Redstate

By TomlinsonDouthat Posted in History — Comments (54) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Promoted from the diaries by Jeff.

Warning: What follows is long. But its length is its point, in a way, since one must appreciate all that has gone into our current predicament to understand how grave the situation is.—T.D.

There is a piece of political wisdom attributed to Richard Nixon that goes something like this: For a Republican to win the nomination of his party, he has to run to the right, but to win the general election, he has to run to the center. In other words, his counsel is to divide the electorate into separate parts and give each what they want, when it is necessary to do so. This sounds like common sense, and there are certainly occasions when such an approach is probably advisable. But this strategy becomes very problematic when it is used too frequently.

The primary problem with this is the fact that it relies on dishonesty and cynical maneuvering. Of course, it is all too easy to sit on the sidelines and piously call for more honesty and less cynicism in modern politics. This has probably been the subject of more anodyne political commentary than anything outside of the need to be "positive." But surely, even to the non-pious, there is such a thing as too much dishonesty and cynicism, and any strategy that relies too heavily upon them will eventually approach that limit. And the problems that arise when you reach that limit are not just a matter of the honor or moral fiber of the nation, but are quite practical in nature and impossible to solve by further dishonesty and cynical maneuvering—or in just about any other way.

Nixon's governing and electoral strategy fell basically along the lines he is said to have suggested. (I put it this way since I can't find the original quote, if it exists.) He would give each competing faction of his party just enough to keep them on board for the next election, but never so much that their priorities would interfere with the priorities of any other faction. He gave blacks affirmative action (which also served to make problems for his enemies in the unions). He wooed the remaining segregationists with his opposition to busing. He gave liberals (then still a force in Republican politics) a whole array of federal programs, wage and price controls, Harry Blackmun, and the like. He kept Pat Buchanan on staff to hear what the conservatives wanted, but he mostly just appeased them with his willingness to keep fighting in Vietnam. And so on.

Politically, this approach worked well enough for him. He won in both 1968 and 1972 (and he came close in 1960). Both of his victories were somewhat atypical—there was a Democratic schism in 1968, and he faced an unusually weak opponent in 1972—but he probably would have won anyway, given the various dynamics at play. In any case, he did what he had to do to win (and then some).

But while this strategy kept enough people content enough with him to give him these electoral victories, it left none of them happy. Nixon was tolerated, not embraced. The practical implication of this for him was that, once the Watergate scandal was exposed, there was almost nobody who was willing to defend him. If Nixon had had a significant core of supporters who originally stood behind him 100%, then Watergate would still have shaken their confidence in him, but they still might have stood behind him 75%—good enough for them to vote in his favor during his impeachment trial. (Remember, he only would have needed 34 votes to remain in office.) But as it happened, most of his supporters initially only stood behind him 51% or so, and hence it didn't take much to turn them against him on balance. He knew that he could never get to 34 votes, and so resigned. But this, I think, was less the result of the severity of his crimes than of his lack of a political base.

(And it might also be worth noting that Nixon's cynicism and his desire for every possible marginal political advantage contributed both to his crimes in Watergate and to this fatal political circumstance.)

The implications of this for the party was similar. As president, Nixon had won the temporary and shallow support of large numbers of voters but the loyalty of none, either to himself or to his party—and especially not the latter, since he did little to campaign for congressional Republicans, which could have complicated his efforts to do the deals he was doing with the Democratic Congress in furtherance of his personal strategy. In fact, he must have degraded much pre-existing loyalty to the Republican party, leaving many voters with the impression that their priorities would be sold out whenever the party’s leadership saw a temporary advantage in it. The GOP's representation in Congress was fairly stable through the first six years of the Nixon administration before collapsing after Watergate in 1974, and a very weak Democratic presidential candidate was able to win in Nixon's wake in 1976. Nixon left his party in far worse shape than he found it, and it would take a very different approach to restore Republican fortunes. But that must wait for another essay.

After Nixon's fall, the mechanisms of American politics changed in such a way that made Nixon's "right, then center" strategy a more complicated proposition. When Nixon was politically active, primaries were only an ancillary part of the nomination process. A few of them existed, and they were handy to win, but the bulk of what Nixon did when he was running to the right was not campaigning as we think of it today, but getting delegates more directly: through activists, party bosses, and the endorsements of elected officials. To Nixon, then, running to the right meant convincing these people rather than the primary-voting public that he was sufficiently conservative. And once he went back to the center in the general election, the only ones who felt betrayed were this small core of activists and political professionals, who invariably had already made such great personal investments in their party and its candidates that there was little chance that they would bolt for the Democrats or another party. (This might explain why he felt he could get away with giving conservatives so little while he was in office.) They would only be less enthusiastic in their support, which was no great price in the usual course of things, but proved fatal to Nixon when his career veered from the usual course.

