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TEAR DOWN THIS PARTY!
“There’s an old saying…that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me…you can’t get fooled again.”
—George W. Bush
As in most tragedies, the seeds for the decline of thoughtful conservatism were sown long before its decline manifested. And as is almost always the case, that drop didn’t proceed in a straight trajectory. The rise of conservatism was checkered with fits and starts; likewise, its intellectual diminution has not been a precipitous line. There have been good men and women—thoughtful conservatives—who have made a major impact, despite an unaccommodating political and media milieu. And, as later chapters will detail, I believe there is great hope for a renaissance of thoughtful conservatism.
The presidency of Ronald Reagan constitutes the apex of modern conservatism. After the Gipper rode off into the sunset, Republicans were rewarded with his third term, in the person of George Herbert Walker Bush. Despite being a prudent statesman who helped oversee the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall (and who enjoyed sky-high approval ratings after the first Gulf War), Bush is best remembered for breaking his “Read My Lips, No New Taxes!” pledge, and for losing his 1992 reelection to a slick Arkansas governor named William Jefferson Clinton. It has been said, “Without a successor, there is no success,” and if that’s the case, it’s fair to question whether the Reagan Revolution was doomed when Bush, Reagan’s moderate rival in the 1980 primaries, was selected to balance the ticket as his running mate—despite having disparaged Reagan’s economic theories as “voodoo economics.” (One wonders what might have been had Vice President Jack Kemp been given the same opportunity.)
The Clinton Era
Bill Clinton, whose political skills are legendary, deserves credit for winning in what was, at the time, a hostile environment for any Democrat. Despite his own electoral success, Clinton’s victory did not usher in a liberal renaissance. His early attempts—such as lifting a ban on gays in the military (which turned into a compromise dubbed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) and health care reform (dubbed “HillaryCare” after then First Lady Hillary Clinton, who headed the task force to sell the plan)—were rebuffed. In fact, it’s fair to say the market corrected itself and that the early years of Bill Clinton led to a backlash that, in the short term at least, made the conservative movement even stronger. On his watch (or, perhaps, in response to his election and policies), Rush Limbaugh became a rock star, Fox News was launched, and Matt Drudge’s rudimentary website became a behemoth and submerged the Clinton White House in scandal after scandal. After two years of attempting to push a liberal agenda, Clinton lost both houses of Congress. And, unlike President Obama, he responded by pivoting to the center, “ending welfare as we know it,” and declaring, “The era of big government is over.”
The 1994 midterm congressional election (known as the Republican Revolution) deserves mention as a high point of the post-Reagan era for conservatives. Previously, Tip O’Neill’s maxim that “all politics is local” suggested that increasingly conservative voters—the so-called Reagan Democrats—would continue to pull the lever for their local Democratic congressman, who, after all, they knew personally and who (they also understood) would make sure to “bring home the bacon” in the form of allocating federal dollars to pay for projects like bridges and roads. But in taking the House for the first time in forty years, Republicans defied this theory, effectively nationalizing the midterm elections by running aggressively on an ideologically conservative platform dubbed the “Contract with America.” Two of the revolution’s leaders, Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Dick Armey, were professors, and it showed. Few would accuse Gingrich of lacking intelligence. (Judgment and wisdom, yes. But intelligence he had in spades.) Ditto a joie de vivre. Gingrich was charismatic, but grandiose. He was a leading example of a new breed of politician who understood public relations and marketing far better than the old bulls who had been running Congress for decades. Some of Gingrich’s innovations, such as the theatrical, made-for-TV speech on the House floor, still plague us today. As Katharine Seelye reported in the New York Times in 1994, “Mr. Gingrich made his name in the House…by denouncing the Democrats on the floor while the cameras rolled. What they did not show, because they were locked into a narrow field of vision, was that Mr. Gingrich was hurling his barbs at an empty chamber, when his victims could not respond.”
Thankfully for conservatives, the Reagan era did not end with Reagan. Bill Clinton figured out he was still operating under a conservative paradigm. The downside for Republicans, however, was that Clinton was ideologically flexible and strategically sophisticated enough to simply co-opt their ideas, including balanced budgets and welfare reform, while snookering them into major missteps like shutting down the government. The end of the Clinton years was marked by his impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair, which ironically turned out to be another political misfire by congressional Republicans. It’s hard to blame them. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, no small thing. Republicans probably assumed impeaching Clinton would turn him into Richard Nixon—a disgraced shell of a man. Instead, he only seemed to grow more popular. Ironically, the politicians taken down by the scandal were Gingrich, who was carrying on his own affair, but was pushed out after Republicans had a disappointing midterm in the 1998 run-up to impeachment, and the man who was set to replace him as Speaker, Representative Bob Livingston, who quickly acknowledged his own adultery.41 Clinton would leave office in 2000 with high approval numbers. By then, conservatism seemed to be struggling or at least in need of reinvention. George W. Bush provided that during the 2000 election, albeit without winning the popular vote.
