When Obama stood in Grant Park, Chicago, on November 4, 2008, to speak to the country as president-elect for the first time, his election appeared to represent something more than just the repudiation of a failed Bush presidency, more also than just the election of the first president who was not white and male. It represented a generational upheaval. Among voters more than forty-five years old, the new president had actually lost; younger voters had accounted for his entire victory margin. Indeed, the youngest cohort—voters under thirty—supplied most of his cushion, supporting Obama by a staggering margin of more than two to one.
A generational divide of this size had not appeared before, at least not in the era in which exit polling exists. (In 2000, Al Gore, who won a narrow plurality of the vote, carried voters over sixty by four points. Obama, who won by a comfortable seven-point margin, performed a net eight percentage points worse than Gore among the oldest voters.) In every election since 1972—when George McGovern lost by half a dozen points among the young, while getting slaughtered by thirty-plus points among every older cohort—age had played barely any role. The young and old moved between the two parties more or less in tandem. Now it seemed a new America had arrived, and the new president seemed to embody it. He walked onto the stage, aside a glamorous and beautiful wife, with two school-aged daughters, the youngest, Sasha, nestling her head against her father’s elbow. Obama looked youthful—more closely resembling the twenty-eight-year-old who had made national news for the first time when he won the presidency of the Harvard Law Review than he would the gray-haired man at the end of his second term. In so many ways, the young, dark-skinned, urban president-elect was the incarnation of his disproportionately youthful, city-dwelling, minority, college-educated supporters.
To Republicans, this cast a bleak vision of a future that might be slipping away from them. The 2008 election and the collapse of the Bush administration’s program at home and abroad created a widespread belief that the GOP would have to alter its policies. Even much of the right accepted this premise. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time a few weeks after Obama’s victory, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Instead of moving toward the center, though, the Republican Party lurched even more sharply rightward. By doing so, it gained a temporary tactical advantage, but may have solidified Obama’s majority coalition.
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On January 10, 2009, eleven days before Obama’s inauguration, House Republicans met to plan their strategy for the new term, in which Democrats would control the presidency as well as both houses of Congress. A PowerPoint presentation boiled down their strategy to its essence. “If the goal of the majority is to govern, what is the purpose of the minority?” one slide asked. “The purpose of the minority is to become the majority.”
While this was presented as a simple axiomatic truth, in reality, the Republican Party was embarking on a strategy without any modern precedent in American history. Most Americans have had the sense that the parties are supposed to work together—that governing is the job of all elected representatives, not just those in the president’s party. It would become clear during Obama’s presidency that the basis for this tradition had disappeared.
The American political system during the twentieth century had a peculiar character, compared to the tight-knit party systems operating in most democracies, but which Americans took for granted. Bipartisanship evolved into a hallowed tradition, understood almost as a form of civic virtue. Conservative Democrats might block their own president’s policies and work closely with a Republican president, while moderate or liberal Republicans would do the opposite. Both Democrats and Republicans recruited Dwight Eisenhower to run as their presidential candidate in 1952, believing, reasonably enough, that his moderate views would fit about as well in one party as the other. Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly supported Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act, allowing the bill to survive mass defections by southern Democrats. Ronald Reagan worked closely with conservative Democrats to enact his 1981 tax cut.
The political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have developed a system for measuring the ideology of members of Congress and their parties. They found that northern Democrats occupied about the same ideological space from the early 1960s through the present day—that Kennedy and Johnson Democrats from north of the Mason-Dixon Line had the same vision of the role of government as Obama Democrats. But after 1964, white southern Democrats went into a long, slow, terminal decline, and their departure pushed the Democrats somewhat to the left of center. The Republican Party underwent a much more dramatic change. From the early 1960s to the present day, Republicans in the House moved four times as far to the right as their Democratic counterparts moved to the left. The conservative movement, which began this period as a small minority faction within the GOP, took it over completely—a radical transformation. During the 1950s, conservatives maintained a bitterly hostile relationship to the party’s leadership and its president, Dwight Eisenhower. They rejected the Republican Party’s postwar acceptance of the enhanced role of government in economic life created by the New Deal, and its foreign policy of containing rather than destroying communism abroad. William F. Buckley, the most important intellectual among the fringe, dismissed Eisenhower as “undaunted by principle, unchained to any coherent ideas as to the nature of man and society, uncommitted to any estimate of the nature or potential of the enemy.”
Conservatives tended to see every extension of government, even small ones, as the looming extinction of freedom. Economist Milton Friedman compared John F. Kennedy’s program to fascism. In the early 1960s, Ronald Reagan warned that if Medicare passed, the government would inevitably force doctors to live in cities where they did not want to, and future generations would no longer know “what it once was like in America when men were free.” (Conservatives continue to tout that speech today as if it has proved prescient.)
Certainly, mainstream Republicans of this era sometimes opposed new government programs, or disagreed with Democrats about their design or scope. But the conservatives utterly rejected the idea that their party should be about simply accepting a smaller or better-run version of the same model endorsed by the Democrats. This was because they didn’t actually care about the design of government policies—they opposed big government on principle, because they believed it inherently impinged upon freedom. Friedman once wrote, “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” Barry Goldwater, the political leader of the conservative movement, declared:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
Their distrust of the social and political elite made conservatives prone to paranoia. Senator Joseph McCarthy enthralled conservatives by describing lurid communist conspiracies that eventually extended to Eisenhower himself. In 1964, None Dare Call It Treason, a book by the conservative author and Republican activist John Stormer, alleging “a conspiratorial plan to destroy the United States into which foreign aid, planned inflation, distortion of treaty-making powers and disarmament all fit,” eventually sold 7 million copies.
