Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (69 page)

Indeed, even supporters of the Tea Party sought to march under the reform banner. Michael Needham, chief executive officer for the Heritage Foundation, took to the pages of
National Affairs
, a quarterly journal that has become an intellectual meeting place for reform conservative intellectuals and policy specialists, to argue that the Tea Party should be seen as an effort to
“disrupt the status quo” and that its efforts should be welcomed by those “eager to shake up a stale Republican agenda.” Senator Mike Lee—he had won the first big Tea Party intra-Republican fight against then-Senator Robert Bennett in Utah—also waved the reform standard in an April 2013 speech at the Heritage Foundation, urging conservatives to embrace words like “compassion” and “community” but insisting that “collective action doesn’t only—or even usually—mean government action.”

Yuval Levin, the lead conductor of the reform conservative orchestra,
criticizes the left’s “prescriptive, technocratic approach” as “a poor fit for American life.” Where conservatives revere “the space occupied by families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and the private economy,” progressives, he says, have always viewed these “mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the government with suspicion, seeing them as instruments of division, prejudice and selfishness or as power centers lacking in democratic legitimacy.” Such talk underscores the insistence of many Reformicons that they are not dissidents. Levin says that while he and his allies want to offer “a positive vision of what government is for,” their approach would “inevitably lead to a smaller government because it just envisions a larger society and a smaller state.”

When it comes to the Tea Party, you might say that Levin is fair and balanced. “I’m certainly not an anti–Tea Party voice,” he told me in a 2014 conversation. “I think it brought a lot of energy to Republican politics. I think it focused on a lot of the right problems. But it hasn’t been focused on policy-oriented conservatism. I think that’s where things need to change.” He added: “There are a lot of members of Congress, most of them elected in the last four years, who just don’t think they’re here to make policy, and I disagree.”

Ronald Reagan is a challenging figure for the reformers. The younger ones (and it tends to be a younger movement) are especially inclined to say that the conservative movement must free itself from Reagan nostalgia. But others see the road to the Promised Land passing through a reembrace of Reaganism—properly understood, of course. The Reagan they have in mind is the one who created Reagan Democrats because he could speak to working-class voters, a gift Romney obviously didn’t possess.

The reform conservatives can already claim a significant success: almost all of God’s conservative children seem to want to take up the reform banner. This can arouse suspicions as to whether there is any there here. The word “reform” polls very well. It was not surprising
to see Karl Rove praise the movement in a March 2014
Wall Street Journal
column. It was Rove who shrewdly rebaptized George W. Bush as “A Reformer with Results” to fend off John McCain in 2000. “Reform” is a word that only machine politicians relish taking on.

It puts the current reform conservatism in context to see McCain as this era’s first reform conservative and to notice that many of the positions he took were far more adventurous and well to the left of where most of today’s reform conservatives are willing to venture. McCain was a passionate campaign finance reformer in a party that is now committed to tearing down all barriers to big money in politics. He acknowledged the human causes of global warming and introduced what would now be seen as sweeping legislation to curb carbon emissions. He opposed the Bush tax cuts with populist language that is familiar to today’s progressives. And he worked hard for immigration reform, an issue that divides the Reformicons.

Today’s reform conservatives are operating in a highly constrained environment. Some of them confront the Tea Party’s extreme opposition to
government directly. But the Reformicons generally choose to accept the limits placed on them by the increasingly conservative Republican primary electorate, the shift in the GOP’s geographical center of gravity toward the South, and the rightward drift within the business community. As long as these boundaries on their thinking hold, it is unlikely that they will leave behind as many policy monuments as the earlier Constructive Republicans did.

There is another constraint as well. While it is an article of faith among conservatives that Barack Obama has pursued a left-wing agenda, the reality is that Obama has picked up on many policy ideas that are conservative in origin and might, in a different world, be deployed by the reform conservatives themselves. Example number one, as we’ve seen, is the Affordable Care Act, the chief object of Republican scorn. Its much-maligned complexity is built around ideas that were developed on the right and are designed to keep the private market in health insurance intact. Had Obama supported a single-payer system or some other more government-oriented plan, one could imagine reform conservatives endorsing something that looked like Obamacare—which is what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts. It’s the conundrum that has confronted progressives since the Clinton Era: in trying to be practical, moderate, and reasonable, they may have helped shrink the philosophical space in which policies are formulated and arguments are carried out.

Obama strongly advocates income supplement plans such as the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, which often figure in conservative alternatives to more elaborate government programs and to increases in the minimum wage. Oh, yes, and income taxes under Obama are still lower than they were when Bill Clinton was president.

Reform conservatives are leery of acknowledging any of this. If Obama is socialism personified, then any idea he supports, no matter its genealogy, is suspect.
This is the lesson we learn from the ritualistic attacks on the president for having “extended the power of the federal government to an unprecedented degree,” for having engineered “a federal regulatory takeover of health insurance,” and for pursuing policies that “set a high-water mark for the size and reach of the federal government.” These words came from an otherwise quite bold—and at times scathing—
critique of the Tea Party’s view
of government by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, who served with Gerson in the Bush administration. Describing what he called the “Reformish Conservatives,” the liberal journalist Ryan Cooper noted that members of this tribe seem inclined to produce “about three articles bashing liberal statism for every one questioning Republican dogma.”

