It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  The German story is more complicated. Immigrants from northern Germany were Protestants. Identifying with the Protestants they found here, they tended to become Whigs, and, later, Republicans. Immigrants from southern Germany were Catholics. Yet many moved to the countryside to become farmers and often, once again, Whigs, then Republicans. German Catholics who remained in the cities became, like the Irish, Democrats. Then they underwent a final subdivision at the time of the First World War. Although they had been unhappy enough with Germany to leave, they were nevertheless aghast when the United States waged war on their homeland. Seeing the conflict as a Democratic war—Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president—many German Catholics became Republicans. The remnant that in spite of the war against their homeland remained Democratic, it seems safe to assume, remained very Democratic.

  Nearly all the rest of the white Catholics arrived, along with additional Irish and German immigrants, during the great wave of immigration between roughly 1880 and 1924—indeed, aside from the Jews, most of those who came during the great wave were Catholics. Still poor newcomers during the 1930s, the Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and the most recent Irish and German arrivals found themselves won over by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and, like Jews and African-Americans, gave their allegiance to the Democratic Party, the party of the little man.

  From the New Deal to the 1960s, white Catholics voted solidly Democratic with just one exception, the 1956 presidential matchup between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, when Catholics gave Ike 51 percent of their vote—David Brady’s uncle Ray wasn’t the only Catholic miscreant that year. Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party peaked four years later, when the Irish Catholic, John Kennedy, ran for president against the Anglo-Saxon Quaker, Richard Nixon. Kennedy took 78 percent of the Catholic vote. “I licked envelopes for Jack Kennedy,” David Brady says. “He was good-looking, he was articulate, he got into Harvard, and he was one of us. What more could you ask?”

  Since the election of 1960, the loyalty of white Catholics to the Democratic Party has tailed off. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Catholics have changed. They used to receive less education than Protestants, perform blue-collar work, and live in ethnic enclaves. Now Catholics are just as educated as Protestants, perform nearly as much white-collar work, and are almost as likely to live in the suburbs. As Catholics have come to look more like Protestants, they have come to vote more like Protestants, too. The second reason is that the Democratic Party has changed. It would have been unthinkable in 1960 for John Kennedy to have supported gay rights or abortion. It would be just as unthinkable in 2000 for Ted Kennedy not to do so. For many Catholics, the Democratic Party has simply become too liberal.

  * * *

  After graduating from high school, David Brady remained in his hometown of Kankakee to take a job in a furniture factory. Then he mauled his hand in a belt on the assembly line. He had to spend months recuperating. The gruesome accident changed his life—amazingly enough, for the better. Since he had time to spare and a little money in his pocket—the union made sure he received disability pay—David spent a few days visiting a high school friend who was studying at Western Illinois Teachers’ College. “All he did was read books and go to parties,” David says. “I thought, ‘This beats working in a factory.’ ” David dropped by the admissions office to find out what he had to do to get in. All he needed was a diploma from an Illinois high school, “a requirement I had barely managed to meet.” The next fall David enrolled, beginning an academic career that would make him one of the leading political scientists in the country and a full professor at Stanford University. Like millions of other Catholics, David escaped the blue-collar enclave in which he was raised and ended up living like a Protestant.

  If David illustrates the first reason Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party eroded, that Catholics themselves changed, he also illustrates the second, that the Democratic Party moved too far to the left. David being David, he reached this conclusion circuitously. Studying for his doctorate at the University of Iowa, he became a Marxist.

  “You?” I asked.

  “Don’t look so surprised. Marxism was a serious intellectual endeavor, and at one point in my life I was a serious intellectual.”

  Attempting to put his Marxism into practice, David joined the anti-war movement. During one protest, he was arrested, although, since he was paying for school by working on construction sites and had therefore never grown long hair or a beard, he had to beg the cops, some of whom were Irish, and who recognized a decent Catholic boy when they saw one, to drag him off to jail along with the more bedraggled protesters. At first the protests in which David participated were peaceful. Then they grew violent. When they did, David dropped out of the anti-war movement. “The kids were coordinating their movements with walkie-talkies, smashing windows, serious stuff. During one of the protests some fat cop had a heart attack. I figured the Vietnam War wasn’t his fault,” David said.

  Growing uneasy with what he saw of Marxism in practice, David began to wonder about Marxism in theory. “The idea was that workers would all be brothers if only they were freed from class oppressors. It didn’t seem to be working out that way in the Soviet Union. Ho Chi Minh wasn’t such a nice guy. Mao killed maybe 40 million people, maybe more. Stuff like that starts to add up. You say to yourself, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s think this over again.’ ”

  David read extensively in economics, finding himself impressed by the work of Milton Friedman. Then, pursuing his specialty, the politics of government regulation, David realized that the more he learned, the more he concluded that government regulations, no matter how well-meaning, distort markets so badly that they almost always do more harm than good. By the time he moved to Texas to teach at the University of Houston, he was a conservative. “That’s what happened. I became a conservative first. Turning into a Republican came second.”