One of the most persistent sources of conservative paranoia concerned their own marginalization within the party. It was self-evident to them that the Republican Party would always win national elections if it moved to the right, rather than promote “a Dime Store New Deal,” as Goldwater contemptuously described Eisenhower’s moderate policies. The right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote a tract, A Choice Not an Echo, arguing “there is no way Republicans can possibly lose as long as we have a presidential candidate who campaigns on the issues.” However, the party had been thwarted by “a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, [who] manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues.” Schlafly’s book, like Stormer’s, also developed into a key organizing tool for the Goldwater campaign in 1964.
The mainstream of the party, believing that allowing conservatives to control the party would court political annihilation, did not give up without a fight. Moderates at the GOP convention in 1964 proposed a resolution condemning extremism of all varieties. Goldwater supporters voted it down, their position echoed by the candidate’s famous declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Many moderates stalked out of the convention, including centrist George Romney and his teenage son, Mitt. Governor Romney subsequently penned a twelve-page letter to Goldwater explaining why he had not endorsed him. When conservatives defeated moderate California senator Thomas Kuchel, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, Kuchel lashed out at what he called a “fanatical neo-fascist political cult” in the grips of a “strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear.”
Goldwater suffered an overwhelming defeat in 1964, but his supporters did not see his loss as an indictment of their theory that a true conservative could never lose. And, as it happened, the conservative hope that they could turn the party more right-wing and still win was not as irrational as it appeared in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat. As noted earlier, the conservative strategy, articulated by movement theorists like William Rusher, publisher of National Review, was to add to Republican ranks the tens of millions of conservative voters in the white South who had shunned the GOP since the time of Lincoln. The timing for this shift was opportune: the former Confederacy’s historic attachment to the Democratic Party, shaken loose by Harry Truman’s embrace of civil rights, started an irrevocable break after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Goldwater had opposed. In the ranks of southern Democrats alienated by their party’s embrace of civil rights the Republican Party would find a vast new trove of conservatives who would supply the votes for its new, much more conservative identity.
Despite the initial setback in 1964, the party’s new conservative course soon began to bear fruit. The 1966 midterm elections revealed a public moving steadily rightward, and the Republicans were poised to exploit this shift. White America had come to see the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda as a transfer of resources from the white middle class to the black poor. Violent crime shot upward, starting in the 1960s, a trend that continued into the 1990s. Whites fled cities for the suburbs, and many of them came to associate African-Americans with welfare, which became a synecdoche for laziness and unearned entitlement. Ronald Reagan regaled audiences with stories about a “welfare queen” driving a Cadillac, or a “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to buy steak while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” In 1985, Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and later a close adviser to Bill Clinton, immersed himself in Macomb County, a blue-collar Detroit suburb where whites had abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. He found that the so-called Reagan Democrats there understood politics almost entirely in racial terms, translating any Democratic appeal to economic justice as taking their money to subsidize the black underclass.
Simultaneously, conservatives steadily gained ground within the Republican Party. Republicans won five of the next six presidential elections, interrupted only by a single, narrow defeat in 1976 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Nevertheless, the full triumph of conservatism within the Republican Party took decades to complete. Nixon cut a marginally less offensive profile than Eisenhower, from a conservative standpoint, but still offended the right by expanding regulation, negotiating détente with communist China and the Soviets, and even proposing a universal health care plan (which Democrats opposed as insufficiently liberal). The turning point came when Reagan, an old fighter from the Goldwater movement, won two presidential elections, signifying the right’s triumph within the GOP.
Reagan’s triumph confounded pundits, who initially treated him as another Goldwater, marching the party off the cliff to the right. Conservatives could look back on this period as vindication for their original belief that staunch conservatism, rather than moderation, offered their path to success. When Reagan’s successor, George Bush, lost in 1992, Republicans largely concluded that his deviation from the conservative faith—a 1990 budget deal in which he submitted to a small tax increase in return for hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts—had done him in.
In the meantime, generations of conservative activists slowly replaced the old-line party apparatus. The movement had identified conservatism with Republicanism so thoroughly that no competing power center was left standing. Republican moderates in the 1950s and 1960s had drawn ideas from mainstream organizations such as the Ripon Society, Republican Advance, and the Committee for Economic Development, and center-right publications such as the New York Herald Tribune, Confluence, and Advance. By the 1980s, those were all dead or in steep decline, and the conservative movement controlled every media outlet and think tank with influence over the GOP. No competing ideological tradition or political strategy had any public legitimacy within the party. Reaganism (and the ideal of conservative purity that his acolytes believed, somewhat exaggeratedly, he followed unswervingly) was the standard of perfection agreed upon by all sides. The political habits built during this long period would shape the Republican response to Obama.
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Beginning in 1968, Republicans enjoyed a national political terrain favorable to their party. But for a party to hold a natural majority does not mean it always wins; short-term circumstances can play an enormous role. Think of the two conditions affecting elections as akin to climate and weather: in any given part of the world, the climate might be growing warmer over the years, but the weather could easily undergo a cold snap at some given point.
In 1992, Bill Clinton interrupted the long period of Republican presidential success. He accomplished this by taking advantage of a presidency that had grown unpopular during the 1991 recession, and by adapting his message to the conservative tenor of the times. The governor of a southern state, Clinton presented a national persona (primarily in his support of welfare reform and a severe crime bill) that soothed white fears about the party’s support for African-Americans. (That Clinton was able to do this while maintaining deep support from black voters displayed both his political skill and the pragmatic tradition of the African-American electorate.) Clinton’s identity as a “New Democrat” (as he put it) displayed his recognition that the old Democrats had lost their majority.
