Within the space of a week
last summer, one judge in Arizona, ruling in a suit
brought by the Obama administration, blocked a provision
in a new state law permitting
police officers to check the status of suspected illegal
immigrants, while another blocked the implementation of
a California referendum banning gay marriage. The two
decisions imposed liberal policies that public opinion
opposed. These things happen, of course. Congress had
acted contrary to measurable public opinion when it
passed health care reform in
March. What made the two judicial rulings different was
that both seemed to challenge the principle that it is
the people who have the last word on how they are
governed.
American conservatives, most
notably the activists who support various Tea Party groups, have a
great variety of anxieties and grievances just now. But
what unites them all, at least rhetorically, is the
sense that something has gone wrong constitutionally,
shutting them out of decisions that rightfully belong to
them as citizens. This is why many talk about “taking
our country back.”
If polls are to be believed,
conservatives should have no difficulty taking the
country back or doing whatever else they want with it.
Gallup now counts 54 percent of likely voters as
self-described conservatives and only 18 per cent as
liberals. More than half of Americans (55 per cent) say
they have grown more conservative in the past year,
according to the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug
Schoen in their new book, MAD AS HELL: How the
Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our
Two-Party System (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99).
America’s self-described
conservatives, however, have a problem: They lack a
party. While the Tea Party may look like a stalking
horse for Republicans, the two have been a bad fit.
Insurgents have cut a swath through Republicans’
well-laid election plans. They helped oust Florida’s
party chairman. They toppled the favored candidates of
the party establishment in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware,
Florida, Kentucky, New York, South Carolina, Utah and
elsewhere.
More than 70 percent of
Republicans embrace the Tea Party, but the feeling is
not reciprocated. If conservatives could vote for the
Tea Party as a party, they would prefer it to the
Republicans, according to Rasmussen. (Lately,
Rasmussen’s polling, more than others’, has favored
Republicans. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it has picked
up certain recent shifts earlier and more reliably —
like the surge that won the Republican Scott Brown the late Ted Kennedy’s
Massachusetts Senate seat in January.) Much of the Tea
Party is made up of conservative-leaning independents.
The journalist Jonathan Rauch has called these people
“debranded Republicans,” and they are debranded for a
reason — 55 percent of them oppose the Republican
leadership. While Republicans are likely to reap all the
benefit of Tea Party enthusiasm in November’s elections,
this is a marriage of convenience. The influential
conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com,
insists that one of his top goals is denying the
Republican establishment credit for any electoral
successes.
Hence the Republicans’
problem. After November, the party will need to reform
in a conservative direction, in line with its base’s
wishes, and without a clear idea of whether the broader
public will be well disposed to such reform.
How Republicans wound up in
this situation requires one to state the obvious. Well
before George W. Bush presided
over the collapse of the global financial system, a
reasonable-sounding case was being mustered that he was
the worst president in history. Foreign policy was the
grounds on which voters repudiated him and his party,
starting in 2006, and President Obama’s
drawdown of forces in Iraq may be the most popular thing
he has done. But foreign policy is unlikely to drive
voters’ long-term assessment of the parties. The Iraq
misadventure was justified with the same
spreading-democracy rhetoric that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and
other Democrats used to justify interventions in Haiti
and the Balkans in the 1990s. President Obama’s
difficulties in resolving Afghanistan and closing
Guantánamo show that Bush’s options were narrower than
they appeared at the time.
Republicans’ future electoral
fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically
on whether they can reconnect with “small-c”
conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own
business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism
but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of
“big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which
the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social
issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc
of religious conservatives to the party, and continues
to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some
measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on
several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be
sitting in the White House.
Ideological conservatism also
meant “supply-side economics” —
a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually
pay for themselves through economic growth. The problem
is, they don’t. So supply-side wound up being a form of
permanent Keynesian stimulus — a bad idea during the
overheated years before 2008. Huge tax cuts, from which
the highest earners drew the biggest benefits, helped
knock the budget out of balance and misallocated
trillions of dollars. To a dispiriting degree, tax cuts
remain the Republican answer to every economic question.