A Permanent Governing Majority?
For a while, it seemed like we had it all figured out. Just stick to the tried and true conservative doctrine that had worked since 1980, and then soften it up a tad. That was essentially the winning formula that George W. Bush used in 2000. He called it “compassionate conservatism.” The theory was to keep everyone in the conservative coalition happy and then inoculate himself against the predictable charges that Republicans are uncompassionate and mean-spirited. By following this strategy, Bush hoped to do better with Hispanics (“Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande River”), African Americans (some of whom Bush thought might like his proposal on faith-based initiatives, or the fact that Colin Powell and Condi Rice were key players in his administration), and soccer moms (who might share some conservative values, but would be turned off by the harsh conservative rhetoric that had emerged during the Clinton years).
September 11, however, changed everything. It’s worth pausing to consider what would have happened had the 9/11 attacks not occurred. The magnitude of that day was so great that without it, much of the American political landscape—and certainly the conservative movement—would be different today. Might George Bush have been remembered for compassionate conservatism, instead of the Iraq War and waterboarding? Absent the Iraq War that followed, does Barack Obama get elected? (Does he even speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he first made a major national splash? Unlikely, since John Kerry probably isn’t the nominee.) Does Hillary Clinton win the 2008 nomination that year because she wasn’t forced to take a tough vote authorizing military force in Iraq? (As I type these words, perhaps in some alternate universe, Republican president Colin Powell is wrapping up his second term and Vice President Condi Rice is already the front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination.)
Instead, 9/11 caused millions of formerly apolitical or apathetic people to suddenly discover their country was in trouble and they sought to make up for lost time. Some of these new conservatives were very smart, but few were full-spectrum conservatives, and even fewer had a Burkean conservative temperament. Nevertheless, the zealotry of the convert is a powerful thing, and many of these folks took to blogs and emerging media outlets and, in some cases, advanced fringe theories. Take, for example, the case of Pamela Geller, a blogger the New York Times described in 2010 as waging “a form of holy war through ‘Atlas Shrugs,’ a Web site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site.” September 11 “drove Ms. Geller to her keyboard. She had barely heard of Osama bin Laden, she said, and ‘felt guilty that I didn’t know who had attacked my country.’” In 2009, Geller helped lead the movement against building a mosque in Manhattan. And in 2015, Geller organized a cartoon contest where participants competed by drawing the Prophet Mohammad. Two gunmen opened fire outside the Garland, Texas, event before being shot and killed by police. A debate ensued. Was Geller a hero of free speech, or someone who was engaging needlessly in offensive and provocative activities? Maybe both.
One could argue that defending Western civilization from radical Islam is a noble and conservative thing to do, even if Geller does it in a radical and unconservative manner. The point, though, is that events are changing what—and who—qualifies as “conservative.” As the Washington Post noted in 2015, “Geller portrays herself as emerging straight from Ground Zero.” Should the definition of conservatism simply be “One who takes a hard-line stance against radical Islam?” Some would suggest that in an existential war, you focus solely on survival and embrace strange bedfellows. Others say that in welcoming our new allies into the fold for the sake of convenience, we may win the battle only to one day realize that the conservative movement is now simply a cause for erstwhile liberals who fetishize free expression and radical individualism and simply believe the Left has gotten too soft and politically correct.
It’s difficult to tell activists who had awoken from a decades-long slumber that they should go read about conservative philosophy and strategy before diving into political debates. Yet, there is little doubt that the involvement of this new breed of conservative activist in the wake of 9/11 contributed to some of the harsh rhetoric and unsophisticated political calculations that only accelerated after President Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party. I like to refer to these converts as conservative “immigrants”—a term I’m sure they would despise. My point is simply this: Like a nation, a movement needs an influx of new people and ideas. But if this influx comes too quickly, and if the new “immigrants” fail to be assimilated, then you wake up one day and your movement (or country) has suddenly become something you don’t recognize.
