A
Republican from the party establishment enters the presidential race and
immediately tops the polls. A few months later, he trails a politically
inexperienced but media-mesmerizing businessman. The story of Jeb Bush and
Donald Trump? Yes—but also the story of Mitt Romney and Herman Cain in late
2011. And a glimpse back at the early months of GOP contests in 2008 and 2012
suggests what’s to come in 2016: a Christian conservative leaps to first or
second place, surprising the pundits, only to lose at last to
the inevitable establishment nominee.
This
is no inscrutable design of fate. The Republican Party’s knack for nominating
Bushes and Romneys and McCains has a reason, just as there are reasons why
certain kinds of opponents catch on. Nate Cohn of the New York Times
supplies a piece of the puzzle in a story headlined “The Surprising Power of
Blue-State Republicans.” But there’s a deeper philosophical explanation for why
the GOP perpetually fails to nominate another conservative like Barry Goldwater
or Ronald Reagan—conservatism itself has lost its identity to politics.
The truth is
that leaders like McCain, Romney, and the Bushes represent the GOP as a whole
better than right-wing candidates do. Contrary to caricature, the GOP is not
just the party of the South and relatively underpopulated states in the
Midwest. Cohn’s headline calls the power of blue-state Republicans surprising,
but it shouldn’t be: the majority of Americans live in blue states—that’s why
Obama won the last two elections—and one would expect a national political
party to draw a great proportion of its presidential delegates from the states
where more Americans actually live.
Geography
is ideology, at least in part. Blue-state Republicans may still identify as
conservatives, but their conservatism is quite different from that of their
red-state counterparts.
As
Cohn reports: According to an analysis of Pew Research and exit-poll data,
blue-state Republicans tend to be more urban, more moderate, less religious and
more affluent. A majority of red-state Republicans are evangelical Christians,
believe society should discourage homosexuality, think politicians should do
what it takes to undermine the Affordable Care Act and want politicians to
stand up for their positions, even if that means little gets done in
Washington.
A
majority of blue-state Republicans differ on every count.
The
blue states hold the keys to victory for establishment candidates: “Mr. McCain
and Mr. Romney won every blue-state primary in 2008 and 2012,” Cohn notes, “making
it all but impossible for their more conservative challengers to win the
nomination.” Indeed, “Mr. Romney lost all but one red-state primary held before
his principal opponent dropped out of the race”—that opponent being Rick
Santorum, who a few months earlier had seemed utterly hopeless. Santorum lost
his Senate seat in blue-state Pennsylvania in 2006. But in red-state
presidential primaries six years later, he was formidable.
The
division between blue-state and red-state Republicans by itself, however, is
not enough to account for the party’s seeming inability to nominate anyone to
the right of Romney or McCain. There remains a mystery: in the past generation,
even as the GOP has come to be viewed as more right-wing than ever,
conservatives have actually fared worse in its presidential primaries. In just
16 years between 1964 and 1980, conservatives won the Republican nomination
twice. In the 36 years since Reagan left office, conservatives have never won
it.
There
were plenty of blue-state Republicans in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, of
course, and even back then the party had distinct factions of conservatives and
liberals—“Rockefeller Republicans,” as they were called. Why, then, did
conservatives succeed in 1964 and 1980 but never again?
The
answer lies in a development that appeared for the first time in 1988: the
emergence of a distinct religious right or social-conservative candidate. That
was Pat Robertson, who carried four states and won a little over 9 percent of
the overall primary vote—behind Bob Dole’s nearly 20 percent and George H.W.
Bush’s 68 percent. Robertson’s modest campaign, however, was like a hairline
crack in the foundations of the political right. Since then in every election
there has been a strong social-conservative contender in the Republican
contest: Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in
2012.
The
gap is filled by George W. Bush, an establishment candidate who, as a
born-again Christian himself, was “a uniter, not a divider” in appealing to
religious conservatives. And he left nothing to chance: his “compassionate
conservatism,” inspired in part by the evangelical thinker Marvin Olasky, was
pitched directly to Republicans of strong religious sensibilities, and he was
eager to accept whatever help Catholics like Fr. Richard John Neuhaus could
provide in building interdenominational political alliances. Bush’s efforts
came up short in November 2000, when he failed to win the popular vote—in part,
his campaign believed, because not enough churchgoers went to the polls for
him. But his re-election in 2004 was widely credited to success in mobilizing
“values voters.”
Before
1988, religious conservatives voted with other conservatives. The religious
right wasn’t yet organized in 1964, but “moral” voters were a significant
component of Goldwater’s base, sometimes to the candidate’s own embarrassment.
(He vetoed the distribution a short film, “Choice,” intended by his supporters
to rally voters with alarming images of race, sex, and crime.) Reagan in 1980
was the first Republican hopeful, and then nominee, to benefit from effectively
organized social-conservative groups like the Moral Majority.
The
development of the religious right or social conservatives as a bloc discrete
from conservatives generally proved to be the undoing of the right in
Republican presidential primaries. But this differentiation into two distinct
strands of conservatism, represented most of the time by competing avatars in
GOP primaries, was not the result of hubris or short-sightedness on the part of
religious conservatives. On the contrary, it represents a real philosophical
divide that can be seen in the different emphases, attitudes, and even
positions taken by social-conservative champions vis-à-vis other conservatives.
