Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (70 page)

Their prime policy antidote served as a prototype of the stance later reformers would come to. Republicans like to fiddle the tax code downward, and they proposed a large expansion of the Child Tax Credit to $5,000 (a policy that alleged socialist Obama embraced in a more modest form) as well as pension and tuition credits for stay-at-home parents. They argued that means-testing of Social Security benefits (a long-standing conservative goal) should be linked to payroll tax cuts for lower-income workers (a direct, immediate benefit for the working class). They pushed a version of expanded charter schools and, in a bow to Bill Clinton, proposed federal help to assist communities in hiring more police. Some of their ideas were altogether outside the box, including a suggestion that farm subsidies be scrapped in favor of
“subsidies for carbon removal and other environment-friendly agricultural ventures.”

But in all this, their cardinal concern was the breakdown of the working-class family, a catastrophe that aggravates inequality and stifles mobility and opportunity. This worry about the state of the American family—quite different from opposition to gay marriage—might be seen as a Reformicon growth stock. Charles Murray,
the libertarian conservative whose 1984 book,
Losing Ground,
was a manifesto for cutting welfare, influenced many beyond the right with
Coming Apart
in 2013, a warning about the cost to lower-income Americans of family decay. But he was far from alone in his focus. At its worst, blaming “culture” for inequality can be seen as an alibi for avoiding any confrontation with injustices within the economic system and a way to beat back proposals that challenge existing privileges. But the best of the reformers, Douthat and Salam among them, are willing to flip the causal arrows and acknowledge that the economic struggles of the working class have made the task of forming and maintaining stable families more difficult, thus their emphasis on new tax benefits keyed to parents.

In their worries over the state of the family, they were joined by
National Review
writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who originally advocated the large Child Tax Credit, and
New York Times
columnist David Brooks. Ponnuru has never shied away from pointing out weaknesses in conservative arguments and was one of the first on the right, within days of the 2012 election, to score Republicans for a narrow focus on the heroism of entrepreneurs to the exclusion of the vast majority of voters who work for wages and salaries. Brooks has long been a conservative dissident (Charles Krauthammer, speaking only partly in jest, once labeled Brooks his favorite “liberal columnist”) and he frequently invokes the Whig tradition of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln to defend large-scale federal investment in infrastructure, research, development, and education. The chaos that followed the collapse of Kevin McCarthy’s candidacy for House Speaker led Brooks to protest that the Republican Party had “abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism” and had adopted a tone that was “bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced.”

Two other early ventures in reform conservatism are worthy of note. Levin (born in 1977) is a University of Chicago PhD who founded
National Affairs.
His goal, he told me in 2014, is straightforward. “You have to offer a vision of what government looks like to you,” he said, “and what it ought to be doing about the particular set of problems we have now.” He speaks hopefully of a desire, through the magazine and the reform movement, to “inject some different priorities and different arguments and different visions” into the discourse between left and right.

“There’s not a lot of connection with the fact that people in the middle class are seeing stagnant wages, are finding themselves pessimistic about their children’s future, are under all kinds of pressures that are not about the one percent, but they’re not about their tax rates either,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like anyone is talking about them, or anyone is offering a plausible story about what is going on.”

In
his 2014 book,
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left,
Levin chided “today’s conservatives” for being “too rhetorically strident and far too open to the siren song of hyperindividualism.” He suggested that conservatives could learn from “Burke’s focus on the social character of man,” his “thoroughgoing gradualism,” and “his emphasis on community and on the sentiments.”

In an important 2006 article for the
Weekly Standard
prefiguring these arguments, Levin acknowledged, as few conservatives have been willing to do, the deep tensions between the market and the family:

The market values risk-taking and creative destruction that can be very bad for family life, and rewards the lowest common cultural denominator in ways that can undermine traditional morality. Traditional values, on the other hand, discourage the spirit of competition and self-interested ambition essential for free markets to work, and their adherents sometimes seek to enforce codes of conduct that constrain individual freedom. The libertarian and the traditionalist are not natural allies.

The last thought, of course, threatened to blow up the “fusionist” consensus that Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer built, although it was their awareness of the problem Levin identified that led them to work so hard to square the philosophical circles.

Levin acknowledged that the policy fixes he proposed then (they included health care portability, long-term care insurance, and school choice) were “barely a start” to what needs to be done for those in “the parenting class.” This admission points to an ongoing problem for the Reformicons: even when they face up to the contradictions in conservative ideology and acknowledge the market’s shortcomings, their solutions rarely challenge the market’s priorities and are thus much smaller than the problem they’re addressing. Levin deserves credit for treading where many conservatives feared to go.

Michael Gerson’s 2007
Heroic Conservatism
, as we’ve seen, was
a holdout’s case for compassionate conservatism at a time when most conservatives had passed it by. It was also an early marker for reform conservatism, and there are important overlaps between yesterday’s battlers for compassion and today’s advocates of reform. Gerson mourned the decline of the alliance between evangelicalism and the cause of social justice, asking, “Where does someone belong who is pro-life and pro-poor?” And he has reserved some of his toughest polemics for libertarians. “If Republicans run in future elections with a simplistic anti-government message, ignoring
the poor, the addicted, and children at risk,” he warned, “they will lose, and they will deserve to lose.”

Gerson was right about 2012, although in 2010, Republicans did run
on “a simplistic anti-government message” that did ignore “the poor, the addicted and children at risk”—and they won. What mattered, declared Representative Mike Pence—elected governor of Indiana in 2012—was
steering the Republican Party “back to the principles of limited government, fiscal discipline, and traditional moral values.”

