Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done.… It is because they are thus selected that wealth—both their own and that entrusted to them—aggregates under their hands.… They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”
Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favored repeal of President Obama’s health-care plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September 2011 what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered. If the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.
Read the writings of the current darling of conservative intellectuals, the sociologist Charles Murray, and you find the same philosophy at work. In his latest book, Coming Apart, Murray attributes the decline of the white working class to what he sees as their loss of traditional values of diligence and hard work. Increasingly addicted to drugs, failing to marry, giving birth out of wedlock, dropping out of high school, and remaining jobless for long periods of time, America’s white working class has, in Murray’s view, brought its problems on itself. Government has aided and abetted the decline by providing too much help in the form of social programs that encourage pathologies and dependence.
Murray and other neo–social Darwinists seem not to have noticed that for the past thirty years the old working class’s wages have declined, steady union jobs once available to them have disappeared, the economic base of their communities has deteriorated, and their share of the nation’s income and wealth has dramatically shrunk. It seems more likely that these are the underlying sources of the social problems and pathologies Murray chronicles, but this logic is inconvenient because it suggests that any solution requires reversing the widening inequities that have hit the old working class especially hard.
A hundred years ago social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted, “the working out of a law of nature and of God.” The social Darwinism of that era also undermined all efforts to build a more broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.
Not until the twentieth century did America reject social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the engine of our economy and our democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward, often through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods—public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health—that made us all better off. In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.
Even the GOP eventually disavowed social Darwinism. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Republicans like Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller of New York, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, and Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such interventionist measures as Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public works project in the history of the United States, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) interstate highways covering forty thousand miles. The GOP also backed large expansion of federally supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant.
The Republican Party of that era had its share of kooks and crackpots, such as Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who conducted an infamous communist witch hunt, and General Douglas MacArthur, who told the Republican convention of 1952 that the Democratic Party had “become captive to the schemers and planners who have infiltrated its ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state.” But for the most part, the party’s elders controlled the nutcases.
Yet the Republican Party that emerged at the end of the twentieth century began to march backward to the nineteenth. Ronald Reagan lent his charm and single-mindedness to the movement, but he was not a true regressive. It was only when Newt Gingrich and his followers took over the House of Representatives in 1995 that regressives began retaking the GOP. The Koch brothers bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and in 2010 Tea Party Republicans led the way toward capturing the House of Representatives and many state governments.
The Republican Party that emerged in 2012 is more radical and extreme than it’s been in more than eighty years. Don’t just take my word for it. Norman Ornstein, a distinguished political observer and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, hardly a liberal bastion, and his colleague Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, another highly respected student of American politics, have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than four decades. Over the years they’ve criticized both parties when they felt criticism was warranted. But in an Op-Ed for the April 27, 2012, Washington Post they wrote that they had never seen Washington so dysfunctional. “We have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party,” which, in their words, has become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” While the Democrats “may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.”
By 2012 the term “moderate Republican” had become as much of an oxymoron as the term “liberal Republican” was in the 1990s. Even conservative Republicans, such as Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, were targeted by the regressive right as being insufficiently orthodox and too willing to compromise. During the battle over raising the debt ceiling that raged through the summer of 2011, the former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska told the Financial Times that his party had become “captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow. I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.” The veteran Republican congressional staffer Michael Lofgren wrote that “the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”
Through a sequence of presidential appointments, regressives have also gained a slim majority on the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, along with Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and, all too often, Anthony Kennedy, claim to be conservative jurists. But they have proven to be judicial activists bent on overturning seventy-five years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states’ rights, treating the Second Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the commerce clause, and, as I said earlier, calling corporations “people.”
In 2010, Thomas and Scalia swung the Court in the direction of the right-wing group Citizens United, plaintiffs in the case that struck down federal laws limiting corporate campaign contributions. Before the decision, Thomas and Scalia had participated in a political retreat hosted by the billionaire financiers Charles and David Koch, driving forces behind loosening restrictions on big money in politics. Years befo
re, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Citizens United had spent $100,000 to support his nomination.
Given his connections with Citizens United and with the Koch brothers, Thomas should have recused himself from the Citizens United decision in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He has also failed to disclose financial information about his wife’s employment. Virginia Thomas is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization now receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to Citizens United. Among the things she has lobbied for are the repeal of what she terms the “unconstitutional” health-care legislation.
Scalia isn’t much better. In December 2011 he met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus, a group formed in large part to fight for the repeal of health-care reform. Can you imagine the firestorm if Justice Sonia Sotomayor met in secret with the Congressional Progressive Caucus?
I’m not so naive as to believe that Supreme Court justices don’t have political views and values. But if the Court is perceived by the public to be politically partisan, it loses the public’s confidence. That confidence, as described by Justice Stephen Breyer in his impassioned dissent in Bush v. Gore (a case like Citizens United that could be understood only in partisan political terms), “is a public treasure. It has been built slowly over many years” and is a “vitally necessary ingredient of any successful effort to protect basic liberty and, indeed, the rule of law itself.” When Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia go to political strategy sessions with Republican partisans, they jeopardize everything the Supreme Court stands for.
Regressives have no new ideas for dealing with any challenge of the twenty-first century. Which of the 2012 GOP presidential aspirants do you think delivered the following words at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference?