There were many, many consequences of the 9/11 attacks, and one of them was that the conservative movement began to attract people who weren’t all that conservative. It also took people who had long been conservative and inflamed their passions. If George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was aimed at growing the GOP, then 9/11 would make that kind of rhetoric sound naive and weak. Though Bush would be careful to continue parsing his rhetoric, conservative commentators weren’t always so specific or delicate. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity,” declared conservative commentator Ann Coulter.
Contributing to the conservative angst was the fact that conservatives had little to show for the Bush years. Republican majority leader Tom DeLay took the practice of using earmarks (a legislative provision that designates funds to be spent on a specific project and was traditionally used as leverage to win the support of wavering congressmen by promising to fund an infrastructure project in their home districts) as an incentive to entice party discipline to the extreme. Today’s Republican leadership, who find themselves without many sticks or carrots to get anything done, can probably thank him for removing that arrow from their quiver. There was a backlash due to DeLay’s aggressive use of earmarks, leading to their banishment in 2010. The (unintended?) consequence has been Republican leadership can’t get members to follow the party line.
Another tactic that cannot be blamed on DeLay, but certainly thrived during his tenure, was the practice of gerrymandering—the drawing of congressional lines in a way to increase “safe” districts. The result has been the proliferation of members of Congress who must go hard-Right or hard-Left in order to win, and maintain, a congressional seat. Many of the structural changes that empower today’s Freedom Caucus (the congressional caucus made up of the House’s most conservative members), and gave rise to our polarized political environment, can trace their origins to this era.
It might sound like an oxymoron, but this was also a time of big government conservatism—an era marked by spending increases, unfunded programs like the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, and few presidential vetoes. Major reform efforts, such as fixing Social Security, were put off until the second term and eventually abandoned. There was also a larger sense that the president prized loyalty to old friends and Texas pals over competence (“You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie”). Republicans could console themselves with election wins until Bush’s presidency ended with the collapse of the housing market and the Great Recession. By the time Bush left office in January 2009, the conservative movement looked very different, and, in fact, conservatives were undergoing what might be described as an identity crisis.
Obama’s Election and Its Impact on Conservatism
Much has been made of the fact that Barack Obama is the first African American president, and surely there is some percentage of racists out there for which this is greatly troubling. But I think we have largely downplayed the cultural aspects of Obama, which are incidental to his skin color. Though there is little doubt that “urban” is sometimes used as racial code language, that doesn’t mean it’s not fair game for discussion. For one thing, he is, to put it plainly, citified. And this descriptor is unusual for a president. On the 2008 campaign trail, he provoked the ire of small-town folk with this statement about “small towns in Pennsylvania” and “the Midwest” that have been losing jobs for the last twenty-five years: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Obama is a professorial liberal, and this sort of intellectualism has traditionally been damaging to Democrats because it reinforces preexisting narratives about the pretentious, elite Left. It’s probably fair to say that you can get away with being more intellectual than you could even a few years ago. But the best politicians represent a balance of down-to-earth, rural America and urban savvy. Both sides of the political aisle must worry about getting the balance wrong. But liberals are usually in danger of coming across as too wonky. So how is it that a citified professor managed to win twice? How did Obama successfully balance intelligence and populism? Republicans, it seems, misunderstood his success, either thinking he was easy pickings because of his urban liberalism, or that he won only because of America’s white guilt. This led them right off the deep end when they should have been mining Obama’s communications strategy for applicable lessons they could themselves co-opt. Obama’s election victories, coupled with the bailouts and stimulus, and his liberal policies like Obamacare (and the fact that Republicans performed well in 2010 and 2014 midterms) pushed Republicans further to the extremes.
During the conservative Reagan years, Democrats responded to Reagan’s popularity by doubling down on their elite brand of liberalism. This led to historic defeats, including Walter Mondale losing forty-nine states in 1984. Eventually, Democrats wised up and went for a centrist named Bill Clinton. Now, during Obama’s aggressively liberal presidency, Republicans have responded by doubling down on populist conservatism. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Why was the Republican backlash to Obama even harsher than the reaction to Clinton? I suspect part of the reason is that Obama was more liberal, and less pragmatic, than Clinton.
In a 2015 New York Times article, Jonathan Martin captured the degree to which Obama’s presidency had transformed the GOP, by noting the interesting evolution of former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee’s book titles. “Three years before he ran for president in 2008, a newly slim Huckabee peddled a book with a title that doubled as a lecture: Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork. Now, as he considers a second White House run, he has written another book with a decidedly different but equally direct title: God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.” Martin further observed:
Huckabee’s march from author of a self-help and clean-living guide to cheerleader of artery-clogging calories and conservative traditionalism highlights the Republican shift during the Obama era. The party is different in tone and substance, moving toward a stricter, limited-government brand of conservatism in response to President Obama’s liberalism, a change that has generational and ideological dimensions.