Eric Cantor, potentially
the House majority leader, told The Wall Street Journal
that if Democrats went home without renewing various Bush-era tax cuts (which
they did), “I promise you, H.R. 1 will be to
retroactively restore the lower rates.”
Until recently, supply side
was political gravy for Republicans. It confirmed the
rule that in American politics the party most plausibly
offering something for nothing wins. In the 1980s, the
New York congressman Jack Kemp was the
archetype of an ambitious, magnanimous, “sunny” kind of
Republican who let you keep more of your taxes while
building more housing for the poor. Democrats who
questioned the affordability of these policies sounded
like killjoys. In a time of scarcity like our own,
calculations change. Today your tax cut means shuttering
someone else’s AIDS clinic. Your welfare check comes off
of someone else’s dinner table.
Deficits in the Obama era are
a multiple of the Bush ones, and the product of a more
consciously pursued Keynesianism. But that does not
absolve Republicans of the need to find a path to
balancing the budget. With some exceptions — like
Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a
Kemp protégé who has laid out a “Road Map” for reforming
(i.e., cutting) Social Security in coming
generations — Republicans have not adjusted to zero-sum
economics. There is certainly no credible path to budget
balance in the “Pledge to America”
released in late September.
Yet the case against
supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive,
and Republican tax promises will probably help the party
this year. That is because taxes are not just an
economic benchmark, but a political one. The public
should not expect more in services than it pays in
taxes. But the government should not expect more in
taxes than it offers in representation. And the number
of Americans who feel poorly represented has risen
alarmingly during the Obama administration.
Americans’ feelings toward the
president are complex. On the one hand, there is little
of the ad hominem contempt that was in evidence during
the Clinton and Bush administrations. There are no
campaign spots showing a Congressional candidate’s face
morphing into Obama’s. But the president’s ideology,
fairly or not, has provoked something approaching panic.
Not many Americans agree that Obama is a closet
totalitarian, as the Fox News host Glenn Beck has claimed.
But they have serious misgivings of a milder kind.
In retrospect it looks
inevitable that Republicans would have been punished by
voters in 2008; but until Lehman Brothers collapsed in
mid-September of that year, it was far from certain they
would be, despite strong Democratic gains in the 2006
elections. Independent and Republican voters wanted an
assurance that Senator Obama would not simply hand over
power to the Democratic Party. He
consistently provided it. The centerpiece of his
campaign was a promise of post-partisanship. He
introduced himself as a Senate candidate in 2004 at the
Boston convention, deriding as false the tendency of
pundits to “slice and dice our country into red states
and blue states” — a bracingly subversive thing to do at
a partisan convention. He praised Ronald Reagan.
And in 2008 he got more than
52 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than many
political consultants thought possible for a Democrat.
That means he came into office unusually dependent on
the good will of independents and Republicans. And yet,
once in power, the president set to work enacting the
agenda of the same Congressional Democrats he had
implied he would keep at arm’s length. No president in
living memory has compiled a slenderer record of
bipartisanship.
It is often said in the
president’s defense that Republican obstructionism left
him no choice. Today, this is true — and it has put an
end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency.
But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early
2009, when the president’s poll numbers were so
stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose
him on anything. Republicans certainly cannot be blamed
for the way Democrats passed their health care bill.
Whether or not the deal-making and parliamentary
maneuvering required to secure passage was
unprecedented, it was unprecedented in the era of C-Span
and blogs, and many voters found it corrupt. The
president’s legislative program has been bought at a
huge price in public discontent. The _expression_ “picking
up nickels in front of a steamroller” has been used to
describe a lot of the gambles taken by A.I.G. and other
companies on the eve of the financial crisis. It
describes the president’s agenda equally well.
