America Ascendant
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While they continue to appreciate the party’s fiscal conservatism, the moderates see a Republican Party that has little room for the moderates and is increasingly closed to a plurality of views and the ascendant trends described in this book.
I think of a white 54-year-old man in a business suit. And my mom. (moderate woman, Raleigh)
I feel hopeful [about the Republican Party] on an economy level. I feel doubtful on a personal rights level, a women’s rights level, an environment level. So those two issues. But the rest, economy-wise, budget-wise I feel hopeful. (moderate woman, Raleigh)
I just tend to be a little bit more moderate on social issues. However I’m a pretty staunch fiscal conservative so it’s kind of like at least among my peers there’s a change in kind of the conservative group. But it doesn’t necessarily seem like the Republican Party is changing with it. (moderate woman, Raleigh)
These developments in the party make it difficult for educated young people to identify as Republicans. As one man in Colorado said, “I can’t sell my kids on this party.” They hear these leaders talking about the “rape crap” and frankly, “I can’t sell them on my party. These kids are smart, they know these stupid politicians are saying crap” and should “get out of our bedrooms, get out of our lives and do what they’re supposed to do” (moderate man, Colorado Springs).
* * *
This research window into the base of the Republican Party underscores the growing fractures that played out in Republican primaries across the country. But that pales before the elevated worries across the base about the growing dangers facing the country and the demands for a bold conservative policy response. The GOP war to repeal Obamacare and end food stamps and unemployment benefits can only be understood within this Republican world. The same is true for Republican resistance to addressing climate change and immigration and why Republican attorneys general are appealing their defeats on gay marriage in the federal courts. The GOP-controlled states are competing with each other to effectively ban abortions and allow concealed weapons everywhere.
Out of the dynamics of the Republican Party emerge their policy priorities in the face of America’s many challenges.
Part IV
ADDRESSING AMERICA’S CONTRADICTIONS
9 THE CONSERVATIVE INTERREGNUM
Will the Republican Party step up to address America’s growing challenges at this tipping point? Based on everything we know about its philosophy, values, and politics, the answer is almost certainly no for now.
The Republican Party brings to this moment a small-government model of low taxes and low regulation that gives business as much freedom as possible. This model is premised on a belief in individual responsibility as self-reliance and a belief in individual liberty that requires freedom from government intrusion. Growing government spending is like an irresistible pot of gold that invites a feeding frenzy of special interests and that invites dependence and a weakening of the public character.
In practice nationally and in the states, the Republican Party prioritizes reversing the Affordable Care Act and obstructing government action to address climate change. It cuts funding for food stamps and views unemployment benefits as just a new form of welfare and dependence. It is aggressively cutting funding for education and science. It is still contesting the voting rights for racial minorities, the new roles for women, and America’s pluralism of families.
Over the past three decades, a network of outside conservative groups have fed Republican leaders and activists a rich diet of ideas on the welfare state, supply-side economics, and business regulation, and the Evangelical churches rallied them to oppose abortion and to stand against the forces of secularism. That entangling of business, faith, and politics has produced an orthodoxy, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write, according to which conservatives are “the reflexive champion of lower taxes, reductions in the size and scope of the federal government, deregulation, and the public promotion of a religious and cultural conservatism.”1
The Koch Brothers committed to spend almost $900 billion—as much as any national political party—in the 2016 presidential election and proceeded to audition candidates to see who should carry their conservative banner into the election. That externalized the Republican campaign in a way we have never seen before. Charles and David Koch are not at all shy about their views on energy and climate change, on low taxes and small government, and on the need to prioritize deregulation. They want to see which candidate can best articulate that vision and agenda, and Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and no doubt others auditioned before wealthy donors at Koch-sponsored meetings in Palm Springs and New York City. The Republican presidential candidates unapologetically defended these billionaires as “job creators” and praised their constructive role balancing the influence of Hollywood and the liberal media on behalf of Democrats.2
The top conservative thinkers downplay inequality and the problems facing the middle class and press instead for a focus on the poor, whom they think liberalism has failed. The liberals hold out a safety net that invites idleness, and they show a disdain for marriage that leads to a growing number of children raised by single parents and in poverty. Conservatives think that if the safety net provided less security and comfort, people would become more self-reliant and seek out work. Thus weakening the system of social insurance should be part of the strategy for reducing poverty.
