Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (7 page)

Interventionism—reflected in Perry’s orthodox interpretation of Reaganism—remains a powerful impulse in the party. Polls showed that it has never stopped being the majority Republican position, and it experienced
a revival in the final years of Obama’s term with the rise of the Islamic State and the controversy over the president’s negotiations with Iran. Most of the party’s presidential aspirants, including Rubio, Chris Christie, Walker, and Jeb Bush, bet on this, for reasons explained by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and Rubio booster. “I cannot deny the historical isolationist feeling in America,” he told me. “Nor can I deny that there’s an increase in the Republican Party of that feeling.” But he added: “I still believe that the dominant position in the Republican Party is, as Marco Rubio has said, ‘problems don’t go away just because we ignore them,’ and that we are the only remaining superpower in the world, and that America has a responsibility to lead.” Ayres’s analysis was vindicated as the campaign progressed. Paul himself made tactical moves toward a more publicly hawkish position when he announced his presidential candidacy in April 2015, but his underlying skepticism of interventionism remained. While his view reflected a strong, if temporarily submerged, current on the right, Paul found himself falling behind his more hawkish rivals—though not Perry, whose campaign crumbled for other reasons.

The divide over how Republicans read Reagan’s foreign policy is just one indicator of how unsettled the meaning of Reagan’s legacy is. In one sense, it is a sign of Reagan’s posthumous political success: everyone on the right wants to identify with him, and he thus plays a prophetic and, one might say, even a scriptural role.
“All sides take as settled fact the premise that Reagan revealed the truth to the world in its entirety forever and ever,” the liberal writer Jonathan Chait observed archly, “and any revisions to the Party canon must make the case that rival claimants have incorrectly interpreted the Reagan writ.”

The argument over Reagan can run in an endless loop. Only if Reagan is entirely abstracted from the movement that created him can he be viewed as a moderate. Yet there can be no denying his pragmatic side. Both in his 1980 campaign and in the White House, he was careful not to push farther than American public opinion would allow. The movement builder, over time, became a politician. Yes, the true believer was always present. Krauthammer cited what might be seen as Reagan’s Law—“government is the problem”—and insisted, “You can’t get more radically anti–New Deal than that.” But he added that Reagan “didn’t govern that way, because you can’t govern that way in a modern industrial society.” Reagan, he
said, understood that while the United States was “a center-right country,” it was “not a right-wing country.”

Is the Reagan who opposed the treaty giving the Panama Canal back to Panama the relevant Reagan? Or was it the Reagan who greeted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 and said,
“I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands”? Who matters most, the Reagan who uncompromisingly cut taxes in 1981, or the Reagan who happily compromised with House Speaker Tip O’Neill and raised social security taxes in 1983 to keep the system solvent? Do we pay attention to the Reagan who made Establishment pragmatist James A. Baker III his chief of staff, or the president who appointed Edwin Meese III, the staunch and long-time conservative, as his attorney general? Are Reagan’s social views best understood by his opposition to abortion as president, by his decision to sign an abortion liberalization law as governor of California, or by his 1978 opposition to a California initiative that would have barred gays from teaching in public schools? (“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is
not a contagious disease like the measles,” Reagan wrote.)

When I spoke with William Kristol, the founder of the
Weekly Standard
magazine that sought to be for neoconservatism what
National Review
had been to conservatism, he hit on the dilemma in mid-thought. Noting that the pre-presidential Reagan had been out of the mainstream on a range of issues, including the Panama Canal treaty signed by Jimmy Carter—Reagan’s opposition to it, Kristol said, “was, like, wacky,” even to many conservatives—Reagan had managed to make the transition “from being a leader of protest to a plausible, governing conservative.”

And then, on reflection, Kristol edited himself and suggested that the real contrast was between the Reagan who got elected and governed, and the Barry Goldwater who lost in a landslide. “Until the Tea Party can transition from being Goldwaterite to Reaganite,” he says, “it has a big problem winning.”