Now, deviations from orthodoxy on education, health care, immigration, and the environment that some Republicans flirted with or embraced during George W. Bush’s presidency are as out of vogue on the Right as flip phones.
This is a really unfortunate development, but Huckabee is hardly alone. Early in the presidential primaries for 2016, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose candidacy unwisely rested on the notion that he had to win the Iowa caucuses, suddenly discovered that he no longer favored a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The change of tone and substance made perfect sense in a short-term Machiavellian sense. But the danger (and Walker tripped over such dangers more quickly than anyone imagined) is that we have created a system whereby all our rising stars are essentially forced to adopt positions that tarnish their chances of ever being able to appeal later to a more diverse, cosmopolitan audience. It’s hard to sell conservatism to non-Republican primary voters when the messenger has a paper trail of questionable and controversial past statements. It would take a superb leader to be able to simultaneously refuse to pander to the Republican base and still win them over. But most politicians take the path of least resistance, choosing short-term survival at the expense of preserving long-term integrity. This is a vicious cycle.
Christine O’Donnell and the Rise of No-Qualification Candidates
The rise of the Tea Party certainly had some salutary benefits, such as the election of rising star conservatives like Senators Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Pat Toomey. But election waves also bring in the rickety boats, and who could forget the candidacy of Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell of Delaware? O’Donnell has become an easy target, as the Left hates her and the Right has now mostly abandoned her. But her candidacy was highly instructive as an example of how conservatism had metastasized into a movement that preached populism and how a conservative could thrive as a professional victim.
A 2010 speech by O’Donnell highlights how her message was aimed, not simply at liberals, but at elites.42
“The small elite don’t get us. They call us wacky. They call us wingnuts. We call us, ‘We the people,’” she said to applause. “We’re loud, we’re rowdy, we’re passionate.…It isn’t tame, but boy, it sure is good.…I never had the high-paying job or the company car. It took me over a decade to pay off my student loans. I never had to worry about where to dock my yacht to reduce my taxes,” she said, taking a swipe at Senator John Kerry for avoiding a six-figure yacht tax in Massachusetts by docking it in Rhode Island. “And I’ll bet most of you didn’t, either.”
O’Donnell was essentially arguing that her lack of sophistication wasn’t merely something to be overlooked; it was actually a qualification for the job of US senator.
While this message ultimately failed to resonate with Delaware voters—she lost the general election by a 17 percent margin in favor of Democrat Chris Coons—for a moment, at least, it turned O’Donnell into a national conservative star. Hers was a message all those Tea Party–going grassroots conservatives wanted to hear. Meanwhile, skeptical conservatives who saw O’Donnell as both sloppy and opportunistic were branded apostates. Some center-right journalists mustered the courage to push back at this. For example, National Review’s Jim Geraghty wrote that “she told blatant, easy-to-check lies on the campaign trail,” and raised questions about her financial disclosures, noting that she “somehow managed to pay $11,744.59 in back taxes in a year she reportedly earned about half that.” But O’Donnell had cast herself as a victim—our victim—and anything less than defending this conservative darling was considered not just unchivalrous, but downright heresy.
To be fair, every family has that aunt or uncle that they’d prefer be kept in the attic; and similarly, both sides of the political aisle have their share of laughable candidates. In this regard, it feels petty to pick on Republicans. The liberal media tends to give their embarrassing figures a pass while demonizing conservatives who either mess up, or (in the case of O’Donnell) aren’t ready for prime time in the first place. While O’Donnell was merely a failed Senate candidate, her fellow Delaware pol, Vice President Joe Biden, was literally (a word he likes to use) a heartbeat away from the presidency. But one would be hard-pressed to find a politician who has said more stupid things, or committed more gaffes, than “Uncle” Joe Biden.
Failing Forward
The early Obama years were marked by outrage and disillusionment among conservatives. Rush Limbaugh declared of Obama, “I hope he fails,” Fox News host Glenn Beck suggested Obama was “a racist,” and Sarah Palin—John McCain’s 2008 running mate—resigned her job as governor of Alaska and turned her attention toward reality TV and fighting the Left.