Republican presidential hopefuls in 2016 started to mention inequality, middle-class anxieties, and persistent poverty, particularly because they could use these to take an ironic bite out of President Obama for his hypocrisy and failed economic plan. “The recovery has been everywhere but in the family paychecks,” Jeb Bush observed. “Today, Americans across the country are frustrated. They see only a small portion of the population riding the economy’s Up escalator.” Marco Rubio highlighted the recovery: “What really happened is a bunch of the recovery over the last several years has gone to such a small segment of the population.” Washington Post writers observed that the candidates sounded more like John Edwards than Mitt Romney.3
For all of them, highlighting these problems is a way of saying President Obama’s big-government policies have failed on their own terms. “Income inequality has worsened under this administration,” Rand Paul pointed out, and “President Obama offers more of the same policies—policies that have allowed the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.”4
And only a few of the presidential campaigns ventured very far beyond conservative orthodoxy on how to address these issues. A few conservative leaders in the House and Senate have ventured out and supported extending the earned income tax credit to the unmarried, and some have proposed a very large expansion of the child tax credit—both programs that can aid the poor and the lowest-wage workers. The Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor felt inspired to give a speech titled “Make Life Better” to “make sure every American has a fair shot at earning their success and achieving their dreams.”5
They were taking up policy ideas and broader goals developed by a network of intellectuals and conservative reformers, highlighted in separate major pieces by Sam Tanenhaus and E. J. Dionne on the “Reformicons.” As it turns out, the policy innovation did not go beyond tax credit proposals already supported by President Obama. And their plans to support the traditional family and to block grant relief to the poor so states may take greater responsibility hardly open up new conservative territory. As Dionne concluded, they were “more engaged in rebranding than rethinking.”6
When Michael Tomasky reviewed all the presidential candidates’ new books, including those that talked about the “opportunity gap,” he was struck by how few mention the word “wages” or discuss “wage stagnation.” If they talk about inequality, it is to criticize liberal thinkers for inviting “class envy.” Their focus is mostly on the persistence of poverty and the moral decay that has accompanied the decline of the two-parent family. That equips these candidates with a fairly li
mited set of policy tools, as they tiptoe into the debates about America’s deepest problems.7
When the Speaker-in-waiting, Eric Cantor, was ignominiously defeated in a Republican primary, the reformers were shattered. As Tanenhaus observed, “the narrative of the newly in-touch GOP met the cold reality of politics, with its pitiless winnowing of winners and losers.” It was an abrupt reminder that the low-tax, small-government, probusiness conservatives rule in the Republican Party. They do not have much patience with this talk about all Americans getting “a fair shot.” They want to know what you are doing to strengthen the counterrevolution against big government.8
The price of entry for all the Republican presidential candidates in 2016 is to propose huge tax cuts that add between $1.5 and $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade and shower benefits on the very richest. Most of the candidates embrace the traditional conservative supply-side approach and want to dramatically cut top tax rates, move to a flat tax, or cut or abolish taxes on inheritances, corporations, capital gains, or dividends. Marco Rubio and a smaller bloc of conservatives, on the other hand, joined the debate about the struggles facing families by proposing to expand the child tax credit from $1,000 to $3,500. In today’s Republican Party, though, any such proposal to help families has to be more than matched by inventive ways to cut taxes for business and top earners. No longer worried about the added trillions this would add to the deficit, Rubio also proposed to end taxes on capital gains and dividend income, cut the corporate tax rate, abolish taxes on foreign income, and offer tax breaks to “non-corporate businesses”—a device that helped send the Kansas state budget into crisis.9
When any of the presidential candidates talk about reform in some area, they move quickly to demonstrate they hold to a deep red worldview. Rubio moved to make sure the wealthiest and businesses would be the principal beneficiary of his tax plans and opposed the comprehensive immigration reform law that he had voted for in the Senate. Jeb Bush, compromised by his support for Common Core and perceived moderate stance on immigration, quickly surrounded himself with the foreign policy team that gave us the Iraq war and promised to repeal President Obama’s executive orders that granted legal status to millions of America’s immigrant “DREAMers.”10
With America needing leaders to address these deep problems, it is fair to conclude there is a conservative interregnum.