Yes, when many harder-line conservatives such as Chris McDaniel invoke Reagan, they really mean Goldwater—or, perhaps, Reagan at the moments when he most sounded like Goldwater. Far more than the Gipper, it was Goldwater who changed the trajectory of American politics. And Goldwater, in turn, was the product of a movement a long time in the making.

“I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size.”

Journalism, by its nature, focuses on discontinuities. What’s new is, by definition, news. And so there was a breathlessness in much of the early coverage of the Tea Party that treated the movement as an entirely novel form of spontaneous protest. It was said to represent a new populism with all the small-
d
democratic legitimacy that word conveys.

Put aside that much of the protest was organized and well funded, not spontaneous, and that what the Tea Party
opposed
—a government active on behalf of economic equality—was precisely what the original American populist movement was
for
. The important thing is that the rebellion on the Republican right during and after George W. Bush’s presidency was not, in any way, philosophically or ideologically innovative. It wasn’t new at all. Most of the ideas it espoused were born in the 1930s and 1940s, as the historian Kim Phillips-Fein wrote,
“in the reaction against the New Deal,”
particularly among the businesspeople who formed the American Liberty League.

The organization’s arguments sound stunningly familiar in our age. “You can’t recover prosperity,” said the chairman of the League’s Illinois division, “by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and unlucky.” Language about “job creators” and the “47 percent” is nothing new to American politics.

Right-wing ideas developed a deeper hold in the 1950s—in respectable anticommunism and in McCarthyism, in the conspiracy theories spun by the John Birch Society and its friends, and, for some, in fierce resistance to the rising civil rights movement and a liberal Supreme Court. Goldwater and Reagan broadly shared this outlook, although their pronouncements were sunnier and free of crude prejudices.

Rick Perlstein, the left’s premier student of the right, was sufficiently bothered by the failure to see the continuities between the right’s past and present that he took to the pages of the
Nation
in late 2013 to condemn the eagerness “to depict the Tea Party’s brand of reactionary extremism as a new thing.” On the contrary, he argued, the far right has been remarkably consistent with itself. To make his point, he cited conservative episodes over a span of seventy years that looked, felt, and sounded exactly like the obsessions and actions of today’s right. “There is,” he quipped, “little new under
the wingnut sun.”

Conservatives might not like Perlstein’s way of saying it, but most of them agree with his underlying point: Very little of what today’s right or radical right says is genuinely novel. Almost all of it was said in the lead-up to Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and during the campaign itself. The roots of the politics of 2010 and 2015 reach back to 1964. What needs to be explored is why these old ideas came back to life with such ferocity.

As Perlstein showed in
Before the Storm,
his magisterial account with the well-chosen subtitle
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,
breaking the hold that a consensual, centrist liberalism had on American politics was the central purpose of the Goldwater movement. It’s no wonder that the Tea Partiers claim their lineage back to it.

Writers and intellectuals (perhaps because they are writers and intellectuals)
pay disproportionate attention to the residents of one particular conservative neighborhood: William F. Buckley Jr. and the proudly dissident band he gathered around
National Review.
(I have often been guilty of this historical sin myself.) Buckley and his friends were determined to liberate the country from New Dealism and Dwight Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism alike, seeing little difference between them. Thus did the magazine proudly announce that it “stands athwart history,
yelling stop.”

The focus on Buckley and his friends is not entirely misplaced. A movement needs coherent doctrine and sprightly articulation. Buckley’s project provided both. Simply by being smart, attractive, articulate, and, eventually, famous, Buckley gave heart to millions of conservatives tired of liberal know-it-alls and an arrogant consensus that regarded them as kooks. And the Buckleyites provided intellectual and at times moral discipline to the right, reading anti-Semites and Birchers out of the movement. (Buckley tried to read Ayn Rand out of the movement as well, but her hold on the libertarian-inclined, including a young Paul Ryan, was never broken.)