But in 2002, journalist John Judis and demographer Ruy Teixeira noticed a deeper trend in the electorate that had largely escaped detection. The Republican Party had come increasingly to depend on the support of one constituency, white voters without a college degree, and this constituency was steadily shrinking as a share of the electorate. College-educated white voters, once reliably Republican, had turned more Democratic. Combined with racial minorities—another traditional Democratic bloc—which were growing as a result of immigration, the outlines of a winning coalition had come into view. Their book, The Emerging Democratic Coalition, initially drew more ridicule than support. Partly this was because the timing of its publication, right after the post-9/11 patriotic upsurge that had given Republicans a sharp boost, seemingly repudiating Judis and Teixeira. But the 9/11 effect eventually melted away in the Bush administration’s failed occupation of Iraq, and their argument became harder and harder to dismiss. Whites without a college degree cast more than 60 percent of the votes in the 1980 presidential election. By 2012 their share had fallen to 36 percent. The Republicans had built a majority upon the foundation of a populist appeal to blue-collar whites and had failed to notice that the foundation was shrinking beneath its feet. The white population was growing—and is continuing to grow—more educated and secular, and friendlier to the Democratic worldview. Meanwhile, the white share of the electorate has been shrinking by two percentage points every four years.
Judis and Teixeira sketched out a vision of a Democratic coalition that would dominate in urban areas, universities, and tech centers. They singled out Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile ground for the expanding Democratic base. Obama’s two victories followed that blueprint. Campaign reporters cast the election as a triumph of Obama’s inspirational message and cutting-edge organization, but above all his impressive win reflected simple demography. One measure of how thoroughly the electorate had changed by the time of Obama’s election was that, if college-educated whites, working-class whites, and minorities had cast the same proportion of the votes in 1988 as they did in 2008, Michael Dukakis—the prototypically hapless 1980s Democrat, who lost forty states—would have triumphed (just barely, but he would have won). By 2020, nonwhite voters should rise to a third of the electorate. By 2040, or perhaps shortly after, nonwhites will outnumber whites.
The rising cohort of Democratic voters held assumptions about the world that would have seemed alien, and even radical, a generation before. Obama’s youngest supporters—the “millennial generation,” born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s—included far fewer whites than earlier generations. What’s more, its white voters displayed distinctly more liberal views, including on the crucial questions of racial identity. The youngest cohort of whites is far less likely than the oldest cohort to believe that white people face discrimination, and far less likely to be upset at “the idea of a Latino person being president of the United States.” Their proclivities may portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.
Not all of these changes have helped Obama’s party. A long-standing pattern of American politics is that older people, who have deeper roots in their communities, vote at higher rates. The gap is especially large during midterm elections, which lack the blaring publicity generated by presidential races. Historically, age made relatively little difference in voting behavior. But in the Obama era, the generational split handed conservatives a huge advantage in midterm elections; when young voters stay home in nonpresidential years, the electorate now swings heavily Republican. That fact has driven enormous Republican gains in congressional races, state legislatures, and other down-ballot races.
A second quality of the new Obama coalition hurt the party even more: Democrats have grown increasingly concentrated geographically. As Obama built increasingly huge majorities in urban centers, the party declined in small towns. As a result, Democrats, tightly packed into urban districts, tend to “waste” many of their votes in legislative races. House Democrats won more votes in 2012, but Republicans easily held their majority of the chamber. This was because Republicans win suburban districts with 55 percent or 60 percent of the vote, while Democrats pile up 80 percent or 90 percent of support in their city districts. In many states, Republicans have used their majorities to draw districts designed to deepen their geographic advantages. In Ohio, which Obama carried in 2012 by 3 percent, the Republican-controlled legislature drew a map in which 12 of the 16 House districts supported Romney. In Michigan, where Obama defeated Romney by 9.5 percent, 9 of the 14 House districts supported Romney. In some of these cases, the GOP’s advantages compounded each other. The disproportionately older and whiter voters who showed up during the midterms elected Republican officials in state legislative positions, and they used their legislative control to give their party favorable districts in Congress.
The party’s dependence on rural voters intensified in 2016. One unexpected result of this was that Republicans gained an advantage in the Electoral College, which Trump won despite having lost the national vote. Trump turned out enough voters in small towns and the Rust Belt to flip previously Democratic states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, fast-growing states with high minority populations—Texas, Arizona, and Georgia—all moved closer to the Democrats, just not quite enough to flip them from red to blue just yet. It was a trend with ominous portents for a Republican party growing ever more dependent upon drawing every last drop of support from a shrinking portion of the country.
More than four decades ago, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified the core of Americans’ political thinking as a blend of symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism. Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. The push and pull between these contradictory beliefs has defined most of the domestic political conflicts over the last century. Public support for most of the particulars of government has stopped Republicans from rolling back the advances of the New Deal, but suspicion with “big government” has made Democratic attempts to advance the role of the state rare and politically painful.
This tension continues to define the beliefs of American voters. Among the 2012 electorate, more voters identified themselves as conservative (35 percent) than liberal (25 percent), and more said the government is already doing too much that should be left to the private sector (51 percent) than asserted that the government ought to be doing more to solve problems (44 percent). But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under thirty said the government should do more to solve problems. And 33 percent of voters under thirty identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative—which is remarkable, since conservatives have long outnumbered liberals among the electorate as a whole, requiring Democrats to dominate among moderate voters.