So what is serious here, and what amounts to repackaging? David Frum, the conservative heretic, argues that many on the right know that their product is not selling well. He uses the analogy of a failing pizza chain to frame the key question: how much are they willing to change the pizza inside, and how much are they merely changing the box?

The answer turns out to be complicated. At times, reform conservatism does seem more concerned with the box than its contents—more infatuated with the idea of new ideas than with new ideas. There is also a great deal of orthodoxy in the ongoing imperative to propose new tax cuts for the very wealthy, usually bundled into a package touted as “tax reform.” But it’s also true that the Obama years produced such a sharp lurch to the right within conservatism that many Reformicons accept the need for readjustment and for something that resembles a governing agenda.

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, speaks of an
“unemployment crisis,” particularly for the long-term jobless, and is willing to entertain Keynesian remedies. It is a sign that
progressive arguments about inequality have gained sufficient purchase that Marco Rubio is willing to acknowledge that “from 1980 to 2005, over 80 percent of the total increase in income went to the top 1 percent of American earners,” and that “70 percent of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class.”

Some on the right have taken the Tea Party’s antigovernment attitudes head-on. In their essay, Gerson and Wehner pointed to “the inadequacy of the oppositional and negative approach to the question of the government’s purpose and role.” And a few have broken with conservative conventional wisdom altogether, as columnist Josh Barro did in supporting the Affordable Care Act. It is, however, a mark of the boundaries of conservative orthodoxy that many conservatives do not see Barro as one of them. His hard-to-classify ideology led the writer Andrew Sullivan (who is himself ideologially eclectic) to label
Barro a “conservative Whig.” Barro became a contributor to
the
New York Times
’ online feature, “The Upshot,” hardly a redoubt of conservative ideology.

Although McCain’s maverick years suggest that some conservatives have long been aware of the need for new departures, the reformist impulse blossomed in the final years of the Bush presidency in response to its failures. The early reform conservatives saw an opening for an approach focused on problem solving. They hoped to speak to the less well-off voters who rejected the right and Bush. But their early efforts were buried under the Tea Party insurgency.

Bookish types were important to the early rumblings of reform conservatism. And some of the earliest books on the need to rethink conservatism quickly put their authors on a conservative Index of Forbidden Thinkers.

Frum might be seen as a “premature reformer,” in the manner of those whom parts of the old left once labeled as “premature anticommunists” because they broke with the Popular Front before most of their allies. Frum’s criticisms of his own camp (beginning with his open disgust at McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate in 2008) led many on the right to excommunicate him. Although the story is told differently by different sides, Frum’s dissidence had something to do with his departure from (or his being asked to leave) the American Enterprise Institute in 2010. His break with AEI happened to come only a few days after he lambasted the Republican Party for its failure to negotiate with the Obama White House over the Affordable Care Act.
Frum’s heresy included acknowledging that the ACA had “a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan,” building on “ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993–1994.”

Against Republican outcries that Obama was leading the nation to socialism, Frum insisted (correctly) that “the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.” He earned the opprobrium of many a conservative talk show host—and coined a highly useful term—by declaring the
bill’s passage “a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry.” Their “listeners and viewers,” he wrote, “will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio.” The conservative talk show world doesn’t take to anyone who coins a term as evocative as “the conservative entertainment industry.”

An earlier apostate was Bruce Bartlett. A founder of supply-side economics, he rebelled against the Bush administration’s budget policies. The title of his 2006 book,
Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,
explains why he became persona non grata among Republicans (and also why he was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, a generally pro-Bush think tank). The book summarizes rather well the views that many Tea Party Republicans were to come to a few years later. Bartlett got there too early, and he has subsequently moved away from the right altogether and become one of its sharpest critics.

If Frum and Bartlett were rebels, two younger men who published a reformist book in 2008 are among the Founders of Reform Conservatism. Ross
Douthat and Reihan Salam (both born in 1979) have managed to stay a few steps ahead of the reform curve while still remaining inside the conservative family. Appropriately for their generation, both were influential bloggers. Douthat later became the youngest-ever
New York Times
columnist, and Salam has written for a variety of publications and is a columnist for
Slate.
Their
Grand New Party
carried a subtitle that captured their central preoccupation:
How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.
The book grew out of their 2005 article in the
Weekly Standard,
“The Party of Sam’s Club,” in which they sought to put policy seriousness behind former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty’s evocative sound bite, the basis for his ultimately short-lived 2012 Republican presidential campaign.

Like Frum,
Douthat and Salam acknowledged the challenges and problems created by globalization. Most distinctive about the Douthat-Salam thesis was its criticism of the Republican Party for having relied over many years on white working-class voters without delivering many tangible benefits to a constituency that had reason to “feel more insecure.” Working-class voters had flocked to Reagan in the 1980s and to Newt Gingrich’s revolution in the
1990s, they wrote, but quickly became “disillusioned with conservative governance and returned to the Democratic column” because Republicans failed to do much for them. Republicans ruined the courtship, they charged, “by confusing being pro-market with being pro-business . . . and by shrinking from the admittedly difficult task of reforming the welfare state so that it serves the interests of the working class rather than the affluent.”