Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (43 page)

The sense of cultural isolation felt by evangelicals and fundamentalists went back to the
Scopes
trial of the 1920s. Most of them supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, but FDR ushered in a quiet social revolution that saw power shift to Catholics, Jews, and the big cities, whose cultural preoccupations could hardly have been more distant from the rural and small-town ethos revered by theologically conservative Protestants. The Supreme Court’s decision ending prescribed prayer in public schools had a particular resonance because while the prayers were typically nondenominational, they tended to reflect the country’s Protestant origins. The end of public school prayer was another signal that Protestant civic influence was on the decline.

More generally, religious conservatives sensed that religion was being pushed out of public life by increasingly influential secular forces, creating what Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, the progressive-turned-conservative, famously called
The Naked Public Square,
the title of his influential 1984 book. Day-to-day culture was changing, too, most visible to tens of millions in the move on network television from celebrations of traditional domesticity such as
Leave It to Beaver
or
Father Knows Best
to more daring offerings. In many localities, social conservatives invoked the language of the New Left about controlling the decisions that affected their own lives by demanding that school
textbooks, written by academics far away and published by big publishers in major cities, be replaced with volumes sensitive to their own values.

In many places, the religious conservatives who started out as a pressure group became integrated as part of regular Republican organizations, something Karl Rove was acutely aware of when he planned both of Bush’s campaigns.

The religious right caused such commotion in the 1970s and 1980s that it is often ignored how many of the voters whom it motivated to pledge allegiance to the Republican Party had already made their first moves to the GOP (in their voting behavior if not always their formal party affiliations) in the 1960s—and in some cases, back in the late 1940s and 1950s. A large share of the energy on the religious right came from white southerners who began voting Republican in 1964, or for segregationist third parties in 1948 or 1960, in reaction to civil rights. The followers of Jerry Falwell and later Pat Robertson were the same sorts of voters that Rusher and de Toledano had targeted when they imagined a conservative majority.

An episode in the 1970s underscored that among white southern conservatives, race and religion were not always easily separated. The
Brown v. Board of Education
decision in 1954 desegregating southern schools led to the creation of private schools, popularly known as “segregation academies,” for white students fleeing multiracial classrooms. In one of the many ironies associated with Richard Nixon’s administration, the attack on their tax status began during his presidency. Robert Finch, a progressive Republican who was secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for seventeen months under Nixon, announced in January 1970 that he would ask the Treasury Department to end these schools’ tax exemptions.

Nixon was characteristically ambivalent. His first reaction, as the historian Joseph Crespino notes in his fine account of the controversy, was impatience with the often liberal Finch. “Tell him to do the right thing for a change,” Nixon told his aide John Ehrlichman.
“Whites in Mississippi can’t send their kids to schools that are 90 percent black; they’ve got to set up private schools.”

But Nixon eventually relented and ordered the Internal Revenue Service to follow Finch’s approach. The issue kicked around for several years and did not come to a head until August 1978, when the IRS during Jimmy Carter’s presidency
laid out clear guidelines ordering a review of the tax status of schools that “were formed or substantially expanded at or about the time of desegregation of public school” and had “an insignificant number of minority students.” The reaction among conservative (white) Christians, Crespino noted, “bordered on the apoplectic.” An attack on segregation was cast as an assault on Christian education. The IRS battle, said Richard Viguerie, the New Right leader and direct mail maestro, “kicked the sleeping dog. It galvanized the religious right. It was the spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in real politics.” Weyrich said the move “shattered the Christian community’s notion that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they pleased.”

Reagan seized on the issue in the 1980 campaign. In a January speech at Bob Jones University—then fighting the IRS for having lifted its tax exemption because of the school’s ban on interracial dating—Reagan called for “a spiritual revival” and denounced “the evil character of racial quotas.” The 1980 Republican platform pledged to “halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS commissioner against independent schools,” ignoring, as Crespino noted, that it was the Nixon administration that had set the whole process in motion.

The episode certainly does not prove that the religious right was simply cover for an older politics of segregation. Many of the Christian conservatives were, indeed, animated by other questions, from abortion to school prayer. But the battle over the Christian academies does underscore how often reactions connected to race were linked with other forms of social conservatism. It helps explain why white southerners and African-Americans who typically shared similar Christian religious commitments and conservative social and theological views divided sharply at election time. Particularly (though not exclusively) in the Deep South, issues connected to civil rights and racial equality remained the decisive questions.

The interaction between race and other forms of social conservatism is also instructive for what would happen in the Obama years. The subject of race and Obama has been discussed with both excessive delicacy and sweeping certainty. It’s obviously not true that all or even most opposition to Obama could be explained by race, given that so many of the same groups and
individuals who voted against and at times loathed Barack Obama had also voted against and at times loathed Bill Clinton. Ideology mattered most. But there can be no denying that racial feeling played an important role in explaining opposition to Obama—and in the conservative ideology that many of these voters held. And it’s clear that particularly in the South and across Appalachia, a significant number of whites who had been open to other Democrats opposed Obama because he is black.

