The Disappearing Republican Moderates

The Strange Death of the Republican Moderate
By TIMOTHY NOAH
Published: January 6, 2012

Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it “modern Republicanism.” With Eisenhower’s landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.

The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

By Geoffrey Kabaservice

482 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.
THE TEA PARTY AND THE REMAKING OF REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM

By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

245 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.
Of course it wasn’t. The familiar narrative is that William F. Buckley Jr. chipped away at it, starting in 1955, when he founded National Review; that after 1960 it was rendered irrelevant by the vitality of President John F. Kennedy and his cold war liberalism; and that it collapsed entirely in 1964 when the Republicans’ hard-right wing secured the nomination for Barry Goldwater. But were things really so simple as that? In “Rule and Ruin,” his wonderfully detailed new history of moderate Republicanism, Geoffrey Kabaservice makes a strong case that modern Republicanism was hardier than we remember. Kabaservice acknowledges its eventual defeat but argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s.

The story begins at the Eisenhower era’s end. Writing in 1961 about the return of “action and political dialogue to the college campus,” the young activist Tom Hayden cited three examples. The first was the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (which Hayden helped found), remembered today as a primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War. The second was the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (which Buckley helped found), remembered today for advancing the political careers of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The third was Advance, a magazine published by two Harvard undergraduates, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Today no one remembers Advance. Gilder and, to a lesser extent, Chapman are familiar names, but they’re known mainly as right wingers. Back then they were Rockefeller Republicans who played a significant role in rallying Republican Congressional support for the civil rights movement. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Kabaservice reports, it had proportionally greater support among Republicans than among Democrats (who had to fend off opposition from Southern segregationists). But Goldwater, the party’s “presumptive presidential nominee,” voted against the bill.

The Goldwater forces rolled over the moderates that year, with a fervor that their Tea Party legatees would find difficult to match. At the Republicans’ California state convention, moderates barely managed to block a platform resolution to “send Negroes back to Africa.” However extreme the conspiracy-minded Glenn Beck may seem, he was outdone by Robert Welch, the conspiracy-minded founder of the John Birch Society.

Kabaservice argues that Goldwater’s landslide defeat by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (which also helped reduce the number of Republicans in the House to its lowest level in nearly 30 years) actually strengthened the leverage of Republican moderates. In the next few years, liberal Republicans came to the fore, including John Lindsay, who was elected mayor of New York (defeating Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party ticket); Edward Brooke (of Massachusetts), who became the first popularly elected African-­American senator; George H. W. Bush, who won a House seat in his adopted state of Texas; and Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt), who briefly posed a serious threat to Richard Nixon’s presidential ambitions — a 1966 Harris poll had him leading the Republican field and defeating Johnson 54-46 — until he blew it all by attributing his initially favorable view of the Vietnam War to “brainwashing” from generals and diplomats. “In hindsight,” Kabaservice pointedly notes, “Romney was the G.O.P. moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency.”

The Nixon presidency initially seemed a boon for modern Republicans, since Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president. His cabinet appointments included moderates like William Rogers, Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and Walter Hickel. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, a longtime associate of Nelson Rockefeller, was widely deemed a moderate, too. And much of Nixon’s domestic agenda flirted with outright liberalism, particularly the poverty program devised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a career Democrat. But Nixon himself was not at heart an Eisenhower Republican so much as a calculating practitioner of realpolitik, and as he increasingly honed his message to appeal to conservative Southern Democrats (aided by his ex-moderate vice president, Spiro Agnew) he grew estranged from moderate Republicans — even as he often pursued liberal policies. Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the ’70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still.

Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” more than a few Tea Partiers “dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign.” But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-­government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-­Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.

This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it’s also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it’s the “earned” benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don’t necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year.

On some level, then, the Tea Party is a product of the very welfare-statism that the hard right sought to smother in 1964 and that so many Tea Partiers profess to loathe today. “U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups,” Skocpol and Williamson observe wryly. Government supplies the leisure that makes possible fervid and angry opposition to government. The Democrats built this Rube Goldberg structure, but they couldn’t have done it without help from “modern Republicans.” In at least that narrow sense, their legacy lives on.