The
bottom line is that however different a Romney or McCain might be from the
average conservative Republican, figures like Huckabee and Santorum are even
more so. In tone, social conservatives are apt to be either provocative
(Buchanan, Santorum) or “folksy” (in the case of Huckabee and George W. Bush).
On issues, the religious right’s candidates have tended not only to emphasize
homosexuality and abortion more strongly than other Republicans, but
significantly they have also staked out more blue-collar economic positions,
most notably in the case of Buchanan but to varying degrees with Huckabee and
Santorum as well. (George W. Bush tried to square the circle and failed: his
compassionate conservatism was never accepted by the right’s old guard, who
sensed that the adjective implied an unflattering judgment about their
free-market philosophy.)
These
candidates represented, all in their own ways, a very different worldview from
that of the Goldwater-Reagan type of conservative. Christian conservatism is a
clear enough idea that it finds independent champions, and it’s politically
well enough organized that those champions can be “competitive losers” every
four years: never winning the nomination but always finishing with the second
or third highest aggregate vote totals. To state the obvious, if Christian
conservatism were really as similar to the rest of the right as the
conservative movement likes to insist, there would not be a “market” for a
separate “product.” The one candidate since 1988 to bridge the divide, George
W. Bush, left almost all conservatives feeling disappointed or betrayed by the
end of his presidency.
It’s
not a coincidence that this ideological and political differentiation expressed
itself immediately once the Reagan era had reached its end: before Reagan, an
all-purpose conservative represented to the religious right—whether organized
or nascent—a candidate who might give them the kind of country they wanted.
Goldwater’s defeat avoided the disillusionment that victory would have brought.
Reagan, however, showed that a general-purpose conservative once elected could
only go so far: he appointed Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor to the
Supreme Court, after all. Reagan himself did not come in for much blame, but
the spiritually diffident conservatism that he and Goldwater
represented—neither was more than nominally religious—was no longer enough.
The mythology
promulgated by the conservative movement has it that a candidate who naturally
expresses both Christian conservatism and Goldwater-Reagan conservatism must be
out there somewhere. But the record of three decades since Reagan won the
nomination with support from both camps suggests otherwise: in a full
generation, there has never been a candidate equally appealing to both kinds of
conservative. What reason is there to think there ever will be one?
Christian
conservatives may no longer be the only ones who have this problem. Libertarians
have had cause to celebrate in recent elections, as they too seem to have
emerged as a distinct force in the GOP, with presidential standard-bearers of
their own in the form of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. But here again, what this
differentiation suggests is that libertarian Republicans have a vision distinct
from and to some degree incompatible with—unsubstitutable for—that of other
conservative Republicans. When religious conservatives came to this awareness,
the results proved ruinous as far as winning the GOP presidential nomination
went, for themselves and for the older Goldwater-Reagan conservatives. Will
libertarians avoid the same trap?
Conservatives of
one faction or another may be tempted to see this sorry scene as a failure of
team spirit. But that would be a mistake, and a counterproductive one.
Christian conservatives are not being narcissistic when they field and flock to
their own candidates rather than to some generic right-wing Republican—a
Reagan-of-the-week of the Fred Thompson or Rick Perry variety, for example.
They are being true to their beliefs, including their political beliefs—just as
more pragmatic conservatives are being true to theirs in rejecting candidates
like Huckabee and Santorum.
The
proper way to address principled differences is not by disguising them. Once,
before an entrenched conservative movement existed to assure the right that
every GOP nominee was the gold standard in conservatism, the right had a few
institutions that put a bit of daylight between themselves and the Republican
Party, and these institutions—notably periodicals such as the ’50s and ’60s National
Review and Modern Age—devoted themselves to working out a coherent
yet capacious worldview, not by insisting on a politically convenient orthodoxy
but by honestly confronting the differences between various schools of thought.
Ironically, as intense as the intellectual battles were, and as inconclusive as
the quest for an agreeable-to-all “fusionist” formulation proved to be, in
practice traditionalists and libertarians voted together for Goldwater and
Reagan. They did so for their own reasons, and that was quite enough.
The
situation has been reversed ever since Reagan: every movement magazine, TV
pundit, radio host, and think-tanker has come to insist upon a single, bland,
homogenized ideology devised for maximum political convenience. The lively
fights on the right used to be in the pages of its books and magazines; now
they are at the ballot box, where the only winners turn out to be establishment
Republicans—and ultimately liberal Democrats.
The
right, not just the Republican Party, is deeply culturally and geographically
divided—much as the country is. That can be a source of strength, if it leads
to rigorous testing of premises and policies, to re-learning the arts of
persuasion and principled coalition-building: that is, building coalitions not
on the basis of fabricated principles but on honest differences openly engaged.
But all this is more than a political task, and alas, the real dirty secret of
the Republican establishment’s success has been getting the right to bet
everything on partisanship.
Daniel
McCarthy is the editor of The American Conservative.
Comments
The
conversation needs to change from mindless to substantive. Our economy is a
train wreck and debating morality to fix it is irrelevant. Granted, morality
needs to improve, but that happens as citizens demand it. Politicians need to
describe how they would improve our economy with more sensible policies.
Republicans
need to emphasize the failure of socialist policies and the dangers of sovereign
debt. They should refuse to answer any
questions about social issues, because these questions are irrelevant to our
economic problems. They should stress immediate fixes to reverse job loss and
propose cutting unnecessary immigration, imposing tariffs on imports and removing
unnecessary regulations created by the global warming hoax and the failed European
socialist policies adopted by the Obama Administration.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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