The
New York Times
published what would become a famous map showing which counties had become more Democratic between 2004 and 2008, and which had become more Republican. Not surprisingly, given Obama’s substantial victory, he ran ahead of John Kerry in 78 percent of the nation’s counties. But the 22 percent of American counties where he ran behind Kerry, the
Times
noted, “tended to be lower income, less educated, more rural, less diverse, and Southern.” The map portrayed what some Democrats took to calling “the red slash.” It was the grouping of counties that defied the national trend by shifting Republican between the two elections. The slash started in western Pennsylvania, worked its way through West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, much of Tennessee, and northern Alabama. It took in almost all of Arkansas, large parts of Louisiana and Oklahoma, and many counties in northern and eastern Texas.
The cultural feel of red slash counties was captured by this statistic: in 1,173 counties, Obama received 10 percentage points or more of the vote than John Kerry did, and these counties were only 6 percent Southern Baptist; but in the 225 counties where Obama ran 10 percentage points or more behind Kerry, 32 percent were Southern Baptist.

Nationwide, Obama captured 43 percent of the white vote, but in Louisiana his share was only 14 percent; in Mississippi, 11 percent; and in Alabama, 10 percent. David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, noted to the
Times
’ Adam Nossiter that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for John Kerry in Alabama was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.
“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.

There can also be no denying that the racial attitudes of Tea Party supporters are distinctive. In April 2010, a
New York Times
/CBS News poll designed to study the Tea Party phenomenon asked a classic survey question designed to gauge racial attitudes: “In recent years, do you think too much
has been made of the problems facing black people, too little has been made, or is it about right?” Among those who were not Tea Party loyalists,
only 19 percent said “too much.” But among Tea Party supporters, 52 percent said “too much.”

As important as the direct effect of race on politics was the growing interaction between racial, cultural, and economic conservatism. This is why efforts to explain the Tea Party as a new, more libertarian alternative to the religious right were mistaken. It’s true that the public issues on which the Tea Party focused most were the bank bailout, Obamacare, rising deficits, “big government” in the abstract, the centralization of power in Washington, and the need for a return to “constitutional government.” But as Skocpol and Williamson’s research showed, opposition to big government did not extend to two of the federal government’s biggest programs, Medicare and Social Security, which disproportionately benefited the older voters who gravitated to the Tea Party. Moreover, the Tea Party’s libertarianism did not extend to immigration. On the contrary, polls consistently showed that
opposition to illegal immigration was one of the motivating issues for Tea Party supporters—and one of the central causes of its alienation from Bush.

Far from being an alternative to the religious right, the Tea Party was an overlapping form of political organization that gave voice to many of the same forms of social traditionalism that had animated followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
A PRRI/Brookings Institution survey taken shortly before the 2010 elections made the overlap clear: fully 47 percent of those who identified as members of the Tea Party said they also considered themselves part of the religious conservative movement. The overlap was even greater when it came to specific issues on which Tea Party members were conservative, not libertarian: 63 percent said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and only 19 percent supported gay marriage. Some 55 percent of Tea Party supporters said they considered America a “Christian nation,” compared with 42 percent of the general population. Among all Americans, 48 percent said that immigrants were a burden on the country “because they take jobs, housing and health care”; among Tea Party supporters, 65 percent said this.

There were moments during the Tea Party rebellion when the overlap
of conservatism, race, and nativism was stark. At a 2010 Tea Party meeting, former representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado drew cheers when he declared that in the 2008 election, “something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.
People who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.” Rarely has a politician strung together so many resentments so economically. Tancredo’s mention of literacy tests, the phony devices developed in the Jim Crow years to disenfranchise African-American voters in the South, brought a certain brand of conservative politics full circle.

Consider the political and social changes (and shocks) since the rise of the Goldwater movement. They include the increasing ideological homogeneity of the Republican Party, the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, the rising cultural fears of older white voters, the political mobilization of conservative Christians, the expansion of a new conservative media, the shift of business rightward, the collapse of restrictions on big money in politics, the growing influence of the “radical rich,” widespread popular frustration after two long and inconclusive wars, and an economic collapse that made the nation’s foundations tremble. Any one of these would have shaken politics. Taken together, they guaranteed a political explosion on the right. It was all the more powerful because of the disillusionment at the end of the Bush years.

The politics of disappointment and betrayal meant that a young president who had pledged himself to ending divisions in the country between red and blue would be thwarted in his hopes and resisted with a ferocity that few fully anticipated. Most surprised of all, it seemed, was Barack Obama.

“Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand.”

Barack Obama rose to sudden national prominence because he painted an eloquent verbal portrait of the United States that most Americans—the vast majority outside the ranks of the Republican right—wanted to believe was a mirror. For some months after the attacks of 9/11, the country had experienced a degree of national unity unknown since World War II and the immediate postwar period. Obama was telling the country that this period of shared determination and mutual respect reflected who we really are. Our nation, he insisted, was far less divided than the media suggested, and we were far less hostile to each other than manipulative politicians trying to mobilize their core constituencies wanted us to believe.