It is vital to understand
where this steamroller is coming from. According to
Gallup, support for Obama has fallen only slightly among
Democrats, from 90 percent to 81 percent, and only
slightly among Republicans, from 20 percent to 12
percent. It is independents who have abandoned him: 56
percent approved of him when he came into office, versus
38 percent now. The reason the country is getting more
conservative is not that conservatives are getting
louder. It is that people in the dead center of the
electorate are turning into conservatives at an
astonishing rate.
The frustration and
disappointment of these voters is probably directed as
much at themselves as at their president. There were two
ways to judge Obama the candidate — by what he said or
by the company he kept. The cable-TV loudmouths who
dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain
particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if
elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than
his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more
accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his
speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book.
Some wish the president had
governed more to the left, insisting on a public option
in the health care bill and pushing for a larger
stimulus. But those people make up only a small fraction
even of the 18 percent of voters who call themselves
liberal. In a time of growing populism and distrust,
Republicans enjoy the advantage of running against the
party of the elite. This seems to be a controversial
proposition, but it should not be. It is not the same as
saying that Democrats are the party of elitism.
One can define elitism as, say, resistance to
progressive taxation, and make a case that Republicans
better merit that description. But, broadly speaking,
the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong.
It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League),
of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of
Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and,
although there is some evidence that numbers are evening
out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most
of the investment banking profession). That the
billionaire David Koch’s Americans
for Prosperity Foundation supports the Tea Party has
recently been much in the news. But the Democrats have
the support of more, and more active, billionaires. Of
the 20 richest ZIP codes in America, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of
their money to Democrats in the last election, in most
cases the vast bulk — 86 percent in 10024 on the Upper
West Side. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of non-high-school
educated white males are happy with the direction the
country is going in. The Democrats’ overlap with elites
leaves each party with a distinctive liability. The
Democrats appear sincerely deluded about whom they
actually represent. Democrats — who would have no
trouble discerning elite solidarity in the datum that,
say, in the 1930s the upper ranks of Britain’s media,
church, business and political institutions were
dominated by Tories — somehow think their own
predominance in similar precincts is . . . what?
Coincidence? Irony?
Republicans, meanwhile, do not
recognize the liability that their repudiation by elites
represents in an age of expertise and specialization —
even in the eyes of the non-elite center of the country.
Like a European workingman’s party at the turn of the
last century, the Republican Party today
inspires doubts that it has the expertise required to
run a large government bureaucracy. Whatever one thinks
of Obama’s economic team, and Bill Clinton’s before it,
the Bush White House was never capable, in eight years,
of assembling a similarly accomplished one. Nor is there
much evidence that Republicans were ever able to
conceptualize the serious problems with the nation’s
medical system, let alone undertake to reform it on
their own terms. “Democrats and Republicans agree that
our health care system is broken in fundamental ways,”
Eric Cantor notes in YOUNG GUNS: A New
Generation of Conservative Leaders (Threshold, $15),
a campaign book he has written with Paul Ryan and
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. Well,
great. But for years now, Republicans discussing the
availability and cost of health care have been like a
kid who, when asked why he hasn’t cleaned up his room,
replies, “I was just about to!”
It is in the context of class
that Sarah Palin’s two-year
career on the American political scene is so
significant. She “almost seemed to set off a certain
trip wire within the political class regarding access to
power,” as Rasmussen and Schoen put it. But it is not an
ideological trip wire. The Alaska governorship that
catapulted Palin onto the national scene requires
dealing with oil executives and divvying up the money
from their lease payments. It is a job for a pragmatist,
not a preacher. Palin has sometimes opposed big
government and sometimes favored it, as became clear
when journalists discovered that, contrary to Palin’s
claims, she had been slow to oppose the wasteful Alaskan
“Bridge to Nowhere,” which became a symbol of federal
pork.