RED AND BLUE VISIONS
Governor Rick Perry of Texas and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have been on the front line arguing that the country faces a choice between the governing models in the red and the blue states. There is “the vision common in blue states, where the state plays an increasing role in the lives of its citizens,” Governor Perry points out. Taxes are on the rise there, pension programs are “out of control,” and “jobs are leaving by the truckloads.” Without much caution, he quotes Thomas Jefferson in a call to arms against that blue-state model: “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”11
Republicans govern very differently, guided by very different values. There is “a vision common to red-state America where the freedom of the individual comes first, and the reach of government is limited,” Perry observes. In the red states, “taxes are low, spending is under control, jobs are on the rise.” Perry calls out the names of the governors in the GOP-controlled states and asks, what is the common denominator? He answers his own question: conservative governors “know the freedom of the individual must come before the power of the state.” They “trust the people more than the machinery of government.”12
While head of the Republican Governors Association, Governor Jindal hailed the reforms conservative states had advanced against the liberal tide. “Whether it is showing the way without an income tax, whether it’s cracking down on frivolous lawsuits, whether it’s cutting down on government spending, whether it’s growing the private-sector economy instead of the government economy,” Jindal proclaimed before the Texas state legislature, “you have shown the country that conservative principles work.13
Governor Jindal is unapologetic about inequality. He scorned President Barack Obama, who talks of “class envy and warfare,” “equality of outcomes,” and insists on “demonizing those that have been successful.” The “rich are evil, unless they are from Hollywood.”14
What the president and liberals want is to use the issue of inequality to grow “government spending, borrowing, and taxes.” So if they get their way, liberals will “manage the slow decline of this great economy” and “further [divide] the existing pie.” Disaster is inevitable because the liberals want “government to explode”—“to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees.” And the left thinks “debts don’t have to be repaid.”15
Demands on government are what will drive the country to ruin. Jindal builds the case by posing a series of questions: “Where do you go to if you want special favors? Government. Where do you go if you want a tax break? Government. Where do you go if you want a handout? Government. This must stop.” He predicts, “At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state.”16
Blue America believes “people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory.”17
Red America, Jindal assures us, is determined above all else to restore self-reliance and teach people not to ask anybody else to pay their way. Under such circumstances “freedom is still alive.”18
So at the heart of the conservative counterrevolution, E. J. Dionne writes with such clarity, is “a pure and radical individualism.”19
It is so powerful because it sits at the heart of Red America’s contest against Blue America and its determined battle for America’s values. This radical individualism produces an antitax conservatism that sees all government as a threat to individual liberty and any government regulation as a mortal threat to business success and market competence. There is little appetite for any project that uses government or even for discussion of any major national problem, lest it invite a collective or governmental response or more government spending. Where conservatism used to want to empower local communities, this extreme individualism seems to resent both state and local government as well. They are just as capable of burdening business and creating dependency.
As Evangelical Christians were mobilized to battle against today’s growing national threats, their conservatism, too, became more individualistic and hostile to government. In William Jennings Bryan’s day, the fundamentalists and populists gave voice to Christ’s social gospel about rich and poor and the needs of community. As Dionne points out, they held out the promise of individual salvation, as the white Evangelical churches do today. But now, as we pointed out in chapter 8, Evangelicals have embraced the Tea Party and its extreme individualism because they are the only ones fighting against Obama and the threats to America’s values. That bond and alliance between the Evangelicals and the Tea Party is hegemonic within the GOP and creates a modern Republican Party with a unique brand of conservatism.
This modern-day conservatism does not have much use for William F. Buckley Jr. and his ideological colleagues at The National Review who appealed to both libertarians and traditionalists by promoting both liberty and virtue. One colleague who went into the Reagan administration described the mission as “utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends.” Conservatism’s appeal is more than just making it possible for individuals to get rich.20
Today’s conservatives do not have much use for the brand of conservatism presented by George W. Bush. His faith-based initiatives sought to elevate local civic efforts to aid the poor and vulnerable, and his race-to-the-top education reforms aimed to raise student achievement with accountability. Their skepticism is rooted in an ascendant individualism “that simultaneously denigrates the role of government and the importance most Americans attach to the quest for community.”21
Today’s Republican P
arty has emerged as an “insurgent outlier” that does not grant the legitimacy of its political opponents, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. Put that kind of purposeful ideological party in the America constitutional order with separation of powers and you have a “formula for willful obstruction and policy irresolution.” They are waging a “guerrilla war” to oppose the president, of course, though as Jonathan Chait points out, they are battling to restore America’s values, and that seems to justify a “procedural extremism.” It precludes today’s Republicans listening to Joe Scarborough to emulate electorally successful conservatives, like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush who put “pragmatic conservatism” ahead of “reflexive purity.” To win, they accommodated the New Deal and Social Security and grew government programs and federal spending. That formula is not under consideration.22
The new conservatives in government brought a brinkmanship that shut the federal government down in 1995–1996 and again in 2013. The insurgent House leader Newt Gingrich sought to coerce President Clinton to accept cuts in Medicare. The Tea Party–dominated House threatened to have America default on its debts and to force changes in the Affordable Care Act. They shut the government down for sixteen days. Prominent Republicans said their central mission is “to make Washington … inconsequential.”23
It is little wonder that the principal narrative offered by the Republican candidates for president amounted to little more than a mantra about small government and empowering the “productive citizens and private companies” that “would bring back prosperity and solve the nation’s problems on their own.” Mitt Romney was not apologetic about the central actors in the comeback. “Corporations are people, my friend,” he said with such revealing clarity. And when he considered running again and with the same lack of self-consciousness about the rich—what Peggy Noonan described charitably as his “clunkiness”—Romney “leaked his interest in running: to mega-millionaires and billionaires in New York. ‘Tell your friends.’”24