National Review
also tried hard to resolve the contradictions of a movement that included antigovernment libertarians, traditionalists who put old values and old institutions ahead of the free market, and the robust anticommunists who might oppose small government but wanted the Pentagon to be supplied with as many tax dollars as it needed to roll back Soviet tyranny. The most important political contribution of the magazine was at the theoretical level: the development of what came to be known as “fusionism,” the effort of Frank Meyer,
National Review
’s chief ideologist, to harmonize or at least rationalize the diverse strands of conservative thought into a coherent doctrine. He emphasized
“two main strands of conservatism,” wrote his biographer Kevin Smant: “the belief in order, transcendence, truth and the divine; and the belief that freedom was the highest
political
end, it being the only way for the individual legitimately to choose the truth.”

Meyer shared with the traditionalists a belief in an “organic moral order” and in the importance of cultivating “virtue” in citizens. Lovers of liberty often did not appreciate how important a belief in an objective morality was to the task of preserving freedom, he argued. But traditionalists were sometimes too ready to confuse the authority they invested in tradition with the power they were willing to surrender to human rulers—to the state—to
promote their idea of virtue. His conclusion: free markets were compatible with virtue and often promoted it, but virtue was the only proper end of freedom.
Donald Devine, a conservative political scientist and Reagan administration official, summarized fusionism nicely: it meant “utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends.”

Fusionism would never fully resolve the tensions within conservatism, and the movement, in our time no less than in Meyer’s, would face the constant threat of conflict among its various wings. But as a rough-and-ready intellectual consensus, Meyer’s idea was critical to conservatism’s progress. It made it easier for competing factions to submerge their disagreements in the larger causes of opposing American liberalism and the more dire threat of communism.

But in understanding the Tea Party’s lineage, an attention to the Buckley crowd misses right-wing precincts that were genuinely kooky—and also ignores the extent to which even the Buckley crowd was ready to throw in with the southern segregationists, who were key to building the new political majority they longed to create.

The Buckleyites rose side by side with an extreme right that included the Birch Society and other conspiracy-minded groups, as well as the South’s archsegregationists resisting the civil rights push.
National Review
was set up to answer the
New Republic
and the
Nation
, and Buckley sought to bring the conservative cause to television, too. His
Firing Line
was a singularly successful public-affairs television program in which Buckley often debated leading liberals—among them John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, and Al Lowenstein—who were eager to match wits with one of the nation’s premier intellectual pugilists. Buckley was determined to “correct the sorry situation today where the liberal appears to have a
monopoly on sophisticated information.”

But people farther to his right had the same idea. In the late 1950s, H. L. Hunt, the Texas oil millionaire, set up the Life Line Foundation, which included a newsletter, television programs, and a book club. Its greatest influence came in its radio program. By the end of 1962, as the scholar Mary Brennan noted, it was being broadcast 342 times a day on roughly 300 radio stations in 42 states and the District of Columbia. There was also Dan Smoot, a former FBI agent turned right-wing pamphleteer and later a John Birch Society leader. He developed a substantial audience, with his radio program at
one point reaching 150 stations and 16 million households weekly. Typical Smoot fare was his 1962 book,
The Invisible Government,
about the Council on Foreign Relations and its efforts to create “a one-world socialist system.” It sold more than 2 million copies. Smoot believed that the key to political salvation could be found in the country’s founding document.
“We cannot reestablish Constitutional government and restore our free republic until a decisive number of Americans understand the Constitution and use it as a guide to political action,” he said in one of his television broadcasts. “You should do your utmost to remove from public office every official who violates the Constitution’s clear meaning if you want to save your own freedom and help restore your republic.” Smoot died in 2003 at the age of eighty-nine, and if his words sound remarkably like a Tea Party broadcast, this helps explain why he has developed a modest new following in recent years, thanks to YouTube.