Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (74 page)

But Bush’s party turned its back on his immigration plans, thereby pushing both Hispanic and Asian-Americans toward the Democrats. Bush’s defeat, standing in contrast to Reagan’s victory in securing passage of the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration law in 1986, suggested how far the right had moved toward restrictionist immigration policies. Opposition to immigration reform would be one of the central passions of the Tea Party. Donald Trump made the cause his own and took it in an even more radical direction.

Compassionate conservatism was already in retreat when the attacks of September 11, 2001, abruptly shifted the focus of Bush’s presidency. Its importance diminished further as the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq took the bulk of his attention. The Iraq adventure was a decidedly unconservative approach to foreign policy. The war’s underlying purpose was to
reorder the Middle East by installing a democratic regime in Iraq that would be a model for the transformation of the region. In pursuing the war, Bush broke with his father’s prudent approach and ignored a core conservative insight: that large actions by government can have major and sometimes destructive unintended consequences. This rule proved as apt abroad as it can be at home.

But even without the wars, Karl Rove’s sense of what had gone wrong in the 2000 election led him to give priority to base mobilization over efforts to broaden support for the Republicans at the center of the electorate. Polarization was doing its work in politics long before it became a national obsession. And within the conservative base, compassionate conservatism never won broad legitimacy. Bush’s own administration was always divided as to how forcefully to push it, knowing that many conservatives resented the suggestion that they lacked compassion (just as Goldwater had been unhappy with Richard Nixon’s insistence that conservatives needed to show “heart”). Republicans in Congress were reluctant to back initiatives associated with the compassion agenda—“particularly,” as Gerson noted drily, “if they cost money.” Finally, Bush never resolved the contradiction between those who turned to compassionate conservatism as a way of dismantling the state and those who saw it as a supplement and corrective to traditional programs.

Once again, conservatives who sought to alter conservatism’s post-Goldwater trajectory confronted a wall of resistance.

Outside the Republican Party, Bush’s travails led to a turn toward the center-left, first in the 2006 midterm elections and then in Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008. But inside the GOP, Bush’s failures were used to discredit his moves toward moderation, opening the way for the Tea Party to restore the uncompromising commitments of Goldwaterism, supplemented with a strong streak of nativism. By 2010 the Republican Party had moved far to the right of where Bush once hoped to lead it.

This was the conservatism Obama confronted. It was rooted in Goldwater’s creed but had advantages Goldwater never enjoyed—the new institutions of talk radio and Fox News and financing from a group of very wealthy champions whose power was vastly expanded by misguided Supreme Court decisions. The reach of the new right-wing rich far exceeds the influence of
the financial angels behind Goldwater or Reagan. Charles and David Koch are representative figures. They were more expansive in their means and more ambitious in their ends than their father, Fred, the John Birch Society National Council member, had ever been. Conservative media institutions and funders pressed for conformity. They usually got it. With an increasingly homogeneous Republican primary electorate always threatening dissidents with defeat, the reformist currents in the movement and the party’s so-called Establishment found it as far easier to appease these forces than to challenge them.

The vast demographic gap between Americans who vote in presidential elections and the smaller group that casts ballots in midterm elections created an additional barrier to change, as did gerrymandered districts in many states. Over the next decade or so, very conservative Republicans are likely to maintain their bastion in the House. They will have more than a fighting chance every two years to win the Senate. Given the nature of the districts and states that Republicans represent, they have far more incentive to resist rethinking than to promote it. But staying on their current path will make it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win the presidency as the nonwhite share of the presidential electorate continues to grow.

This demographic gap, as long as it persists, will make governing very difficult whenever Democrats control the White House and Republicans control Congress. A narrowly based Republican Party with an ideology far removed from the political center is ill-suited to compromising with a Democratic Party of the center-left. The sharply divergent attitudes toward compromise itself within the two parties make this process even more difficult. This
partisanship increasingly influences the Supreme Court, where, as Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster noted, “the justices now divide along party lines on major cases with greater frequency than at any time in recent history.”

Thus the story told in this book, and it leads to two questions: Short of an extended period of unified party control of our government, how will we govern ourselves? And if, as I have argued, effective government depends on the rise of a more moderate brand of conservatism, how—given all the constraints I have described—will the movement reform itself?

There is, of course, no reason to imagine that conservatives would have any particular interest in changing their movement on the advice of a liberal. In fact, liberals have been urging conservatives to rediscover the virtues of Burke since the rise of a more militant right in the 1950s—without much effect. Given the Republican Party’s long-term prospects of maintaining a strong position in Congress and the fact that a relatively small swing in their favor could give Republicans the White House, why should conservatives even consider changing?

Part of the answer is in the hands of progressives and Democrats—in the arguments they advance, in their skill at calling out extremism, and in their ability to maintain their presidential majority. Over the long run, a conservative movement that continually loses the presidency will tire of an almost entirely defensive and oppositionist role in American politics.

But to challenge the gridlock created by the two electorates, progressives will need to win back white working-class voters who look to government to reduce economic insecurity and expand opportunity—yet have lost confidence in government’s capacity to succeed.