What all this suggests is that we may soon see a political landscape that will appear from the perspective of today and virtually all of American history as unrecognizably liberal. Democrats today must amass huge majorities of moderate voters in order to overcome conservatives’ numerical advantage over liberals. They must carefully wrap any proposal for activist government within the strictures of limited government, which is why Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Obama promised not to raise taxes for 99 percent of Americans. It’s entirely possible that, by the time today’s twenty-somethings have reached middle age, these sorts of limits will cease to apply.
Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. A long-standing piece of folk wisdom says that people inevitably grow more conservative as they age. That is not necessarily true. In reality, voters tend to acquire voting habits early on, and hold them throughout their life. A Pew survey that tracked the behavior of different generations through time found that early choices persist for decades. Voters who came of age during the Roosevelt administration voted Democratic at a heavier rate throughout their life than voters who came of age during the Eisenhower administration. Hillary Clinton lacked the cultural connection with younger voters enjoyed by Obama, a much younger and hipper politician. But she still won voters under the age of thirty by nearly a 20-point margin, and prevailed among voters between thirty and forty-five by 8 points. The political cast of the young is likely to remain a Democratic-leaning force for decades to come.
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The growth of Obama’s coalition did not go ignored by Republicans. The political transformation his election seemed to augur unnerved them deeply. In the waning days of the 2012 election, a Republican strategist told journalist Ron Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this”—“this” being a presidential campaign that tries to assemble a majority almost entirely through white votes. Conservatives saw the waters rising all around them.
Yet the psychology of decline does not always operate in a straightforward, rational way. A strategy of managing slow decay is unpleasant, and history is replete with instances of leaders who persuaded themselves of the opposite of the obvious conclusion. Rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position, they chose instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. Such was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was also the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.
At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that drove Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost. Jim DeMint wrote a book in 2012 titled Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse. DeMint, who the next year left the Senate to take the presidency of the Heritage Foundation, painted a haunting picture: “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on the government. Dependent voters will naturally elect even big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt. The 2012 election may be the last opportunity for Republicans.”
Paul Ryan, then-chairman of the House Budget Committee, wrote a document that was not merely a fiscal blueprint but a sweeping vision statement that he called “The Roadmap,” which warned, “America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course.” Arthur Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a high-profile presence on the Republican intellectual scene, wrote a 2010 book titled The Battle, urging conservatives to treat the struggle for economic libertarianism as a “culture war” between capitalism and socialism, in which compromise was impossible. Time was running short, Brooks pleaded in apocalyptic tones. The “real core” of what he called Obama’s socialistic supporters was voters under thirty. “It is the future of our country,” he wrote. “And this group has exhibited a frightening openness to statism in the age of Obama.” Peter Wehner, a former deputy to Karl Rove and conservative opinion writer, sadly conveyed his observation that conservatives “believe that America is at an inflection point. That we are about to enter into the land of no return.” This paranoia bled from the fringes all the way into the party’s prestigious centers. Even a blue-blood like Jeb Bush declared in 2015, “I think the left wants slow growth because that means people are more dependent upon government.”
The right’s doomsday mood and vision breathed new life into an important stream of far-right thought: the ideology developed by Ayn Rand. A Russian émigré whose affluent family suffered persecution at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Rand constructed a worldview that turned the ideology of her Bolshevik tormentors upside down. Recapitulating the methodology of the Marxists she so despised, Rand believed that politics boiled down to a struggle between two opposing economic classes, in her vision one that created all wealth (the makers), and the other that stole it (the takers). Rand identified the producer class and the parasite class as the opposite of how the Marxists did: the producers were the capitalists, the parasites the workers. “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains,” explained John Galt, protagonist of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, giving voice to its author’s beliefs. (Rand, a screenwriter and author, articulated her ideas mainly through fiction.)
Rand’s ideas provided the formative worldview for generations of conservative thinkers. One of them was Ryan, who told a group of Rand followers in 2005 that her ideas were “the reason I got involved in public service” and said in 2009, “we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking.” Rand’s ideas gained a new vogue during the Obama era, as conservatives saw in the new president the first signs of the attack on wealth and the inevitable social and economic disintegration Rand had depicted. In a 2011 speech before the American Enterprise Institute, Ryan fused Randian thought with the party’s fresh terror that Obama’s supporters threatened to permanently overtake them. “The tipping point represents two dangers,” he announced: “first, long-term economic decline as the number of makers diminishes [and] the number of takers grows . . . Second, gradual moral-political decline as dependency and passivity weaken the nation’s character.” In Wehner’s endorsement of Stanley Greenberg’s findings he concludes that his fellow Republicans believe “[t]hat demographic trends are all troubling and that the ‘takers’ in America will soon outnumber the ‘givers.’”
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The hysterical response to Obama’s presidency did not just bubble up from the inflamed grass roots. It filtered down as well from the party’s intellectual elite, whose ideas had prepared them to conclude that the only response to Obama entailed an all-out class struggle. Republican leaders at the beginning of 2009 understood, in a way minority parties had not understood before, that total opposition to Obama served not only their policy goals but also their political interest.
Republicans in Congress did not announce publicly that their strategy was to deny the administration support for any of its initiatives. They generally maintained in public that the administration was to blame for their lack of support. But a wide array of evidence supports the conclusion that the party followed a conscious plan of mass opposition. On the evening of his inauguration, journalist Robert Draper later reported, more than a dozen Republicans in both chambers met to plot how the party would respond to Obama. They affirmed the message of the House Republican meeting ten days before—they would open fights on every front. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign,” House chief deputy Republican whip Kevin McCarthy told the group.