We have seen tax-and-tax, spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous … years of our Republic.… Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is government give-away programs.… If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine.
If you guessed Newt Gingrich, you could be forgiven; he didn’t utter these precise words, although he uses much the same language and offers the same themes. You’d also be wrong if you guessed Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, or Ron Paul. But again your mistake would be understandable, because any of them could have delivered this message, and all of them have delivered variations of it, over and over. So have Republican candidates for seats in Congress, state legislatures and governorships, and local elections. It’s the Republican message of 2012 and beyond.
The correct answer, however, is Herbert Hoover.
Hoover didn’t deliver these words at the last Conservative Political Action Conference. He delivered them at the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 8, 1952. My point is regressives haven’t come up with a single new idea since, or a new theme. It would be one thing if Hoover was always correct. But, as you may remember, the former president did not have a sterling record when it came to the economy. As president, he presided over the crash of 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression. He had no idea how to respond. By the time he was voted out of office in 1932, one of four Americans was unemployed.
By 1952, Hoover was hidebound and irrelevant. After Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952 Republican nomination and went on to become president, he wisely disregarded everything Hoover had advised. Under Ike, the marginal income tax on America’s highest earners was raised to 91 percent. As I’ve said, Eisenhower also commenced the biggest infrastructure program in the nation’s history—the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. He also expanded Social Security and signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which trained a whole generation of math and science teachers and upgraded American classrooms for the future. Under Ike, the Defense Department spawned technologies that would cement America’s leadership in aerospace and telecommunications for more than a generation.
The United States did not suffer fascism, socialism, deficits, and inflation, as Hoover predicted. Instead, the U.S. economy roared. The median wage rose faster than ever before, and the incomes of America’s working class and poor rose at the fastest pace of all. Our democracy became sufficiently confident and expansive that within a few years we passed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
THE STOP-AT-NOTHING TACTIC
Social Darwinism is the regressives’ theme. Stop at nothing is their methodology. As the political analyst Michael Lind has noted, today’s Tea Party is less an ideological movement than the latest incarnation of an angry white minority—predominantly southern and mainly rural—that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way. It’s no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy. Of Congress’s Tea Party Caucus elected in 2010, twelve members hailed from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and the border state Missouri. Others were from border states with significant southern populations and southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus were from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture was shaped by Oklahomans and southerners who migrated there during the Great Depression. This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, southern, or rural Republicans—only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.
The views separating these primarily white, southern, and rural Republicans from other Republicans mirror the split between self-described Tea Partiers and what had been the Republican establishment. In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN in September 2011, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party said global warming isn’t a proven fact; other Republicans said it is. Six in ten Tea Partiers said evolution is wrong; other Republicans were split on the issue. Tea Party Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and half as likely to support gay marriage. Tea Party Republicans are more vehement advocates of states’ rights than other Republicans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abolish the Department of Education; only one in five other Republicans do. And Tea Party Republicans worry more about the federal deficit than about jobs, while other Republicans say reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit.
In other words, the regressives who are taking over the GOP aren’t that much different from the social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the party during the 1990s and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980s and, before them, Richard Nixon’s so-called “silent majority.” Through most of those years, though, the GOP managed to contain these white, mainly rural, and mostly southern radicals. For one thing, many of them were still Democrats. The conservative mantle of the GOP remained in the West and the Midwest—with the libertarian legacies of the Ohio senator Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, neither of whom was a barn burner—while the center of the party remained in New York and the East, safely within the corporate establishment and Wall Street.
But after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as the South began its long march toward the Republican Party and New York and the East became ever more solidly Democratic, it was only a matter of time. The GOP’s dominant coalition of big business, Wall Street, and midwestern and western libertarians was losing its grip.
The watershed event was Gingrich’s takeover of the House in 1995. Suddenly, it seemed, the GOP had a personality transplant. The gentlemanly conservatism of the Republican House minority leader Bob Michel was replaced by the bomb-throwing an
tics of Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay. Almost overnight Washington was transformed from a place where legislators sought common ground into a war zone. Compromise was replaced by brinksmanship, bargaining by obstructionism, normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government—which occurred at the end of 1995.
Before then, when I’d testified on the Hill as secretary of labor, I had come in for tough questioning from Republican senators and representatives—which was their job. After January 1995, I was verbally assaulted. “Mr. Secretary, are you a socialist?” I recall one of them asking. The new crowd wasn’t willing to compromise on anything. Their distinguishing characteristic was that they’d stop at nothing to get their way. Led by Gingrich, House Republicans closed down the government when they didn’t get their way on the budget. Then stop-at-nothing regressives voted to impeach Bill Clinton. In the upper house, two-thirds of senators from the South voted for impeachment. (A majority of the Senate, you may recall, voted to acquit.)
According to Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, the two respected political observers I mentioned before, Gingrich was instrumental in the GOP’s move to the extreme right. “From the day he entered Congress in 1979,” they write, “Mr. Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority.” It took Gingrich sixteen years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders, exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians, and recruiting right-wing GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, he eventually accomplished his goal. “The forces Mr. Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines,” say Ornstein and Mann, “activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base—most recently represented by Tea Party activists—and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress.”
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