For progressives, the lessons of the last fifty years are paradoxical. It’s certainly true that liberalism needed the updating and the course corrections that Bill Clinton undertook in the 1990s. His “Opportunity, Responsibility, Community” slogan helped free Democrats and progressives from the stereotypes that had attached to liberalism. His campaigning against false choices—between feminism and the family, between environmentalism and economic growth, between worry over crime and a concern about the social causes of crime—transformed a stale debate. He showed that fiscal responsibility was not the enemy of progressive goals, and that progressives gave a higher priority to fiscal prudence than conservatives did. On budgets, he really was an Eisenhower Republican. His battle with the Republicans in 1995 was based on a defense of the core purposes of government, and he prevailed. And the period of soaring economic growth and job creation after Clinton and a Democratic Congress raised taxes decisively undercut the claims of supply-side economics, even if the supply-siders continued to sell their wares well into the new century.

But Clinton also gave up ground, some rhetorical and some substantive. There was no need for him to say, “The era of big government is over,” a statement that was both flatly untrue and surrendered a large point of principle about government’s role in American life. Having defended government so effectively against the Gingrich revolutionaries, he then conceded to their core critique of the American state for the purposes of a single line in an election-year State of the Union message. It may have been only a momentary gift to the right, but given the centrality of the debate about government in the ongoing political battle, it had lasting consequences.

Clinton too easily embraced Wall Street’s view of the benefits of financial deregulation. Since the New Deal, liberals had rightly insisted on the need to regulate finance, to keep banking a boring business, and to limit the dangers that speculation could pose to the larger economy. Deregulation not only opened the way the crash of 2008. It also helped fuel a sharp shift in the reward structure of the economy in favor of the very wealthy, and particularly those in the financial sector. It is not surprising that Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist senator from Vermont, gained a wide following for a presidential campaign that reasserted his party’s traditional belief in the imperative of checking the economic power of the very wealthy. In a sense, Sanders was taking Obama’s Osawatomie speech to its logical conclusion. Hillary Clinton understood that new economic circumstances and new forms of inequality demanded serious revisions and updates in the now old New Democrat playbook. If Republicans need to recognize that the problems of the the new century are different from those of the 1980s, Democrats need to accept the formulas for success now will be different from those championed by Bill Clinton in the prosperous 1990s.

Moreover, the Democrats’ eager embrace of a centrist form of liberalism helped open space on the right end of politics. At its best, centrism can involve the very sort of balanced politics that Eisenhower preached. But there are moments when the primary political task is to move the center to a new place—or, at the least, to keep it from being dragged in the wrong direction. By the time of Clinton’s election, the American center had clearly veered well to the right. This is an achievement that Goldwater and Reagan can both claim. For liberals, chasing the moving center meant acquiescing as it shifted ever rightward. In the middle of the Goldwater campaign, Irving Howe,
the distinguished left-wing intellectual, offered an axiom that was prescient about the entire period that followed.
“A law might be here advanced about recent American politics,” he wrote: “the more housebroken the left, the more adventuresome the right.”

The Obama years offer a similar message. Obama was at his most effective when he was on offense, advancing not only an agenda but also an argument. His weakest moments came when he seemed excessively eager to compromise. Over time, Obama learned this lesson. Days before he stepped down as Obama’s senior adviser in 2015, Dan Pfeiffer described to
New York
magazine’s Jonathan Chait the president’s conversion to a more aggressive approach.
“There’s very little we can do to change the Republicans’ political situation because they are worried about a cohort of voters who disagree with most of what the president says,” Pfeiffer argued. “We don’t have the ability to communicate with them—we can’t even break into the tight communication circles to convince them that climate change is real. They are talking to people who agree with them, they are listening to news outlets that reinforce that point of view, and the president is probably the person with the least ability to break into that because of the partisan bias there.”

Chait went on to note that the “original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false.”

The greatest irony of an Obama presidency that began with a pledge to tear down ideological barriers is that, as Chait noted, his “most politically successful maneuvers . . . have all been unilateral and liberal.” Pfeiffer underscored the point: “Whenever we contemplate bold progressive action, whether that’s the president’s endorsement of marriage equality, or coming out strong on power-plant rules to reduce [carbon] pollution, on immigration, on [Inter]net neutrality, you get a lot of hemming and hawing in advance about what this is going to mean: Is this going to alienate people? Is this going to hurt the president’s approval ratings? What will this mean in red states?” Yet in the end, “there’s never been a time when we’ve taken progressive action and regretted it.”

The one exception to this pattern in a sense proves the rule. Among Obama’s many victories in 2015 was passage of fast-track authority to negotiate an Asian trade deal—and trade was the rare issue on which the president was closer to Republicans and conservatives than to members of his own party. Even on this issue, some conservatives who would normally have endorsed free trade opposed the trade bill because Obama was doing the negotiating. They labeled it “Obamatrade,” which for some conservatives was enough to settle the argument. But on trade, most Republicans voted with Obama not because he compromised but because he endorsed the long-standing position of a majority of conservatives.

And if 2015 was one of the best years of Obama’s presidency, all its other achievements came in the face of Republican opposition, from the new Cuba policy to the Supreme Court victories on gay marriage and the Affordable Care Act and his own big steps on climate change. The continued drop in the unemployment rate into the early fall of 2015 reflected the combined success of his own policies and a broadly Keynesian approach by the Federal Reserve. If the economy was still not delivering the wage growth Democrats (and wage earners themselves) sought, it had been rescued from catastrophe. And the historic nuclear deal with Iran confronted unanimous opposition from Republican Senators. It was saved entirely by Democratic votes.