Vice President Joe Biden, who had cultivated deep social ties to his fellow senators during his six terms of service, claimed that seven Republican senators told him they had to promise to support their party leadership on every procedural vote, or else be stripped of their chairmanships. Biden’s report of private conversations cannot be verified, and he obviously has an interest in playing up Republican partisanship. But at least one Republican senator more or less confirmed Biden’s account. “If [Obama] was for it, we had to be against it,” Ohio’s George Voinovich said, after retiring in 2010. Biden’s report would also explain a curious anomaly from 2009, when moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe voted for health care reform in the Senate Finance Committee, then went on to vote against the bill when it came to the floor. (The latter vote was procedural; the former was not.)
The old Washington folk wisdom held that the opposition party had to tread carefully. If it opposed the president too harshly, or was seen as reflexively partisan, voters would hesitate to trust them with power again. This seems to be more of a comforting fable, useful for encouraging responsible behavior, than a realistic analysis. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, explained in 2010 the importance of maintaining unified Republican opposition to health care reform: “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.” The next year, McConnell reiterated his point, telling The Atlantic, “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
McConnell’s logic was very shrewd, echoing the previously mentioned findings of John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. McConnell knew that most Americans have little time to follow the intricacies of the policy debate, and instead take their cues from indirect signals. Bipartisan agreement provides one such important signal. If the two parties seem to agree on a bill, it implies the idea is broadly acceptable and moderate. If they disagree, it sends a signal that something with the bill is wrong. Even many pundits who follow politics for a living tended to fall back on the same reasoning, albeit in more sophisticated form. Self-identified centrists in Washington tend to assume that the sensible position lies halfway between whatever the two parties are saying at any given moment. “The middle is often the commonsensical place to be,” explained ABC News commentator Cokie Roberts. “The notion that one side is right and one side is wrong is generally, as one finds in life, not the case.” They conclude, as a matter of course, that if the two parties cannot agree, they are equally to blame. It is striking how little support moderate opinion leaders gave Obama throughout his presidency, even when he endorsed their preferred policies, as he often did. The centrist establishment’s most urgent priority remained long-term deficit reduction, and the centrists urged both parties to compromise in pursuit of this goal—Republicans would have to yield on their opposition to new taxes, and Democrats on their reluctance to reduce spending on retirement programs. When Obama and his allies did exactly this, however, centrists were forced to ignore it—after all, if they sided with one of the parties, they wouldn’t be “nonpartisan” anymore!
Obama made several attempts to forge a debt compromise with Republicans—offering concessions publicly on some occasions, or behind closed doors on others. All these attempts failed because Republicans refused to give in on higher tax revenue. After Obama publicly endorsed a mix of revenue increases and cuts to Social Security, the New York Times’s David Brooks wrote a column accusing him of “declin[ing] to come up with a proposal to address the problem.” When Senate Democrats offered a plan to mix spending cuts and higher revenue, the centrist Washington Post editorial page dismissed it as a “non-starter.” Technically, this was true—Republicans rejected these proposals, unilaterally making them a political nonstarter. So even though the Post editorial page itself had in the past explicitly endorsed the very policy ideas the Democrats were proposing, they dismissed Democrat support for them as useless on the grounds that Republicans wouldn’t support them. Republicans were therefore able to block any bipartisanship in the knowledge that liberal pundits might oppose them, but conservatives would take their side, and centrists would apportion blame on both sides regardless.
The most important benefit of the Republican strategy was that voters tend to care less about process than results. Political scientists have found over and over that voters tend to hold the incumbent party responsible for conditions, the most important of which is the state of the economy, but studies have also shown that voters can project their feelings of support or lack thereof onto matters that politicians have nothing to do with, such as weather conditions or the record of the local football team. What’s more, at a national level, the electorate does not split the credit or the blame between Congress and the president—they tend to hold the president almost solely responsible. This does not hold true of voters alone. Again, the pundits frequently employ the same logic. Ron Fournier conceded that Obama had agreed to compromise on the budget and Republicans had not, but insisted Obama shared the blame anyway. “President Obama makes a credible case that he has reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans,” he wrote in the National Journal. “But knowing who’s at fault doesn’t fix the problem. To loosely quote Billy Joel: You may be right, Mr. President, but this is crazy.” Even by 2016, when Senate Republicans immediately followed the death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia by announcing they would block any replacement, however moderate or well qualified, some reporters continued to lay the blame equally. Obama “can’t even get Senate Republicans to give him a hearing,” said CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell. “Most Republicans won’t even meet with Judge [Merrick] Garland. Does that say something about President Obama’s inability to reach across the aisle?”
The most successful application of the Republican strategy came in 2011, when they threatened not to lift the debt ceiling. The episode left them with a double victory. The dysfunction in Washington, and the possibility that Congress might set off a potential global economic meltdown, justifiably shook the public’s faith in the recovery. Consumer confidence dropped steeply that summer, and Obama’s approval ratings dropped along with it. Gleefully, Republicans learned that they could inflict immediate harm on the American economy and the blame would accrue to Obama—which would, of course, improve their own electoral prospects. (It was in the wake of the debt ceiling scare that Obama’s reelection prospects were most deeply imperiled.) Additionally, by refusing to compromise, they forced Obama to accept budget sequestration. The resulting slowness of the recovery gave the GOP better odds of defeating Obama and his congressional allies.