  It also came hard. On election day 1980, David stepped inside the voting booth intending to cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan. It would be the first time in his life he had voted for a Republican. He put his hand up to the lever. He couldn’t pull it.

  “I saw my father’s face,” David explained. “He was saying, ‘Son, what are you doing? You know you can’t vote for a Republican.’ ” A widely regarded political scientist, David walked out without casting a vote.

  Four years later, in 1984, David once again stepped inside the voting booth intending to cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan. But his father appeared to him again. This time when David left without voting, he got a pass that would permit him to return later in the day. He figured all he needed was a couple of hours to get his nerve up. “I called a buddy in Washington who was a pollster. He told me it was shaping up as a landslide for Reagan. Once I knew that—once I was sure Mondale was going to lose—I went back and voted for Mondale.”

  In 1986 David received an appointment at Stanford. “One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is try to figure out the local politics,” David said. He attended a Democratic meeting to hear Barbara Boxer, then a member of Congress from Marin County, north of San Francisco, and now one of California’s two senators. “I sat in the front row. The stuff she said was so wacko, so far to the left, I had to bury my face in my hands. I was embarrassed for her.” David felt certain everyone in the audience felt just as he did, but since he was in the front row he couldn’t tell. “You have to remember, I’d just spent years in Texas. Democrats there aren’t like Democrats in the rest of the country. They would never have put up with that kind of left-wing stuff.” Yet instead of hearing the audience behind him razz Boxer when she finished, David heard the sounds of a standing ovation. “I couldn’t believe it. I hung around for half an hour afterward talking to people to find out what they believed. Sure enough, they were all just as far to the left as Boxer.”

  The next day, David registered as a Republican. One more white Catholic had decided that the Democratic Party was too liberal.


  * * *

  The GOP once thought Catholics like David Brady would come to it en masse. In 1980 Ronald Reagan became the first Republican presidential candidate since Ike to win a majority of the Catholic vote, polling 51 percent. Four years later Reagan polled 57 percent of the Catholic vote. By the time George Bush won 56 percent of the Catholic vote in 1988, the GOP believed that Reagan Democrats—the millions of Democrats who crossed party lines to vote for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, many of whom were white Catholics—were becoming Bush Republicans. Instead, the Reagan Democrats became Clinton Democrats. Running against Clinton in 1992, Bush saw his share of the Catholic vote plummet to 37 percent. Four years later, Dole polled only 40 percent. Yet by contrast with Jews, who, since Clinton has headed the Democratic Party, have once again become faithful Democrats, Catholics have returned to the Democratic Party only provisionally. In 1994 Catholics gave a majority of their vote, 53 percent, to Republican congressional candidates, enabling the GOP to recapture the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Just two years after helping Clinton win the White House, in other words, Catholics helped Republicans humiliate him.

  Catholics have thus become swing voters. They take stands on the issues that cut across both parties. Catholics—especially, polls show, those who attend church regularly—oppose abortion. That inclines them toward the GOP. Yet they support health care and welfare while opposing the death penalty. That inclines them toward the Democratic Party. (Plenty of Democrats, including President Clinton, support the death penalty, but eliminating the death penalty still has more support among Democrats than among Republicans.) Catholics might as well be playing peekaboo with Republicans and Democrats alike. Now you see us, now you don’t.

  How can the GOP appeal to Catholics?

  “Study Reagan,” David Brady replied.

  Catholics voted for Reagan for many reasons that were peculiar to Reagan himself. Reagan was Irish. He grew up in the Midwest, where many Catholics live, and he kept the simple manners of the Midwest all his life. “He may not have been Catholic,” David Brady said, “but he seemed like us. He was a guy you knew you’d like to go out with for a couple of beers.” But those weren’t the only reasons Catholics supported him.

  “Reagan had a good heart,” David continued. “That was a lot more important than you might think.” Although Catholics have moved up in the world, they still feel a particular sympathy for the little man. They’re just a couple of generations away from the immigrant experience. And their church teaches a “preferential option for the poor,” arguing that society should be judged at least in part on the way it treats its most unfortunate members. It made a difference to Catholics that Reagan was able to cut taxes and retard the growth of government spending without conveying ill will toward the poor and disadvantaged.