In 2010, Republicans had a very good midterm, taking back the House of Representatives. But midterm elections are different than presidential elections. For one thing, the universe of voters is much smaller and less demographically diverse. As such, success in 2010 masked some larger problems. But winning covers a multitude of sins, and a party that has just won an election isn’t in much of a mood to make any changes—or to soften any rhetoric. Steps that could have been taken to preemptively address the coming demographic time bomb—or the fact that cultural attitudes were rapidly changing—got kicked down the road. In 2012, Obama was reelected, and new Republican controversies erupted: Missiouri Republican Senate candidate, Todd Akin, used the term “legitimate rape,” Indiana Senate hopeful Richard Mourdock said that when a rape happens, “it is something that God intended,” and Rush Limbaugh poured gasoline on the whole mess by calling feminist activist Sandra Fluke a “slut.” Democrats would effectively use the so-called war on women card to damage Republicans.
The next year, Republicans would attempt to defund Obamacare, a fool’s errand championed by Senator Ted Cruz and Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation. Dubbed the gospel of “defundamentalism” by John Hart, a former communications director for Senator Tom Coburn, Republicans’ effort to defund Obama’s signature legislation was destined to fail—and fail it did.
Or did it? This book is called Too Dumb to Fail for a reason. And the defund effort is an example of how some conservatives manage to fail forward. To many, Cruz and others are not viewed as losers who misled the public into a quixotic adventure, but instead as champions who at least had the guts to try. Rather than owning up to the fact that the defund effort was a fool’s errand, the people responsible for it actually claimed credit. The term gaslighting means “to cause (a person) to doubt his or her sanity through the use of psychological manipulation.” The people who were pushing the defund movement will argue till they’re blue in the face that—surprise!—it worked. (Who are you going to believe—them or your lying eyes?)
The truth is that the defund fiasco arguably helped Republicans in the long run, by teaching them this was a stupid attempt they shouldn’t replicate before the next election. Chastened by the defund experience, Republicans ran a much smarter campaign in 2014 and won the midterm election. So, ironically, I guess you can thank the defund effort for helping Republicans win the 2014 midterms (just not for the reasons the “too dumb to fail” crowd thinks).
Still, conservatives lost a lot of winnable seats in 2010 and 2012 because of bad candidates and flawed strategy. In 2010, they should have won in Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado, but Tea Party candidates Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck each committed costly errors. In 2012, Republicans again missed an opportunity to take the Senate when they blew races in Missouri (Todd Akin’s gaffe), Indiana (Richard Mourdock’s gaffe), North Dakota (establishment representative Rick Berg couldn’t win an open seat), and Montana (establishment Republican Denny Rehberg failed to oust an incumbent). On their third try—having learned the lessons of their previous two failures—Republicans finally captured the Senate in 2014, partly thanks to having run better candidates and better campaigns in blue or purple states. In the senate, this meant electing Joni Ernst in Iowa and Cory Gardner in Colorado. In the state houses, this meant electing Republicans like Larry Hogan in my birth state of Maryland.
But all victories are short-lived, and although it’s nice to control Congress, conservatives won’t be able to fully achieve public policy victories without the White House. Without restoring conservatism’s once proud intellectual tradition and returning to the delicate balance between populism and intellectual optimism, the White House will remain elusive. Republicans have occasionally demonstrated that if they can avoid strategically unwise gambits like government shutdowns, they can win midterm elections, but winning the White House will require some more intensive brand management. And here, some of the stereotypes about “the stupid party” continue to plague the GOP. When NBC’s The West Wing’s fictional president Jeb Bartlet’s equally fictional Republican opponent complains that Bartlet is calling him “dumb,” Bartlet replies, “I wasn’t, Rob. But you’ve turned being unengaged into a Zen-like thing, and you shouldn’t enjoy it so much is all.” Bartlet’s GOP foe, Governor Robert Ritchie, is a tough-talking Southerner who gloried in his everyman qualities by going to baseball games and scoffing at “big words.” Sound familiar? Even if George W. Bush had never entered the universe of American politics, this would still be a pretty accurate portrayal of the typical “red state,” cowboy boots–wearin’ Republican candidate. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with conservatives who wear cowboy boots (I own a pair), but the problem comes when this caricature comes to define an entire philosophy.
Winning elections means having a tent big enough to attract a majority. So if you want to understand why today’s GOP is the way it is, the easiest way is to take a look at who constitutes Republican voters. The next several chapters describe how, in building an electoral coalition big enough to win national elections, Republicans have inexorably sown the seeds that have blossomed into their current identity crisis.