In 2012, Greg Walden, chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, explained why he expected members of his party to hold their majority, despite its almost completely dysfunctional governance: “this is an election that is a referendum on the president’s policies.” If Walden’s claim was to be taken at face value, and there was no reason not to do so, he was arguing that voters would not hold the House GOP’s performance against it. Instead, they would reward or punish House Republicans as a kind of reverse indicator of Obama’s policies. The worse they felt Obama had performed, the more seats they would award Republicans. The leaders of the House had grown aware they had no incentive to govern well, and certainly not to help speed along the recovery. Their incentive ran the opposite way.
* * *
As early as the fall of 2008, anti-Obama passions among conservative voters had started to run ahead of the party leadership. In the waning weeks of the 2008 election, crowds at Republican events had grown rabid, leaving John McCain, the putative head of the party ticket, visibly discomfited. By that point, the emotional center of the GOP had fallen to his running mate, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who captured the anti-resentment enveloping the right. At the time of her appearance, Palin presented an electrifying, novel profile: she spoke not like a politician but like an average person, and perhaps knew hardly any more about public policy than one, but conveyed righteous indignation at the increasingly likely possibility that this young, unfamiliar man from Chicago might soon inhabit the Oval Office. The McCain campaign was hesitant to exploit white racial fears, but Palin shook loose from the campaign—“going rogue,” as alarmed McCain staffers put it—and launched fiery, unauthorized attacks on Obama’s background and alleged lack of patriotism.
The appearance of Palin prefigured a recurrent pattern during the Obama era. The leadership of the opposition passed out of the hands of the formal heads of the opposing party—first McCain, then Mitch McConnell and John Boehner—and into a series of angry populist figures. Palin, Joe the Plumber, Glenn Beck, Herman Cain, and Donald Trump all captured a belief that Obama was not just wrong but dangerous, an alien figure, arising quickly from circumstances that appeared suspicious and seemed to cover some dark origin-secret that could be traced back to a Marxist puppet master from his youth, or perhaps even to Kenya. Stanley Kurtz, a longtime writer for National Review, published a 2010 book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, alleging that the president concealed a far-left agenda. Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy, by Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, and The Roots of Obama’s Rage, by Heritage Foundation fellow and Forbes columnist Dinesh D’Souza, fleshed out these themes.
In a polarized age, it has become normal for partisans to bitterly resent presidents of the opposing party. But the opposition to Obama had an unusually fervent cast. Dark, atavistic fears haunted the minds of Republican voters. A 2009 survey found that conservative Republicans, about a fifth of the country, did not believe that Obama was merely misguided, or cynical, or even corrupt, but that his agenda was “purposely designed to fail.” As the report concluded, “Our groups showed that they explicitly believe [Obama] is purposely and ruthlessly executing a hidden agenda to weaken and ultimately destroy the foundations of our country.” Their belief held that, under the guise of promoting a recovery, Obama was deliberately fomenting economic collapse in order to expand government power. “I do not want economic collapse,” the popular conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh explained in 2009. “The problem is this administration has no interest in it stopping right now.”
Similar kinds of conspiracy theories about the Bush administration could be found on the left. The difference is that the far left remained largely isolated from the political mainstream, much as the far right had been before Goldwater. The right-wing takeover of the GOP had brought the paranoid style into control of a major party.
Republican leaders could not repudiate even the most transparently absurd conspiracy theories circulating among their supporters. In a 2011 interview between NBC’s David Gregory and Eric Cantor, the House majority whip repeatedly danced around the question of whether the state of Hawaii had created a fake birth certificate in order to conceal the president’s secret, foreign birth. The exchange was both representative and revealing:
Gregory: There are elements of this country who question the president’s citizenship, who think that it—his birth certificate is inauthentic. Will you call that what it is, which is crazy talk?
Cantor: David, you know, I mean, a lot of that has been an, an issue sort of generated by not only the media, but others in the country. Most Americans really are beyond that, and they want us to focus. . . .
Gregory: Right. Is somebody [who] brings that up just engaging in crazy talk?
Cantor: Well, David, I, I don’t think it’s, it’s nice to call anyone crazy, OK?
Gregory: All right. Is it a legitimate or an illegitimate issue?
Cantor: And—so I don’t think it’s an issue that we need to address at all. I think we need to focus on . . .
Gregory: All right. His citizenship should never be questioned, in your judgment. Is that what you’re saying?
Cantor: It is, it is not an issue that even needs to be on the policy-making table right now whatsoever.
Obama’s reelection forced Republicans to recalibrate in a way that his first election did not. After 2012, the Republican Party established a committee to reexamine its operations. The ensuing report tiptoed carefully around most of the party’s ideological problems. It did, however, hint that its harsh antigovernment message and identification with the business class left many Americans with the sense Republicans did not care about them. While generally avoiding policy recommendations, it urged the passage of immigration reform, to give Republicans a chance to court the increasingly Democratic Latino vote. And indeed, as Obama’s second term opened, even many staunchly conservative Republicans—like Ryan, Boehner, and Rubio—pushed the party to pass immigration reform and clear the issue off the table in advance of the 2016 election.
There was, however, a flaw in the plan. The flaw was that it is not easy to ferociously incite your supporters into a state of terror against the president and then turn around and pragmatically cut deals with that same president. A mutually reinforcing cycle had taken hold, in which Republicans helped convince their voters that Obama represented a fundamental and unprecedented threat to freedom, and the conservative base pushed its leaders to oppose the president on those terms. Republican leaders found it immensely difficult to compromise with the president even on those occasions when their self-interest dictated doing so, because a large segment of their voters could not imagine that normal rules of politics applied during the Obama era: that the two parties had divergent but occasionally overlapping interests that could be mediated through negotiation. There is no negotiating with a president who sits at the heart of a subversive plot.
