Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (75 page)

The lesson for progressives is to recognize what the liberal writers Paul Starr and Robert Kuttner observed, and what Obama eventually learned: “
The idea of transcending partisan differences works only when there is some basic agreement on the ends.” But this does not mean that simply standing their ground is sufficient for liberals. The most ambitious parts of their agenda require Congressional action and the Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress means that liberals must, for now, play a largely defensive game.

To have any hope of regaining the political terrain they have lost in the state houses and in the House and Senate, progressives need to pay far more attention than they do to making government work effectively. Nothing did more damage to the Affordable Care Act than the collapse of its website, an entirely avoidable problem. This was not a failure of ideology but of procurement, performance, and management. Obama also lost an opportunity when he did not try to convert the enthusiasm of the young for his campaign in
2008 into a generational commitment to public service. Creating a sense of energy and possibility in government, key achievements of both Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, is essential to repairing both its image and its performance. The seemingly mundane task of reforming how government recruits and hires is actually a critical component of any effort to revive progressivism and to encourage a form of conservatism more open to public endeavor.

And if Mitt Romney had problems with working-class voters, so did Barack Obama. Obama’s race is often cited as the main reason for his difficulties with the white working class. There is no doubt that racial reaction cost him votes—and, as we have seen, played an important role long before Obama was born in the formation of the conservative coalition he confronted. The problems liberals and Democrats have with working-class voters predate him. Their difficulties are tied in part to social issues, and there is good reason for liberals to pay respectful heed to the values of working-class voters, especially their religious commitments. Democrats face difficult coalition management problems around religion because their core constituency includes very religious African-Americans and Latinos alongside middle- and upper-middle-class (and largely white) secular voters. Winning also requires the party to seek more support from middle-ground Catholics who happen to be swing voters in the swing states of the Midwest. Democrats need to defend religious freedom and tolerance while showing that their commitment to tolerance and openness extends to those for whom religion plays a central role in their lives. Pope Francis has opened possibilities here that did not exist before.

But on many specific issues, progressives have no reason, political or substantive, to abandon their social liberalism, especially since polling shows that younger white working-class voters are more socially liberal than their elders. Over time, conservatives are playing a losing hand on these questions, particularly on gay rights.

The major difficulty progressives face is that—except in the final years of the Bill Clinton–era economic boom—they have not delivered on their promises to lift working-class wages and to close the opportunity gap between the children of the well-off and those from families of modest means.
My purpose here is not to
outline a full-scale economic program, although the Inclusive Prosperity Commission of the Center for American Progress, of which I was a part, made an important start at doing so, as did “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” a report written by Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt Institute. This is the issue on which progressives will stand or fall, something Hillary Clinton recognized in
a campaign kickoff speech in June 2015 that laid heavy stress on the need “to make the economy work for everyday Americans, not just those at the top.” She elaborated on these themes in a series of detailed policy speeches that drew on both reports and other ideas that have gained broad support among progressives.

The paradox, as the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has argued, is this: both the party’s core constituencies and whites with lower incomes who have been drifting Republican are seeking government policies that could help them shore up their living standards and improve their job prospects and family lives. Yet they are skeptical about how government works and wary of the influence of the well-heeled and well-connected.

“Democrats,” Greenberg argued, “have not addressed the profound wage stagnation and the special interest corruption of government that leaves the middle class out in the cold. That leaves the Democrats’ potential majority without a reason to stay consistently engaged—and leaves Democrats short on white working-class votes as well.” Voters the Democrats need to mobilize and those they need to win over “are ready for government to help—if the stables can be cleaned.”

Progressives not only need to defend the rights of minorities whose access to the ballot box is being challenged by conservatives in many states through modern-day voter suppression measures; they also should take the offensive by easing access to the polls, particularly for lower-income Americans whose work schedules often make voting difficult. Clinton’s call in 2015 for a renewal of a Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court, automatic voter registration, at least twenty days of early voting, and other reforms pointed in the right direction. Stopping efforts to make voting more difficult is good; making voting easier and more conveninent is better.

Above all, progressives need to challenge their conservative adversaries directly to accept that America’s demographic and social changes are part
of the ongoing history of a nation that stays young and vibrant because of its openness. Restricting ballot access for these new constituencies may have short-term electoral advantages for conservatives, but it is not a viable long-term strategy in a pluralistic and democratic society.

Obama’s best moments have come when he insisted on a definition of our nation based not on a deification of a static past but on a celebration of its capacity to transform itself. Standing before the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2015 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the great voting rights march, Obama delivered one of the best speeches of his presidency. “America is a constant work in progress,” he declared. “[L]oving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what’s right and shake up the status quo.” Americans, he said, are “strong enough to be self-critical,” and he urged Americans not to flee the nation’s diversity but to celebrate it:

We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free—Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be. We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

In the short run, progressives will need to mobilize far more effectively than they do now if they are to end the great divide between midterm and presidential electorates. But in the long run, the trends are on the side of progressives.

