Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (73 page)

But unless both problems are recognized, what must be a shared quest for sensible and compassionate policies could become instead another shouting match about culture and values. Focusing the conversation about Americans in great distress on family difficulties alone would be the equivalent of telling a severe depressive to “snap out of it.” If social justice depends on improving family lives, improving family lives depends upon greater social justice. For some conservatives, embracing the second imperative will prove difficult.

Despite Levin’s claims, most progressives value civil society institutions as much as conservatives do. What they object to, as Mike Konczal of the
Roosevelt Institute has argued, is the idea that these voluntary forms of community can replace essential government services. As Konczal noted, private charity can respond to social problems “with targeted and nimble aid for individuals and communities” but cannot be expected to shoulder “the huge, cumbersome burden of alleviating the income insecurities of a modern age.” Strengthening society’s mediating structures is a worthy goal. Invoking mediating structures as cover for reducing government’s commitment to promoting greater equality of opportunity and condition is simply to dress the old conservatism in finery. It did not work during compassionate conservatism’s opening run. It will not work any better now.

How do we judge the Reformicons? Frum offers a demanding standard. He argues that conservatives need “an economic message that is inclusive” and in which “middle-class economic performance is at the core.” This would include providing “various kinds of benefits to middle-class people outside the market.” Unapologetic about his Obamacare heresy, Frum argues that conservatives as well as progressives should make “removing health care as a haunting concern” a priority. Conservatives also need a “modern cultural message,” he says, and they should abandon their insistence on making abortion illegal. Instead they should seek to reduce the incidence of abortion and pledge “to cut the number of abortions by two-thirds over the next ten years.” Republicans should be “just banishing the idea that the purpose of your party is to regulate the intimate behavior of women.” Frum thinks Republicans need to be more environmentally conscious, and, against the libertarian leanings of Rand Paul, insists that Republicans must maintain their position as advocates of military strength and engagement abroad.

While some of the Reformicons share Frum’s leanings toward neoconservative views on international issues, the movement is focused on domestic policy, and this is where it will make its mark. To do so, it needs to take Frum’s domestic agenda seriously. His call for an economic approach willing to go “outside the market” to ease the struggles of low-income and middle-class Americans is the acid test of the movement’s seriousness.

A true reform conservatism would move Republicans out of a comfort zone that sees deregulated markets and even more rewards for investors as elixirs for all economic ailments.

It would halt and reverse the right’s retreat on a broad range of issues,
including health care and climate change. Where Republican politicians of the center-right once proposed robust plans to provide for near-universal access to health insurance, they are now so focused on repealing Obamacare that they have largely given up on enacting realistic alternatives. On the environment, conservatives once offered market-based ideas for dealing with the human causes of climate change. Now much of the right has joined with the energy industry lobbies in denying the problem altogether. And even when conservatives such as Rubio offer modest tax measures to lift the incomes of lower-income Americans, they join them with large tax reductions for the wealthy that dwarf their redistributive efforts and worsen inequalities.

The Reformicons also need to be bolder in asserting that to have a future, conservatism cannot view an increasingly diverse and tolerant America as a horror. A Burkean traditionalism honors the gifts diverse communities bring to a nation.

Both reform conservatism and compassionate conservatism arose from an intuition among thoughtful and self-aware center-right thinkers that their side of politics needs a governing philosophy responsive to the problems of our moment. Yet both movements have operated within the severe constraints imposed by an asphyxiating orthodoxy and a Republican coalition resistant to change. Reform conservatism must still prove itself to be more than a slogan, more than a marketing campaign, more than the new pizza box. It needs to respond to the crisis of confidence among the conservative rank and file reflected by the rise of Carson and Trump. The Reformicons can settle for being sophisticated enablers of more of the same, or they can be part of the historic correction the conservative movement badly needs. But to do so, they will have to challenge not only the tactics of the Tea Party but also the turn conservatism took during the Goldwater revolution. It was once common for conservatives to say that liberals needed to free themselves from the 1960s. That is now the imperative for the American right.

“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”

In his commentary on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke wrote that at certain dangerous moments,
“Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors.” He could have been describing the spirit that has overtaken much of the American right.

It is no accident that the turn away from Burkean moderation began in the 1960s when an attractive and compelling man warmed the hearts of his followers by preaching against precisely this virtue.
“I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” Barry Goldwater declared at the 1964 Republican National Convention. “And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

We have not been the same since Goldwater’s version of conservatism became the philosophy’s dominant form, and a narrative of disappointment and betrayal became the movement’s signature story. Loyal conservatives have been upset that promises made over and over again were not kept, and this is neither surprising nor malign. But by continuing to pledge to achieve what
they could not deliver and by responding to their own failures by further escalating political conflict, conservative political leaders have only aggravated this discontent.

They have also created the vicious cycle in our politics that Thomas Schaller described. It is a cycle that conservatives themselves must break. Doing so will be difficult precisely because the forces set loose by the Goldwater rebellion have created an increasingly homogeneous Republican Party that is less and less open to course corrections. The pressures on Republican elected officials are almost uniformly from the right. That earlier Republican regimes failed to satisfy the yearnings of the conservative movement’s base led not to a rethinking of its objectives but to a doubling down on a more radical posture. If citizens are told over and over that certain outcomes are inevitable if only they stay true and work hard enough for the next victory, their natural response to failure will be to search for scapegoats and conspiracies. They are given good reason to blame the “morons” and “losers” of Trumpian demonology.