Conservative activists blocked the party leadership from any compromise on immigration. They likewise forced Republicans in Congress to shut down the federal government. The movement’s ideological cadres demanded that the party stand by its agenda of reducing taxes in a way that disproportionately benefit a small percentage of the highest earners; eliminating coverage for millions of Obamacare beneficiaries; opposing the minimum wage; and other stances with limited appeal to the broader electorate. But by the end of Obama’s presidency, Republican elites discovered that the fury they had harnessed against the president’s policies had raged completely beyond their control.
* * *
In 2011, Donald Trump, a figure from the world of tabloid gossip and reality television, appeared on the Obama-era political scene. Before this time, Trump had regularly floated the possibility that he would run for president, but he invariably decided not to follow through, and his political profile was an ever-mutating hodgepodge, sometimes endorsing liberal ideas like single-payer insurance and higher taxes for the rich, and other times embracing bigotry or standard right-wing tropes. The conspiratorial ferment over Obama’s citizenship attracted Trump, who insisted a treacherous scheme was afoot and promised to send investigators to uncover the “real” story. It seemed to amount to nothing more than his latest outrageous publicity stunt—with one small exception. The next year, Mitt Romney, after sewing up his party’s nomination, met with Trump and accepted his public endorsement, gripping hands and smiling like old friends. Why would a putatively mainstream figure go out of his way to associate himself with a controversial crank peddling a transparently bogus conspiracy theory? Because Trump’s racialized paranoia turned out to represent a deep core of the conservative vote Romney needed—far deeper, perhaps, than any Republicans were willing to admit, and perhaps even deeper than Romney realized at the time.
Conservatives had a fable about their takeover of the Republican Party, one that in its countless retellings over the decades had come to be accepted by them as a timeless truth. The story began with William F. Buckley, who had publicly broken ranks with some of the most irrational and bigoted elements of the right—anti-Semites, and followers of the John Birch Society, the latter of which not only opposed Dwight Eisenhower (as Buckley himself did) but considered him a communist agent. Buckley “upheld the honor of the mainstream conservative movement,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens in 2016, and so, even though liberals accused conservatives of pandering to racism, “the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious.” Having purged itself of bigotry, the fable went, the conservative movement then took over the Republican Party with appeals to the small-government beliefs of the majority of the public. Yes, they conceded, Goldwater had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but this was a minor slipup caused by his excessive zeal for the Constitution. As discussed in the first chapter, this perspective held that American passion for limited government accounted for conservatism’s appeal—if anybody was exploiting race, conservatives insisted, it was the Democrats, with their “tribal” appeals to “special interests.”
This willful delusion persisted through the Obama era—indeed, the pervasive racialized fear mongering on the right made it more necessary for Republicans to insist that conservatives’ ideas had inspired the right-wing uprising against the first black president. Charles Krauthammer lauded what he called “a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.” Yuval Levin agreed: “the Tea Party has also been intensely focused on recovering the U.S. Constitution, and especially its limits on government power.” But any close attention to what Tea Party activists actually said and believed would have dispelled this comforting fantasy. Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist, conducted a detailed study of Tea Party activists and discovered that they saw themselves beset by parasitic Democrats. “Along with illegal immigrants,” she wrote, “low-income Americans and young people loom large as illegitimate consumers of public benefits and services.” The Tea Party activists also felt gripped with “anxieties about racial, ethnic, and generational changes in American society.” Stanley Greenberg held extensive focus group discussions with Tea Party voters in 2013 in North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado, and described their worldview in detail. Their most intense belief held that Obama had used the power of expanded government to build a majority voting coalition of racial minorities, those on welfare and food stamps, those soon to be legalized via immigration reform, those getting free health care, and the like. They were “very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities.” Abstract libertarian theories about the role of government did not interest them. They wanted to keep in place government programs that benefited people like them, shut down border crossings, and roll back social change.
The truth is that, even in its most erudite forms, conservatism was never the haven of race-blind idealism its adherents liked to imagine. (Even the sainted Buckley, who supposedly cleansed the movement of ugly bigotry, had endorsed segregation, and then, a quarter century after it was outlawed in the American South, defended apartheid in South Africa.) Trump’s astonishing success in the Republican primaries blew to smithereens decades of conservative self-delusion. Here was a demagogue whose appeal barely intersected with the right’s abstract ideas about the role of the state. Rather than attack government for being unworkable or too large and proposing to shrink it, as good Reagan Republicans customarily do, he attacked it for being allegedly run by morons and promised to solve all problems by having it be run by his own great business genius. Trump promised to protect every cent of Social Security and Medicare. He cravenly exploited the bigotry of the Republican electorate, even mocking their gullibility. (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he boasted at one point.) Trump’s appeal stripped away the illusions about just what made so many Americans pull the Republican lever for so long. “If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support,” editorialized National Review in January 2016, well before Trump’s nomination seemed inevitable, “what would that say about conservatives?” Brett Stephens lamented in the Wall Street Journal, “It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.” By conservatives’ own logic, Trump’s nomination proved exactly that.
Trump’s rampage through the Republican primaries also demonstrated something else. It revealed that the grassroots Republican fury at Obama was not premised on any abstract vision of “constitutionalism”—indeed, it didn’t have anything to do with any particular actions Obama had taken. Obama did not provoke a backlash by passing health care reform or other measures, nor did he fail to consummate possible deals with the Republican Party. Trump revealed how little the party base cares about governing philosophy—Trump’s crude attacks on Obama, even though they were rooted in an absurd conspiracy theory, or perhaps exactly for this reason, were enough to establish his tribal loyalties. The revulsion of Obama by the party base was a racialized backlash, rooted more in the president’s identity than his policies, and despite the hand-wringing of his centrist critics, no different set of policies could have avoided it.