The controversies over Palin
are about class (and markers of class, like
religiosity), not ideology. She endorsed several
underdog insurgent candidates who wound up winning
Republican primaries in the spring and summer. How did
she do that, when few observers — no matter how well
informed, no matter how close to the Republican base —
had given them a chance? Either Palin is a political
idiot savant of such gifts that those who have
questioned her intelligence should revise their opinion
or, more likely, she is hearing signals from the median
American that are inaudible to the governing classes —
like those frequencies that teenagers can hear but
adults can’t.
This talent alone does not
make Palin a viable national leader. But until
Republican politicians learn to understand the party’s
new base, Palin will be their indispensable dragoman.
After November’s election, the party will either reform
or it will disappoint its most ardent backers. If it
reforms, it is unlikely to be in a direction Palin
disapproves of.
In The Ruling Class:
How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It
(American Spectator/Beaufort, paper, $12.95),
Angelo M. Codevilla, an emeritus professor of
international relations at Boston University who
formerly was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, gives a very interesting, conservative
account of class politics. Codevilla sees the country as
divided into “the Ruling Class” and “the Country Class,”
who “have less in common culturally, dislike each other
more and embody ways of life more different from one
another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and
Southerners.” Codevilla’s terms are often frustratingly
vague. The Ruling Class, in his definition, includes top
Democrats as well as Bush Republicans, despite their
many differences; the Country Class seems sometimes to
mean the passive remainder of the country, and sometimes
the vanguard of ideological insurgents.
And yet Codevilla captures the
texture of today’s conservative grievances with
admirable boldness and convincing exactitude. Slights
are harder to tolerate than exactions, he finds: “Day
after day, the Ruling Class’s imputations — racist,
stupid, prone to violence, incapable of running things —
hit like artillery cover for the advance of legislation
and regulation to restrict and delegitimize.” This is a
polemic, and people wholly out of sympathy with
conservatism will dislike it. But Codevilla makes what
we might call the Tea Party case more soberly, bluntly
and constructively than anyone else has done.
Codevilla takes seriously the
constitutional preoccupations of today’s conservative
protesters and their professed desire for enhanced
self-rule. He sees that the temptation merely to form
“an alternative Ruling Class” in the mirror image of the
last one would be self-defeating. Americans must instead
reacquire the sinews of self-government, he thinks.
Self-government is difficult and time-consuming. If it
weren’t, everyone would have it. The “light” social
democratic rule that has prevailed for the past 80 years
has taken a lot of the burdens of self-government off
the shoulders of citizens. They were probably glad to be
rid of them. Now, apparently, they are changing their
minds.
Codevilla has no illusions
about their prospects for success. Americans are not in
the position to roll back their politics to before the
time when Franklin D. Roosevelt or
Woodrow Wilson or
whoever-you-like ran roughshod over the Yankee yeomanry.
Town, county and state governments no longer have much
independent political identity. They are mere “conduits
for federal mandates,” as Codevilla puts it. He notes
that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country
in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today
a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school
districts. Self-rule depends on constitutional
prerogatives that have long been revoked, institutions
that have long been abandoned and habits of mind that
were unlearned long ago. (Not to mention giving up
Social Security and Medicare benefits that
have already been paid for.) “Does the Country Class
really want to govern itself,” Codevilla asks, “or is it
just whining for milder taskmasters?”
We will find out soon enough.
With a victory in November, Republicans could claim a
mandate to repeal the Obama health care law and roll
back a good deal of recent stimulus-related spending,
neither of which they’ve made any pretense of
tolerating. But achieving the larger goal — a citizenry
sufficiently able to govern itself to be left alone by
Washington — will require more. The Republican Party’s
leaders will need to sit down respectfully with the
people who brought them to power and figure out what
they agree on. If Republicans make the error that
Democrats did under President Obama, mistaking a protest
vote for a wide mandate, the public will turn on them
just as quickly.
Christopher Caldwell, a
senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author
of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam, and the West.”
