Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (72 page)

He did it by condemning the leadership of the United States in terms everyone could understand. “We are led,” he declared, “by very, very stupid people.” He criticized Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and the only woman in the Republican presidential contest, for her looks.
“Look at that face!” Trump said. “Would anyone vote for that?”

He did it by saying that because he was tough and made a lot of real estate deals, he could negotiate the United States out of any difficulties it now had with Russia, China, Iran, or anyone else. He did it by saying that the United States had become “a hell hole” and “a third-world country” and promising to “make it great again.” He did it by endorsing a national registry for Muslims after the Paris terrorist attacks in November of 2015, before backing away.

He also did it by saying that rich people got too many tax breaks. “The hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax.” Of himself, he said: “I do very well. I don’t mind paying a little more in taxes.” He did
it by saying: “I will protect your Social Security. I will protect your Medicare and Medicaid.”

He did it by saying that while he was against Obamacare, single-payer health care had worked well—in “Scotland,” for example. He did it by attacking Republican orthodoxy on free trade, condemning the flow of American jobs overseas. He did it by denouncing the role of big money in the political system. His opponents, Trump said, are “controlled by lobbyists, controlled by their donors, they’re controlled by special interests.” In late July 2015 he tweeted: “While I’m beating my opponents in the polls, I’m also beating lobbyists, special interests & donors that are supporting them with billions.” And he did it by saying of CEO pay: “You see these guys making an enormous amount of money, it’s a total and complete joke.”

Trump’s surge into first place in the summer and early fall of 2015 mystified Republican leaders and upended the party’s established candidates. His strength was a measure of the depth of disillusionment and radicalization in the Republican Party, as was support for Dr. Ben Carson, an African-American neurosurgeon who found himself in second place in September—and in first place, ahead of Trump, in many polls before Carson confronted questions about how he described his past. Carson built on a manner as quiet as Trump’s was flamboyant. Carson had created a conservative following by saying outlandish things about Obamacare (“the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery”) and about Barack Obama (he said those who want to understand him should “read
Mein Kampf
and read the works of Vladimir Lenin”). But his personal story was remarkable and his manner dignified. He won strong support from evangelicals by being a deeply and, on all the evidence, sincerely devout Christian. Carson seemed to pick up his support from voters who wanted to support an outsider protest candidate, but someone less glitzy, less egocentric, and less bombastic than Trump. Carly Fiorina turned the outsider sweepstakes into a three-way competition with a strong performance in the second Republican debate in September. She took Trump on directly for sexism and was the first of his adversaries to inflict real damage.

The abandonment of traditional politicians by Republicans in the campaign’s first stages was underscored by a CNN/ORC Poll taken
September 4–8, 2015. The survey found that 54 percent of Republicans favored a candidate for president who had never held public office. Trump led with 32 percent, followed by Carson at 19 percent. Fiorina was backed by an additional 3 percent, equal to the support won by Senators Paul and Rubio. Among the politicians, Jeb Bush ran first—with all of 9 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at 7 percent and
Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee, both at 5 percent. With Trump decimating his early support, Walker eventually dropped out after an indifferent performance in the second encounter.

There were many reasons why Republicans could blame themselves for the Trump phenomenon. The party had created the rough beast it was suddenly trying to slay.

Many of Trump’s Republican foes took to condemning how mean and nasty he was. Trump, in Rick Perry’s formulation, was “throwing invectives in this hyperbolic rhetoric out there.” Yet the party had not worried about invective or hyperbole in the days when Trump directed both against Obama in challenging his right to be president. “Now, he doesn’t have his birth certificate or he’s not showing it,” Trump said in a representative comment on CNN in 2011. “So it’s a very strange situation. . . . The fact is, if he wasn’t born in
this country, he shouldn’t be the president of the United States.” Even when Obama produced his certificate in late April of that year, Trump did not back off, because, he explained, “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.”

Were Republicans backing away from Trump then? Some did, but most wanted to hug Trump close and, as Trump noted, seek his campaign contributions. When he accepted Trump’s endorsement during the 2012 Republican primaries, Mitt Romney was positively giddy about how cool it was to be with the man who emblazons his name on gaudy hostelries.

“There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” Romney enthused when he got Trump’s backing at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. “This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump’s magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight. I am so honored and pleased.”

Romney was even ready to endorse Trump’s self-image as a great gift to public policy. Romney praised The Donald for his “extraordinary ability to
understand how our economy works and to create jobs” and for being “one of the few who has stood up to say China is cheating” on trade. For Republican leaders, Trump was a genius—until he wasn’t.

The party’s establishment paved the way for Trump in another way. Since 2006, many of the GOP politicians had courted the votes of Americans strongly opposed to immigration reform, evidenced by John Boehner’s refusal to take up the Senate-passed bipartisan bill. Recall also that in the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney had deployed resentment over immigration first against Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and then against Rick Perry in 2012. Republican Congressional leaders were happy enough to have Tea Party candidates ride the issue when it helped the party win and then hold their majority in the House. Republicans had repeatedly complained about an insecure border, even though border security vastly increased under Obama and net immigration from Mexico actually fell to zero, a decline also partly explained by the economic downturn.

It’s true that Trump’s most outrageous comments about Mexican immigrants (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”) went far beyond anything most Republican politicians had said. His call for the deportation of all illegal immigrants was well outside the mainstream discussion as well and made Romney’s “self-deportation” remark look comparatively humane.