Worst of all, from the Republican point of view, Trump blew away whatever faint remaining hopes the party nurtured of healing its reputation. Trump was the very incarnation of every value abhorrent to the Obama coalition, the anti-Obama incarnate—loud, impulsive, ignorant, intolerant, backward-looking. Trump’s racism, misogyny, and contempt for expertise offended college-educated voters, racial minorities, and feminists, among others. And the America that saw itself in Trump’s vision rather than Obama’s was dying off. In its desperation to stop Obama, the conservatives had signed their own demographic death warrant.
Yes, Trump did win the Electoral College. In the wake of his triumph, jubilant Republicans boasted that the country had rejected Obama at last. Paul Ryan called Trump’s election “a repudiation of the status quo of failed liberal progressive policies” and “a mandate”—a bizarre description of an election in which his party finished second in the national vote.
In reality, Clinton failed to carry the Electoral College for a combination of reasons attributable largely to her personal image, rather than her association with the popular incumbent. Her poor decision to use a private email server received more news coverage than all policy issues combined, creating for her an image of indelible untrustworthiness that made many voters rule her out. Clinton was unable to overcome simultaneous attacks by Russian intelligence, which stole emails of her allies and leaked them selectively in order to generate negative coverage in the American media, and the FBI, whose director made an extraordinary intervention in the race’s final days to return the server issue to the forefront of the debate. Polls showed that voters considered her less honest and trustworthy than an opponent who was literally facing trial for fraud.
Republicans claimed Trump had won a mandate, which they could use to launch frenetic attacks upon the Obama legacy, not because they had any confidence that their ideas commanded the sustained support of the public, but because they knew that they did not. For eight years, Obama had filled them with the growing dread that the young president and his often-young supporters represented the future of a diversifying country alien to their own values. Trump’s surprise victory gave them a last-gasp chance to stave off defeat.
But it would come at a terrible long-term price. Any chance the party could distance itself from the brand damage of its association with America’s most famous bigot disappeared when his presidency became inevitable. Trump will leave a deep imprint on the psyche of young Americans, who mostly loathe him, and especially on immigrant communities, who associate him indelibly with nativist hate. In 1994, Republican Pete Wilson won the governorship in California by railing against illegal immigrants from Mexico. His state had supported Republicans in every presidential election from 1968 through 1988, and in 1992, Bill Clinton had won just 46% of the vote in a three-way race. California has tilted overwhelmingly Democratic since. Trump seems to have taken Wilson’s immigrant-demonization strategy as a model rather than a cautionary tale, but his party will face the consequences. Fifty years from now, there will be Latinos and Asian-Americans who, asked why they vote Democratic, give Trump’s name as an answer.
Conservative Republicans won power, but they lost the future, and they also lost the argument. The triumph of a blustering, cartoonishly dishonest and manifestly anti-intellectual candidate was a forceful display of the party’s retreat from seriousness. Their critique of Obama’s program amounted to doomsaying predictions that had failed to come to pass. Their alternative was a retread of failed policies and free market aphorisms sold to the public through bombastic sloganeering and social resentment. Trump is the poisoned chalice of a failed ideology. Obama, not Trump, is destined to supply the model for American governance in the decades to come.
* * *
The GOP has not been able to escape the political identity it carved for itself in reaction to 1960s liberalism—an identity that appealed to a country consisting mostly of blue-collar whites, but which has alienated the emerging majority. The Obama presidency completed the tectonic shifts that had begun in the 1960s. The civil rights movement drove southern whites out of the Democratic Party and into the GOP. It turned the Republicans into the party of blue-collar white America, and Democrats into the party of racially liberal (mostly college-educated) whites and racial minorities. It allowed Republicans to move sharply right, and to build a majority that dominated national politics for a quarter century. But the Obama era revealed a new world in which the parties’ identities, forged during this era, had hardened but their fortunes had reversed. Fittingly, many of Obama’s policies borrowed from and updated the moderate Republicanism that its old party had forsaken. Obamacare copied the success Mitt Romney, the lineal heir to the moderate Republican tradition, had achieved with health care reform in Massachusetts. Obama’s climate plan used a law passed under Nixon, and enjoyed the support of moderate Republican environmental regulators. His foreign policy embraced the ideas and frequently enjoyed the support of mainstream Republican foreign policy veterans. Obama had, in essence, turned the ethos of the banished moderate and liberal Republican wing—with its support for civil rights and openness to well-designed, market-friendly public solutions to social problems—into a highly effective blueprint for Democratic governance.
The Obama presidency was able not only to advance the interests of its new and growing coalition, but also to represent its values: humane, pragmatic, open to evidence and science, and welcoming to outsiders and diverse perspectives. Obama presented a new vision of America, to the world and to itself. And he had, to a degree hardly anybody recognized at the time, made his vision of a new America real.
Many Americans, those sympathetic to Obama’s aims as well as those opposed, spent his presidency believing he had largely failed. But this conclusion rested on the premise that Obama had undertaken to bring about a revolution, or a post-racial society, or the banishment of all political disagreement—none of which he had ever actually promised. What had Obama promised? To unleash structural transformation in American health care and education, to bring down the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, and to spare the economy from another depression. He had likewise promised thoughtful, honest governance—a “no drama” president, whose style embodied the famous Rudyard Kipling poem “If”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too . . .
In 2008, sixty-nine and a half million Americans voted to entrust the presidency to Barack Obama. Many believed in him deeply, even fervently. Their faith was vindicated.