Today, the post-George W. Bush,
post-Mitt Romney conservative movement is one-third of the
way there. Among younger activists and rising politicians,
the American right has a plausible theory of what its role
in our politics ought to be, and how it might advance the
common good. What it lacks, for now, is the self-awareness
to see how it falls short of its own ideal, and the
creativity necessary to transform its self-conception into
victory, governance, results.
The theory goes something like this:
American politics is no longer best understood in the
left-right terms that defined 20th-century debates. Rather,
our landscape looks more like a much earlier phase in
democracy’s development, when the division that mattered was
between outsiders and insiders, the “country party” and the
“court party.”
These terms emerged in 18th-century
Britain, during the rule of Sir Robert Walpole, the island
kingdom’s first true prime minister. They were coined by his
opponents, a circle led by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke,
who were both conservative and populist at once: they
regarded Walpole’s centralization of power as a kind of
organized conspiracy, in which the realm’s political,
business and military interests were colluding against the
common good.
Bolingbroke is largely forgotten
today, but his skepticism about the ways that money and
power intertwine went on to influence the American
Revolution and practically every populist movement in our
nation’s history. And it’s his civic republican ideas,
repurposed for a new era, that you hear in the rhetoric of
new-guard Republican politicians like Rand Paul and Mike
Lee, in right-wing critiques of our
incestuous “ruling class,” and from
pundits touting
a “libertarian populism” instead.
Theirs is not just the usual
conservative critique of big government, though that’s
obviously part of it. It’s a more thoroughgoing attack on
the way Americans are ruled today, encompassing Wall Street
and corporate America, the media and the national-security
state.
As theories go, it’s well suited to
the times. The story of the last decade in American life is,
indeed, a story of consolidation and self-dealing at the
top. There really is a kind of “court party” in American
politics, whose shared interests and assumptions —
interventionist, corporatist, globalist — have stamped the
last two presidencies and shaped just about every major
piece of Obama-era legislation. There really is a disconnect
between this elite’s priorities and those of the country as
a whole. There really is a sense in which the ruling class —
in Washington,
especially — has grown fat at the expense of the nation it
governs.
The problem for conservatives isn’t
their critique of this court party and its works. Rather,
it’s their failure to understand why many Americans can
agree with this critique but still reject the Republican
alternative.
They reject it for two reasons.
First, while Republicans claim to oppose the ruling class on
behalf of the country as a whole, they often seem to be
representing an equally narrow set of interest groups —
mostly elderly, rural (the G.O.P. is a “country party” in a
far too literal sense) and well-off. A party that cuts food
stamps while voting for farm subsidies or fixates on
upper-bracket tax cuts while wages are stagnating isn’t
actually offering a libertarian populist alternative to the
court party’s corrupt bargains. It’s just offering a
different, more Republican-friendly set of buy-offs.
Second, as much as Americans may
distrust a cronyist liberalism, they prefer it to a
conservatism that doesn’t seem interested in governing at
all. This explains why Republicans could win the battle for
public opinion on President Obama’s first-term agenda
without persuading the public to actually vote him out of
office. The sense that Obama
was at least trying to solve problems, whereas the
right offered only opposition, was powerful enough to
overcome disappointment with the actual results.
Both of these problems dog the
right’s populists today. There might indeed be a
“libertarian populist” agenda that could help Republicans
woo the middle class — but not if, as in Rand
Paul’s budget proposals, its centerpiece is just
another sweeping tax cut for the rich.
There might be a way to turn
Obamacare’s unpopularity against Democrats in 2014 — but not
if Republican populists shut down the government in a futile
attempt to defund
it.
To overthrow a flawed ruling class,
it isn’t enough to know what’s gone wrong at the top. You
need more self-knowledge, substance and strategic thinking
than conservatives have displayed to date.
Here the historical record is
instructive. The original “country party” critique of Robert
Walpole’s government was powerful, resonant and
intellectually influential.
But it still wasn’t politically
successful. Instead, the era as a whole belonged to Walpole
and his court — as this one, to date, belongs to Barack
Obama.