Some Republicans—Jeb Bush, Rubio, Paul, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Perry before he dropped out of the race—criticized Trump and Bush made opposition to Trump central to his campaign. He repeatedly warned that Trump’s rhetoric and his ideas risked deepening the party’s deficits among Latinos and Asian-Americans. But many in the Republican field played to Trump as a way of reaching his constituency. Walker had already reversed his support for immigration reform and said Trump’s immigration plan was “similar to what I brought up about four or five months ago.” After Trump’s “rapist” remark, Ted Cruz—who saw himself as the second choice of many Trump backers—went out of his way to say positive things about his rival. “I like Donald Trump,” Cruz said. “I think he’s terrific, I think he’s brash, I think he speaks the truth.”

Trump did not invent anti-immigration feeling in the Republican Party.
He just went several steps further in exploiting it. Nor was he in the least bit innovative in harping on border security. If security was as bad as Republican politicians had been saying—recall the alarm about the border that had played a big role in the 2014 mid-terms—Trump would propose measures as extreme as the scare rhetoric.

Where Trump began to be innovative, in a retro—and, in certain respects, frightening—way was by reaching back into Republican history for Richard Nixon’s rhetoric. “The silent majority is back,” Trump declared, “and we’re going to take the country back.” Speaking in Nashville at the end of August, Trump courted a potential backlash against “Black Lives Matter” and other groups protesting police killings of unarmed African-Americans.

“I know cities where police are afraid to even talk to people because they want to be able to retire and have their pension,” Trump said. Discussing the riots in Baltimore that followed a funeral service for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old African-American who died of a severe spine injury while in police custody, he added: “That first night in Baltimore, they allowed that city to be destroyed. They set it back 35 years in one night because the police weren’t allowed to protect people.”

And then came the magic words: “We need
law and order!”

The racial tinge in Trump’s appeal was unmistakable and had a very long pedigree.

Finally, Trump’s appeal to less affluent Republicans reflected his skill at filling the void in Republican politics that Rick Santorum had identified in 2012. A September 7–10
Washington Post
/ABC News poll found that Trump’s strongest support came from Republican voters without a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000. The GOP’s forgotten working class found a champion in a billionaire. By breaking with Republican conventional wisdom on such a long list of issues—trade, taxes, the political power of the wealthy, the excesses of CEO pay—he spoke to cultural conservatives who had never fully bought into the party’s economic assumptions and to the disaffected and angry voters who were no fonder of the rich and powerful than Bernie Sanders was.

Among the Reform Conservatives, it was Ross Douthat who saw the depth of Trump’s challenge to the Republican Party most clearly. “So far,” Douthat wrote, “he’s
running against the Republican establishment in a more profound way than the Tea Party, challenging not just deviations from official conservative principle but the entire post-Reagan conservative matrix.” Trump, he added, had the special appeal of a candidate “campaigning as a traitor to his class” and had managed to unite a significant share of Tea Party supporters with moderate but disaffected working-class voters.

Douthat warned that if Republicans found “a way to crush Trump
without
adapting to his message . . . the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build—and when it bursts, the GOP as we know it may go with it.”

The Trump movement and the Carson surge ought to wake Republicans and conservatives up to the challenges they face, to the depth of the disaffection among their supporters, and to the costs of the cycle of disappointment and betrayal. Conservative reformers—both inside the formal Reform Conservative movement and beyond it—will be required to do more than offer a few tax credits and speak warmly about civil society. They will need to respond far more creatively and substantively to the seething unhappiness among the Republican Party’s long-suffering working-class supporters.

It’s true that liberals will always see the Reform Conservatives as falling short simply because, as Salam observed,
“Conservative reformism is conservative.” This, says Douthat, is why the movement “strikes many liberals as disappointing, counterproductive, or woefully insufficient.” From a progressive perspective, the Reformicons are timid in their approaches to economic injustice and inequality and too willing to look away from the structural problems in the economic system. Except for criticizing “corporate welfare,” they rarely challenge the reward structure of the modern corporate economy or the reward structures it promotes. Even when the reform conservatives and liberals agree, as they do on the value of the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, most of the Reformicons (there are exceptions like Salam) are reluctant to make common cause with progressives to expand these programs. Even when they acknowledge the need to spend public money, whether on some forms of the safety net or on infrastructure investments, they often engage in “rob Peter to pay
Paul” budgeting by calling for sharp reductions in programs progressives see as necessary. Reformicons typically support steep long-term cuts in programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Might the Reformicons and progressives find common ground? Some of the most productive left-right conversations have been around the issues of prison and sentencing reform, a cause that drew together Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul and grass roots movements on both the left and the right. Yet the rise of a new “law and order” politics on the right that Trump broached and that other Republicans quickly seized upon could block even these promising initiatives.

There is a large opportunity for convergence on the question of how family breakdown and the decline of marriage have aggravated economic inequalities. As stable marriage has become far more widespread in the upper middle class than among lower-income Americans, the life chances of children are even more defined by social class than they were in the past. Conservatives point to family dissolution as a genuine problem for low-income Americans. Progressives insist that economic insecurity bred by the decline of well-paying blue-collar work has placed unbearable pressures on families. Even two-parent families are challenged by workplace practices that have not adjusted to the explosion in the number of households in which both members of the couple join the labor market by choice, necessity, or both. In principle, both sides ought to able to recognize what Robert Putnam, the author of the 2015 book
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,
has called “the red problem” (the crisis in families) and “the blue problem” (declining wages and the disappearance of well-paid blue collar work). Each contributes to rising inequality and declining life chances for low-income children.