“May you live in interesting times” is said to be a Chinese curse. The same kind of curse may apply to people who support interesting parties. There is no doubt that the Republicans are more interesting than the Democrats at the moment — their rhetoric is more incendiary, their divisions more profound, their behavior more outlandish. But the very antics that encourage people to tune in to the presidential debates also discourage them from pulling the voting lever: Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House in November seem to be getting higher largely because she is a safe pair of hands.
Some of the responsibility for this rests with Donald Trump’s singular presidential campaign. No previous American political candidate has broken the rules of politics so completely — labeling entire ethnic groups as “rapists,” for example. And no recent American political candidate has blurred the line between politics and entertainment so thoroughly.
But two things make Trump’s candidacy both more interesting and more worrying. The first is that he’s more of an exclamation mark than an aberration. The Republican Party has been playing with fire for years: This is a political organization that, because of its intransigence, has closed down America’s government (and reduced its credit rating), and that has nominated the ridiculously unqualified Sarah Palin for the vice presidency. The second is that Trump is not always wrong. Establishment conservatives like Jeb Bush cast the civil war over the party’s identity as a battle between responsible politicians like himself and irresponsible rabble rousers like Trump. But for all his carnival-barking persona, Trump has rightly condemned the establishment for supporting tax breaks for the rich and government handouts for corporate cronies.
“Why the Right Went Wrong” and “Too Dumb to Fail” are both attempts to make sense of all this. On the face of it E. J. Dionne Jr. and Matt K. Lewis could hardly be more different. Dionne is a much-garlanded member of the liberal establishment — a fellow of the Brookings Institution, a Washington Post columnist and a fixture on big media. Lewis is a product of the conservative counterestablishment as reinvented by the Internet revolution. He writes regularly for The Caller, as well as The Week and The Daily Beast, and records a weekly podcast, “Matt Lewis and the News.” But they both agree that the buffoonery on the right is bad not just for conservatism but for America.
Dionne’s book is the more substantial of the two: a history of the right from Goldwater to the present that also finds time to explore some of the highways and byways of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. Dionne argues, in effect, that there is nothing new under the conservative sun. The American right has been defined by a cycle of broken promises and bitter disappointments since the 1960s. Right-wing politicians whip up their troops by promising to abolish big government or restore traditional values, only to compromise with reality when they come to office. And those troops react to disappointment by embracing an ever more reactionary brand of radicalism. The proportion of Republicans who define themselves as “very conservative” has nearly doubled from 1995 to 2015, from 19 percent to 33 percent. This cycle is rendered all the more dangerous by the fact that the right is an alliance of three groups that seek different things — libertarians who want to shrink government, moralists who want to restore ancient verities and nationalists who want to assert America’s power globally.
Dionne demonstrates his thesis with a wealth of historical examples. The “old” radical right displayed the same combination of paranoia and inventiveness as today’s radical right. Phyllis Schlafly’s widely read “A Choice Not an Echo” from 1964 revealed the “inside story” of how “secret kingmakers” and “hidden persuaders” betrayed conservatism, while Richard Viguerie invented direct-mail campaigning. And storied conservative politicians like Nixon and Reagan displayed the same tortured relationship with “the movement” as contemporary establishment Republicans do. Nixon invented the right’s Southern strategy as a campaigner while expanding the Great Society as president. Ronald Reagan genially defied his base on occasion, offering amnesty to illegal immigrants and doing business with Mikhail Gorbachev, and left George H. W. Bush to reap the whirlwind.
George W. Bush’s presidency was conservatism’s most ambitious attempt to come to terms with its internal contradictions. Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist, believed that he could deal with the cycle of disappointment by orchestrating a “rolling realignment” of American politics — that is, bringing more and more middle-of-the-road voters into the conservative fold by addressing social problems through compassionate conservatism and economic anxieties through tax cuts and privatization. But rather than resolving conservatism’s contradictions, Bush heightened them. His big-spending ways infuriated small-government conservatives; his support for immigration reform infuriated nativists; and his general incompetence, demonstrated at its worst in the war of choice in Iraq, led to a collective nervous breakdown on the right.
Dionne brings some notable qualities to telling this story: E. J. the Brookings scholar knows the academic literature inside out while E. J. the journalist is on first-name terms with many leading conservatives. Dionne is notably fair-minded. Though he makes no bones about his own liberal sympathies, he tries hard to understand the frustrations of white working-class voters who have seen their living standards stagnate and their cultural values ridiculed. Unfortunately, the one quality that he does not bring is discipline; his book is much too long and frequently disorganized. Dionne meanders back and forth: Long past the middle of the book he interrupts a discussion of the Tea Party to give an extended history of the rise of the religious right. He never uses one example when he can think of a dozen. He doesn’t just tell us that John McCain reduced his staff from 120 to 50 in July 2007. He insists on crediting this momentous fact in the main text to Dan Balz and Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post. Less would have been more.
Lewis’s knockabout style is a relief after Dionne’s workmanlike prose. He argues that the conservative movement has been captured by “empty-headed talking point reciters, rookie politicians who’ve never managed anything in their lives, media clowns such as Donald Trump, dim bulbs in tight pants or short skirts, professionally outraged shout-fest talking heads and total political neophytes.” He notes that the movement is full of overdogs pretending to be underdogs. Ted Cruz, the Tea Party’s leading champion, was educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School and is married to a Goldman Sachs executive. He accuses these assorted freaks of caring more about stoking outrage than in governing the Republic. The more outrage they provoke the more money they can raise — and the more money they can raise the more outrage they can stoke. But he fails to match stylistic panache with intellectual substance.
Book Review Newsletter
Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Some of his argument is familiar. The commentator David Frum in particular has emphasized the way that the party has been captured by self-interested elites. Some of it is self-contradictory: Is the problem that conservatives are amateurs or that they are professionals who are more interested in outrage than good government? And some of it is mistaken: Under the most recent Republican president, know-nothings did much less harm than neoconservatives.
Dionne and Lewis both conclude their books with suggestions on how to fix the right. Dionne argues that conservatives need to recapture the reformist spirit that Dwight Eisenhower embodied: They have to come to terms with the modern world in order to steer it in a more congenial direction. Lewis argues that conservatives must recover the enthusiasm for ideas they had in the Reagan era.
Neither recommendation is particularly convincing (indeed, Dionne almost acknowledges as much in his typically belt-and-braces conclusion). The right has powerful incentives to continue on the same path. The fact that the electorate is smaller and whiter in off-year elections means that the Republican Party has a strong grip on the House of Representatives, and the fact that even a wooden candidate like Mitt Romney came within a few points of winning the 2012 election means that it can justify doubling down on the same old strategy.
Moreover, the forces that are disfiguring the right are likely to spread in future years, consuming the Democrats in much the same way as they have consumed the Republicans. The stagnation of the living standards of average Americans is creating widespread angst. The culture wars are extending to new areas. The Internet-enabled news-cum-entertainment industry stokes political resentments even as it creates epistemic anarchy. Interest groups are finding ever more ingenious ways to pretzel the political process. Interesting times don’t remain confined to one part of the political spectrum for very long.
WHY THE RIGHT WENT WRONG
Conservatism — From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
532 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
TOO DUMB TO FAIL
How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots)
By Matt K. Lewis
230 pp. Hachette Books. $28.
No comments:
Post a Comment