But the real conspiracy is a conspiracy of silence over the inevitability of a rather large government and the need for regular fine-tuning to a market system that is highly productive but requires regulation to function well, and adjustments to spread the riches it produces more fairly. This is part of the Trump Paradox: He gained a following not only because of the disappointments of the Tea Party Right but also because many less affluent Republicans welcomed the moments when he gave voice to protests against the power of the very wealthy that have not been heard within the GOP for decades. Ross Douthat is right that Republicans ignore the significance of the Trump Rebellion at their peril.

Conservatives repeated this pattern in response to cultural change. Yes, one of conservatism’s central tasks is to remind us that not all cultural change is good or positive or beneficial. But it’s also true that not all cultural change is evil, decadent, or sinful. Especially when it involves recognizing the claims of previously marginalized and excluded groups, cultural change is an expression of justice.

It is not as if all Republicans or all conservatives have been blind to the problems their movement faces. I have recounted the history of
post-Goldwater conservatism not only to emphasize that a narrow focus on the rise of the Tea Party misses how its ideology has been with us for decades, but also to show that leading conservatives often tried to move their cause toward a more realistic approach, only to be foiled by those who preferred ideological purity.

Richard Nixon was always torn between his earlier commitments to the Modern Republicanism of the Eisenhower years and his awareness of the political advantages of the Southern Strategy and a turn right on the social issues. His administration created major monuments to progressive governance and foreign policy realism. Pushed by his dissident liberal adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon even tried, for a while at least, to establish a guaranteed national income, a longtime progressive goal. Yet the New Majority he built was rooted in a conservative analysis of the electorate first conceived by southern segregationists such as Charles Wallace Collins and Goldwater conservatives such as William Rusher and Ralph de Toledano. And when Nixon went down in Watergate, conservatives in large numbers—particularly those, like Rusher, who never trusted him in the first place—were quick to insist that his failures had nothing to do with conservative doctrine. They removed him from a conservative pantheon where his place had always been tenuous.

Ronald Reagan left behind an ambiguous legacy whose contradictions still bedevil his followers. His governing side was far more moderate than the words he regularly spoke. He was willing to compromise when he had to, and boldly broke with the right on the driving issue of his life. He realized, ahead of most, that Mikhail Gorbachev really was a different kind of communist leader, and acted accordingly.

Conservatives were able to evade Reagan’s apostasies because they transferred his ideological sins entirely to George H. W. Bush. Bush tried to create a sustainable form of conservatism by acknowledging the fiscal realities of the modern state. He was willing to raise taxes to pay for the government he knew voters wanted. Reagan had been willing to raise taxes, too, but all the political costs fell to Bush, and they were very high.

Bush embraced an affirmative role for government in other areas. In 1990 he became the pioneer of a new civil rights movement by signing the
Americans with Disabilities Act.
He fulfilled his pledge to be “an environmental president” by signing a strong Clean Air Act. In foreign policy he was a prudent and realistic activist, managing the end of the Cold War with exceptional skill. He evicted Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait—and prudently declined to follow him to Baghdad because he understood the impossible costs of occupying Iraq.

He was defeated in 1992 largely because of an economic downturn, the country’s weariness after twelve years of Republican rule, and the political shrewdness of Bill Clinton. Bush’s defeat strengthened the Right’s control of the party. The Republican sweep of 1994 enshrined the dominance of the coalition conceived by Goldwater and his allies. The conversion of the white South to the Republican Party came in stages—from Strom Thurmond States’ Rights campaign in 1948 to Goldwater’s showing in 1964 to George Wallace’s insurgency in 1968 and Nixon’s sweep in 1972. The 1994 election extended the coalition’s reach to Congress. The midterm elections of the Obama years decisively shifted southern governorships and state legislative seats the Republicans’ way, completing what Goldwater and Gingrich had set in motion. Lincoln’s party became the party of Dixie.

Yet the years after 1994 also showcased the key weaknesses of the new conservative disposition. Clinton restored his standing by taking on the most extreme and dangerous reaches of the right after the Oklahoma City bombing and won his battle over Republican budget cuts and a government shutdown. The Gingrich Congress failed to understand a tendency in the electorate that has reasserted itself again and again: Americans often respond to antigovernment arguments in theory, but in practice value the services government provides. Thus was
Clinton’s mantra in defense of “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment” a shrewd riposte to his conservative adversaries. He moved the ground of the debate from abstractions to particulars. As Clinton suggested, ideology would consistently founder on “the laws of arithmetic.” And the conservative calculation that popular mistrust of government would lead a majority to cheer when it was shut down proved flatly wrong, time after time.

It was ironic that this revolution was led by Gingrich, who had once been a Rockefeller Republican. And when Gingrich fell, many conservatives were
eager to see him go because they saw him as too open to compromise with Clinton. It was as if his Rockefeller past had finally caught up with him. It said a great deal about the state of conservatism that Gingrich came to be viewed as too moderate.

The impeachment saga was a mark of how far frustrated conservatives would go in trying to undercut progressive advances. The controversy over the effort to remove Clinton from office combined with what many liberals saw as a power grab in the Supreme Court’s
Bush v. Gore
decision in 2000 to give American politics a much harder edge. Assumptions of good faith, essential to the workings of any democratic political system, continued to break down.

George W. Bush is a paradoxical figure who initially accepted the need for conservatism to change but backed away from the challenge of transforming it, partly by choice and partly because of circumstances.
The turn to compassionate conservatism was a promising acknowledgment that a majority of Americans expected their government to be socially generous. It also offered conservatives a path toward strengthening religious charities and other institutions of civil society that they extolled, following Burke, as society’s “little platoons.” Bush expanded the federal government’s role in education by pushing through the No Child Left Behind law and he added a comprehensive and expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare. He tried to bring a large share of the nation’s Latinos into the Republican fold by welcoming immigrants and supporting immigration reform.