skilled twenty-first-century carnival barker for whom policy details were far less important than a personality the media could not get enough of and an eagerness to exploit the deep and angry pessimism that burned inside so many Republican partisans and conservative loyalists.

“The average conservative reformist output consists of about three articles bashing liberal statism for every one questioning Republican dogma.”

After LBJ’s 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and during the rush of progressive legislation that followed, Republican congressional leaders decided they needed to respond with some proposals of their own. It was the high tide of Great Society liberalism, and Johnson had created a vogue for legislative creativity and national solutions to public problems. Republicans, who had not yet made their decisive move rightward, did not want to be left out, and they hoped that some of their ideas might moderate and ultimately halt LBJ’s juggernaut.

Thus arose the movement for Constructive Republican Alternatives. Liberals have always claimed that the original idea was for “Constructive Republican Alternative Policies,” until someone realized how unfortunate the acronym would be. But in truth, the conservative, moderate, and liberal Republicans (there were liberal Republicans then) who put their minds to formulating new policies were a creative bunch. The torrent of ideas came from the liberals at the Ripon Society, the libertarian wing of Young Americans for Freedom, and mainstream members of Congress such as Al Quie from Minnesota, Melvin Laird from Wisconsin, Charles “Mac” Mathias from Maryland, and Bob Ellsworth of Kansas. They included a volunteer military, the establishment of revenue sharing with the states (an idea that can be traced back to Henry Clay and the Whigs), the negative income tax (broached early by the conservative economist Milton Friedman) to supplement poor people’s incomes, block-granting programs to the states (still popular on the right), and the vogue for tax credits as an alternative to direct government spending, a method Bill Clinton freely applied when the era of big government had supposedly ended. Republicans were also essential to the enactment of the great civil rights and voting rights acts.

Now the trumpet summons Republicans again. A loose, informal confederation of conservative thinkers and legislators has come together in what they label the “conservative reform project.” They call themselves “reform conservatives.” They are not the Constructive Republicans of old—the absence of liberal Republicans means the intellectual compass of this group points farther right. But these Reformicons do have ambitions.

Some are sharply critical of the Tea Party. Others embrace it. Many maintain a diplomatic silence or keep their criticism implicit. To reduce the chance that they will be seen as hostile to the party’s right-wing factions, they often say that they are simply trying to fill a policy void on the right created by four and a half years of largely defensive and negative politics directed against President Obama.

Several refer to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign as an object lesson in what Republicans should not do, pointing especially to Romney’s failure to speak to the vast majority of Americans who are employees, not “job creators.” There are conservative reformers who hint at nudging the GOP to the left
of where it is now and specifically emphasize the importance of shedding radical antigovernment rhetoric. But a very strong strain of reform conservatism seems most interested in wrapping the old small-government precepts in appealing language about reviving “civil society” and relying on local communities to solve problems. This allows them to make many of the same antiliberal, antigovernment arguments, but freshens them with warm references to community redolent of Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville. Here are the 1970s ideas of Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus proving useful yet again. Here also is a split similar to the pro- and antigovernment divide that hobbled compassionate conservatism.