  “People could claim that Reagan was mean-spirited, but it just wouldn’t stick,” David said. “I mean, you could see just to look at him that he wasn’t. Now compare Reagan with some of the Republicans who came after him. Newt Gingrich? Give me a break.”

  Now that Reagan was gone, David said, the GOP needed to get rid of the spokesmen who were giving it an ugly face. Dumping Gingrich was a good start. (Strictly speaking, Gingrich wasn’t dumped from the speakership of the House of Representatives, he resigned. But Republican members of the House were so dissatisfied with him that they probably would have dumped him.) “Then I think that the GOP has to keep talking,” David continued. “Republicans have to say, ‘Maybe welfare isn’t such a great idea, but because it hurts the people who are on it, not because the Republican Party is a bunch of sixty-year-old WASPs who have got it made and stopped caring about anybody else. Maybe it’s better for people’s self-respect if they develop skills, get a job, and learn how to show up for work every day instead of taking government handouts.’

  “The GOP’s ideas are right,” David continued. “The free market is better than big government. But the GOP has to say it believes in the free market for the right reasons—because the market is better for everybody, even the poor, not just for fat cats.

  “Can Republicans learn to talk like that?” David asked. “Beats me. But if they want the Catholic vote, they’d better.”

  Journal entry:

  I still can’t imagine doing what each of them has done. Michael Medved and David Brady have friends who suggest only half-jokingly that they must have been out of their minds to become Republicans. For Justin Adams, it has been even worse.

  “To most black people,” Justin says, “I’m a sellout. It’s not as if every time I meet a black person I say, ‘Hey, did I happen to tell you what political party I belong to?’ But people find out. And I know what they think of me when they do.”

  It’s astonishing. It really is. There are people to whom being a Republican is so important that they’re willing to pay a price.

  Chapter Six

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  Journal entry:

  As the plane banked to land in Washington, D.C., this afternoon, I found myself peering out the window to admire the Capitol far below. The building has always struck me as a kind of architectural miracle. Virtually none of Benjamin Latrobe’s original structure remains visible—the north and south wings, in which the Senate and House now sit, were added in the mid-nineteenth century, while much of the construction of the dome took place later, during the Civil War—yet somehow each successive architect got everything right, making certain that his own changes enhanced rather than distorted the design. If only, I found myself wishing, the country had been as fortunate in the changes that have been made to Congress itself.

  The Constitution originally mandated one member of the House of Representatives for every thirty thousand inhabitants of the country. For several decades that formula gave the House a relatively small membership—the first time the body met it was comprised of just fifty-nine representatives. But as the country grew, so did the House. By the second half of the nineteenth century, when the membership of the House had grown to more than three hundred, observers began to argue that the institution was becoming unwieldy. By the early years of the twentieth century, when the membership of the House had grown to more than four hundred, even congressmen themselves could see that the institution would soon be teetering on the brink of chaos. Congress acted in 1929. Yet instead of shrinking the House to make the institution collegial once again, Congress simply froze the membership at 435. And there the House has remained, teetering on the brink of chaos ever since.

  As the plane floated toward the runway, it struck me that the size of the House in itself puts the Republicans who serve there at a disadvantage. Republicans like order. Chaos is for Democrats.

  The two cities to which the title of this chapter refers are Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, New Jersey, both of which I visited to investigate a question that had been puzzling me for months. Why do Republicans in the House of Representatives so often look hangdog or bewildered, while Republican governors and mayors—including the Republican mayor of Jersey City—so often appear to be enjoying themselves?

  In Washington, I talked with three prominent Republicans, one a former member of the House, ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, and two who are current members of the House, Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois and Congressman Christopher Cox of California.

  OPERATOR? GET ME ST. HELENA

  If you do not remember the excitement that Republicans felt back in 1994 when the GOP captured the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, take my word for it. We whooped and hollered. At the election night party that I attended, Republicans embraced, tears in their eyes, then drank round after round to celebrate, then embraced again, even tearier. President Clinton had been repudiated. The Democrats were down and we were up. Since the powers of the Senate majority leader are for the most part administrative, the most powerful Republican in America—the leader of us all—was the man who would soon be sworn in as speaker of the house, Congressman Newt Gingrich o
f Georgia. All hail, Newt!

  Six years later the Republican majority in the House has shrunk from twenty-six seats to just 11, giving the GOP the slimmest majority held by either party in the House in forty-seven years. Republicans in the House now lack even the semblance of a coherent agenda, much less a ten-point program such as the Contract with America on which they swept to victory in 1994. And Newt Gingrich himself is out of a job, having resigned from the House after the GOP’s feeble showing in the 1998 election, during which, polls showed, voters regarded him as one of the most unpopular politicians in the nation.