NYTimes
Ross Douthat
January 4, 2013
A Populism Worthy of the Name
A big part of the story of the fiscal cliff negotiations, now half-resolved
and half-postponed, was that the populist wing of the Republican Party
couldn’t quite figure what it wanted to actually achieve, or how. The broad
goals of less spending and lower taxes were clear enough, but on anything
more specific the politicians and activists on the grassroots right seemed
confused about what they thought the party should to be negotiating toward, or
what they expected that their calls for harder hardball and/or
cliff-diving would actually win in the end. (The scenarios being spun out
tended to
either envision extracting never-gonna-happen concessions from the Democrats
across weeks of brand-destroying brinksmanship, or embracing a truly
massive defeat on taxes as a _“the worse, the better”_
(http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-28/opinions/36030365_1_tax-cuts-taxes-rise-tax-increases)
step toward eventual conservative resurgence.) This confusion was
obvious throughout, but particularly during the brief window on Tuesday when
there was talk of House Republicans sending the bill back to the Senate with
some amendments tacked on. If there had been any kind of
strategically-plausible consensus about how conservatives actually wanted the
compromise
amended, then that gambit might have made some sense. But there wasn’t, so it
didn
’t.
This is not a new problem on the right. As _I’ve suggested before_
(http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/romney-and-the-rights-divisions/)
,
Mitt Romney didn’t overcome the G.O.P.’s populist mood to win his party’s
nomination because of a conspiracy between squishy party elites to nominate a
moderate country club Republican like themselves. Rather, Romney won
because the party’s populists _never found plausible leaders or a plausible
message_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/opinion/sunday/douthat-missing-the-populist-moment.html)
to match the voters’ anti-establishment impulses. The
strangest and most self-defeating feature of recent Republican politics is
that while the party’s populists talk a good game about championing
regular Americans and taking on the party’s Georgetown cocktail partygoers and
Wall Street insiders, when it comes time to advocate actual policy they
mostly just embrace more extreme, less workable versions of the ideas those
same
insiders already endorse. (Both the Mike Huckabee-endorsed Fair Tax and
Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, to pick two prominent examples, are like parodies
of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s long-running view that taxes
should be much lower on, well, Journal readers and _slightly higher_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_duckies) on the lower middle class.) The
result,
in the anti-Washington season of 2012, was a Republican primary campaign
that was hotly contested yet intellectually sterile, with the
anti-establishment candidates competing on style rather than substance, and
the (obvious)
populist case against Romney bubbling up in weird, substance-free ways,
from Santorum’s sweater vests to _the policy-free Gingrich-Perry attacks on
Bain Capital_
(http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/return-of-the-repressed/) .
Given all this recent history, then, it was very interesting to read _this
post-New Year’s post by Erick Erickson_
(http://www.redstate.com/2013/01/02/a-new-agenda/) making the case for what he
describes as a “new agenda”
for conservatives. Erickson is the model of a populist political-media
entrepreneur: He’s the editor of RedState and an Atlanta talk radio host, a
scourge of Democrats and moderate Republicans alike, a champion of America’s
conservative river valleys against its liberal coasts, a man who never met a
cliff he didn’t want to jump or a Beltway deal he wasn’t ready to dismiss
as a betrayal of conservative principle. I rarely (never?) agree with
Erickson about G.O.P. tactics, up to and including his latest post on
_Republicans and the debt ceiling_
(http://www.redstate.com/2013/01/02/have-republicans-boxed-themselves-into-a-government-shutdown/)
, and during the campaign
just past he often seemed to embody the pathos of right-wing populism: Like
many conservatives, he was _against Romney without really being for anyone
else_
(http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/11/08/mitt-romney-as-the-nominee-conservatism-dies-and-barack-obama-wins/)
in the primaries, and he spent
September as one of _the most prominent defenders_
(http://www.redstate.com/2012/09/18/conservatives-agree-romneys-right/) of
Romney’s disastrous “47
percent” donor pander — understandably enough, since it was a framing that
_he had helped popularize_
(http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/10/05/the-occupy-wall-street-fools/) in
the first place.
But Erickson’s “new agenda” post opens up a path out of futility for the
populist right. It’s an outline, not a policy paper, but basically he argues
for 1) a more family-friendly turn in tax policy, and a focus on payroll
taxes as well as income taxes; 2) a more anti-corporate, anti-Wall Street
turn in economic policy, based on a recognition that “the Fortune 500 has
less and less in common with the fortunes of the average American,” (for
readers well-versed in _D.C. wonk controversies_
(http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/staffer-axed-by-republican-group-over-retracted-copyright-refor
m-memo/) , he even sneaks in a dig at the G.O.P.’s ill-thought-out support
for the existing copyright regime) and 3) a focus on the cost of higher
education, in pursuit of what he calls “a low cost BA.” These ideas share
space in his post with old conservative standbys like regulatory reform,
school choice, and repealing Obamacare. But they are not old standbys
themselves, and they offer a glimpse of what a more constructive and effective
right-wing populism might be able to offer to the party — and a glimpse, too,
of
what might have been had Republicans thought harder about policy in 2012
instead of just expecting the economy to deliver them the White House.
True, some ideas along these lines were floated or gestured at during the
2012 primary: Rick Santorum talked a lot about family breakdown and had a
modestly pro-family tax plan, Jon Huntsman had a break-up-the-banks plan, and
if Rick Perry’s campaign hadn’t drowned in two feet of water, he might
have talked up some of the Texan higher ed reforms that Erickson mentions.
But there was no sustained attempt to define conservative populism as more
family-friendly, middle-class-friendly, and anti-corporatist than Beltway
Republicanism. Instead, the populists mostly defined themselves by the pitch
of their rhetoric and the implausibility of their proposals, and the only
substantive pressure they put on Mitt Romney was pressure to embrace a Wall
Street Journal-approved tax plan that was predictably and easily attacked,
come the general election, as another Republican giveaway to the rich.
More middle-class friendly proposals might not have carried a Perry or a
Santorum or a Pawlenty to victory. But they might have changed the way Romney
had to position himself, and changed his general election fortunes in the
process. And they might do the same for the near-future G.O.P. The current
elite consensus is that the Republican Party will ultimately be saved from
irrelevance only when its establishmentarians impose some sanity on the Tea
Party radicals, and drag their party kicking and screaming back toward the
center. But Erickson’s proposed agenda offers a different model for how
reform might come to the right: Not through the high-minded influence of the
self-consciously moderate, but through populists and cultural conservatives
realizing that they have more to offer their party and their country than
just more outlandish variations on what K Street and Wall Street already
support.
--
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