And that is the strongest incentive for conservatives to change and reform. There is a time limit on the ability of conservatism in its current form and Republicanism in its current incarnation to win elections. A movement rooted in a fifty-year-old ideology, dependent on an aging constituency, and closed to the kind of nation the United States is becoming may win
short-term victories, but it will ultimately wither. And some very practical Republicans know it.

Jim Brulte, California’s Republican state chairman, had sobering but useful words for his party when I spoke with him in the spring of 2015. “California is the leading edge of the country’s demographic changes,” Brulte said. “Frankly, Republicans in California did not react quickly enough to them, and we have paid a horrible price.”

One measure of the cost: In the three presidential elections of the 1980s, California voted twice for Ronald Reagan and once for George H. W. Bush. The state has not gone Republican since.

California telescoped the demographic changes the nation is going through, so its transformation from Ronald Reagan’s base to a Democratic bastion ought to be an alarming portent for conservatives. “The one thing no one can stop,” said Representative Ted Lieu, a Los Angeles–area Democrat who was elected to Congress in 2014, “is that every month, the rest of America looks more like California.”

Republicans made the mistake of alienating Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans in a state whose population is already a majority nonwhite. The passage of Proposition 187 in 1994 with the strong support of Republican governor Pete Wilson—the ballot measure barred illegal immigrants from a variety of state services—simultaneously turned off Hispanic voters from the GOP and mobilized many of them into the political process.

The same thing is now happening nationally as the Republican Party is pressured by its political base to repeat the California GOP’s mistake on immigration—or, in Trump’s case, to go even farther. Brulte urges Republicans to emblazon these facts on a wall in every party headquarters: “In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of the white vote and he carried independents. In 2004, this would have elected him president. In 2000, it would have given him an Electoral College landslide. In 2012, it gave him second place.”

Republican pollster Whit Ayres hails from North Carolina and has enjoyed great success in helping Republicans win across the South. But as we
saw earlier, he shares Brulte’s views on the imperative of changing his party.
“Unfortunately for Republicans, the math is only going to get worse,” he wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
in March 2015. “Groups that form the core of GOP support—older whites, blue-collar whites, married people and rural residents—are declining as a proportion of the electorate. Groups that lean Democratic—minorities, young people and single women—are growing.” He added: “The challenge is obvious: Republicans can’t win a presidential election by trying to grab a larger piece of a shrinking pie.” Ayres’s solution—for the party to nominate “a candidate who can speak to minorities, especially Hispanics, and offer a vivid and compelling vision of expanded economic opportunity at home and a stronger America abroad”—came naturally to an adviser to Marco Rubio, whose presidential candidacy precisely met these specifications. But Ayres’ broader point applies well beyond a single candidacy.

Perhaps the right candidate fronting the old ideology would be enough to pull Republicans and conservatives through their demographic difficulties. But Rubio’s own experience on immigration—having to back away from the reform bill he helped negotiate in order to appease the Tea Party—suggests that the pull of the movement’s current orientation is not easy to overcome. The party’s demographic problems are plainly intertwined with its ideological orientation, and the immigration issue is not the only concern that pushes Latinos away from the Republicans.
Latinos have been among the strongest supporters of Obamacare, reflecting both the large number of Hispanics who lack health coverage and their general support for social insurance. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was targeted partly at these voters; a harder-right ideology has little to say to them. A Republican Party that cannot answer the Latino community’s desire for public programs aimed at relieving economic stresses and enhancing opportunities for mobility will remain at a long-term disadvantage. And a failure to deal with barriers to mobility will eventually haunt conservatives among white working-class voters as well.

Conservatism as it is now understood places the movement in a policy straitjacket, which is precisely why compassionate and reform conservatives alike have been unable to achieve their potential. As long as conservatism is dedicated to lower taxes as one of its unbreakable public commitments, its proposals aimed at easing inequality and promoting mobility will be small,
largely symbolic, and ineffective. Republican leaders may have felt obliged to discuss wage stagnation and rising inequality after the 2014 election because these were problems on the public’s mind. They may have publicly abandoned the “makers” and “takers” idea. But their budgets continued to be rooted in this understanding of how the world works.

As has been clear since the Reagan era and the dramatic budget confrontations of the Clinton years, Republican budgets whose central aim is to reduce taxes on the wealthy will never pass the test of simple arithmetic. Such plans require either deep program cuts that that majorities of the voters reject or the very ongoing deficits that conservatives regularly denounce. At some point conservatives face a reckoning with the fiscal contradictions of their ideology.

There is, finally, the question of whether conservatives want to continue to seek power based on a strategy that might be seen as Marxist, in its approach if certainly not its goals: Heightening the tensions in our democracy has been at the heart of the conservative approach throughout Obama’s time in office.