The key word is “back.” The Tea Party’s call for a “constitutional conservatism,” based on a remarkably skewed reading of the Founders’ intentions, was, for a while, the only “reform” conservatism that counted. The question “What Would the Founders Do?” is, of course, popular across ideological lines, as the historian David Sehat pointed out in his 2015 book,
The Jefferson Rule: Why We Think the Founding Fathers Have All the Answers
. But tendency to invoke “constitutionalism” is especially strong within American conservatism, and it goes back a very long way—to Calhoun in the nineteenth century, to critics of progressive initiatives under both Roosevelts at the turn of the century and in the 1930s, and to southern resistance to civil rights beginning in the 1940s.

In their inclination to return to the Founders, many Reformicons are at one with their Tea Party brethren. In
an essay in the Reformicons’ 2014 manifesto, “Room to Grow,” Ramesh Ponnuru explicitly defended “political constitutionalism” and argued: “In America, what conservatism chiefly means is the conservation of our political inheritance from the Founders.”

And while the reform conservatives did not match the Tea Party in the harshness of their criticism of Obama, they rarely spoke out against its extreme rhetoric, and most of them fell in line behind criticisms of the stimulus and the health care law—to which many of them had objections anyway. The increasingly conservative Republican mood made it lethal for potential conservative reformers to find common ground or seek compromise with Obama even on issues where their views overlapped.

The 2010 elections certainly had a chilling effect on the reform project, yet the 2012 primaries and Romney’s campaign illustrated the continuing costs of an unchallenged orthodoxy. The party’s dominant ideas about “makers and takers” and the primacy of “job creators” left little room for initiatives on behalf of working-class voters in pivotal states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Romney’s political problem was also an intellectual problem.
This is why his defeat enabled a reform conservative comeback. In the wake of the 2012 election and the strategic fiasco of the Republican shutdown of government in the fall of 2013, reform conservatives were in a position to say, “I told you so.” Tea Party slogans would not be enough.

One sign of the shift was a strategic repositioning by Republicans and conservatives who had once broadly accepted the “job creators” and “makers and takers” formulations but now embraced something more, well . . . compassionate.
Arthur Brooks, who had once warmed to the “makers and takers” idea, published an article in the February 2014 issue of
Commentary
titled “Be Open-Handed Toward Your Brothers.” He called on conservatives to accept the idea of a social safety net, supported increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit, and favored new ways of helping the unemployed, including Strain’s proposals for subsidies to help them move to more promising job markets. Brooks didn’t break with his past positions, but his emphasis was entirely different.

He elaborated on these themes in
The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier and More Prosperous America
, published in 2015, which laid heavy stress on the moral imperative to fight poverty. The tactical movement within at least parts of conservatism can be seen in the contrast with the book Brooks (who is no relation to the
New York Times
columnist) published five years earlier,
The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future
. The earlier work was a far more aggressive attack on liberalism and argued that the fight between capitalism and its enemies was the new American “culture war.” Brooks, a genial and religious man, had absorbed some of the lessons of 2012. Still, he signaled in his second book that he was less interested in rethinking conservative premises—not suprising, really, from the head of the nation’s premier conservative think tank—than in selling the conservative idea more effectively. In concluding that “we’ve got to improve the way we
make our case
to the American people” (my italics), he underscored the centrality of Frum’s pizza box question.

Because of electoral reality, Republicans were also thinking once again about the working class.
One of the boldest Reformicon thinkers, Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was devastating in his description of the 2012 campaign:

Obama effectively asked: Which do you like better? Would you prefer the Republican alternative as exemplified by the candidacy of Mitt Romney and the policies he and his party have proposed in Congress and on the stump? . . . One would have thought that Romney would actively join the debate. In a way he did, for he often emphasized that America was a land where anyone could start from scratch and build a business. The subtle implication, however, was that people who did so were the best Americans and everyone else was just along for the ride. It is in that sense that the phrase “you built that” and laments about “makers” versus “takers” were the essence of Romney’s America.

Republicans lost a debate they had never joined because they forgot a core constant in American politics that involves, Olsen argued, “the willingness to use government power to help individuals advance in life.” He concluded: “If American principles simply require hands-off government, then American principles have not been part of our politics for a very long time. A hands-off approach is not what American politics and principles require; it is a parody of what America and American conservatism mean.”

Olsen offered what may be the ultimate conservative heresy: “The painful truth is that President Obama’s rhetoric was closer to Reagan’s than the rhetoric of Romney and many other leading Republicans in 2012.”

Olsen has been the most insistent Reformicon in learning the lessons Reagan taught. These, he argued, included “a profound respect for the aspirations of the common person” and acceptance of “the federal government’s potential as a means of helping these people.” There is certainly a romanticism in Olsen’s vision on Reagan. He plays down some of Reagan’s strongest antigovernment ambitions and policies—including Reagan’s attack on unions—that sped the long decline of blue-collar wages. Yet Olsen is among those in the movement who have taken on the essential task of reminding conservatives that however much they properly revere Reagan, the Reagan era is was well and truly over.

The headline of a November 2014 article in
Commentary
he coauthored with Peter Wehner was “If Ronald Reagan Were Alive Today, He Would Be 103 Years Old.” Much of the article is an encomium to Reagan, but they nonetheless insisted that “Reagan was not a man for all seasons or causes” and warned: “Republicans need to be careful not to be trapped by Reagan
as Democrats allowed themselves to become trapped by FDR and JFK. It’s difficult to grow while living in someone else’s shadow. . . . Reagan, while conservative to the bone, would never have allowed himself to become captive to the past.”