Today, however, nominations are won almost entirely through the primary process. As eagerly as candidates trot out their endorsements according to the old manner of politicking, this has changed the game considerably. To win a Republican nomination these days, one must convince not just hundreds of party and conservative activists that you are with them, but millions of conservative voters. This can only be done through the mass media, and this has the unfortunate effect, from the politician's perspective, of creating a record of his words.

This means that, while Nixon was able to (and one must presume he did) lie outright in the private assurances he gave the party activists about his intentions towards conservative governance, and to do so with relative impunity, any modern candidate trying to run to the right on the basis of such blatant dishonesty to the public would be caught out and exposed by a gleeful media. However, a version of the Nixonian strategy is still available to politicians who 1.) are able to phrase their positions very precisely, leaving loopholes to allow them to claim that they never really changed their position when, in fact, they did; or 2.) take genuinely principled positions which are so arrayed as to appeal to different groups in different ways. Both of these approaches allow politicians to switch the emphasis between the primaries and the general election without getting caught in a lie (or in too many lies, perhaps), and both of these require the politicians, once elected, to follow a governing strategy functionally identical to Nixon's—dividing up the coalition and keeping all the factions just happy enough to keep them voting.

George H.W. Bush governed in a manner similar to Nixon's in this respect, a phenomenon which had its roots in his 1988 campaign and was certainly encouraged by his innate pragmatism and moderate brand of conservatism. Bush's governance was friendlier to conservatism than Nixon's—a fact due in part, I would argue, to the fact that the primary system now gave more control to the conservative electorate, rather than activists and political professionals. However, the game was still the same, structurally.

Bush's Supreme Court appointments, for instance, were crafted to appease the main competing factions in his era's Republican party. He gave the conservatives Clarence Thomas, and he gave the moderates David Souter. And it worked. Both factions were appeased—but only for the moment. Neither faction was happy with him, and he had earned neither's loyalty.

Such loyalty would have helped him recover from the rough spots in his administration, like the 1990 budget agreement when he broke his "no new taxes" pledge. Perhaps the deal was necessary and unavoidable. But the voters, who had seen and would continue to see him sell out their own and others' priorities in order to keep the various factions barely satisfied, would have no particular reason to trust him on this point. Most did not.

Perhaps the worst thing to happen to Bush, politically speaking, was his astronomical approval ratings upon the initial success of the Gulf War. This revealed the potential of bringing even more voters into his electoral coalition (even though this was already quite sufficient, on the evidence of his 1988 showing). But if they were to be kept on board, he would have to balance the interests of even more competing factions, meaning even more compromises, half-measures, and sellouts, and pushing his established base of supporters even closer to the line separating satisfaction from dissatisfaction. The fact that the Gulf War and the attendant temptations of these high ratings occurred so early in his term, before so many of the most problematic actions of his administration, is suggestive. And Bush himself—a pragmatist by nature, and living in the shadow of a president who had won two enormous victories and was still widely beloved—was ill-suited to resist these temptations.

It is interesting to note that Bush pursued a similar strategy in his conduct of the Gulf War to what he did domestically. He might be said to have run to the right when speaking to the American public—Saddam as the new Hitler, for example—and then to have run to the center when dealing with the UN, the Democratic Congress, and Colin Powell. He tried to create a large coalition of nations—far larger than was militarily necessary, but necessary for winning approval from Congress. And to maintain this coalition, he had to abide by all sorts of limitations on military action—not marching on Baghdad, not coming to the aid of the rebelling Shi'ites, forbidding Israel from retaliating for attacks on its own soil, etc. These half-measures had disastrous effects, most particularly leaving Saddam with the impression that America was unserious about keeping him in line, which misunderstanding made his son's eventual war in Iraq inevitable. (And that war effort had been complicated by similar factors, of course.)

These half-measures proved politically disastrous as well, earning him no loyalty from the considerable Jacksonian segment of the electorate, which would have served him well in other matters. But he did not, nor did he earn the loyalty of anybody else. Hence, in 1992, he faced challenges from the right (Buchanan), from the left (Clinton), and from the center (Perot). Beset on all sides, he was roundly defeated.

Through the rest of the nineties, the leadership of the GOP shifted to Congress. And though the majorities of 1994 entered with a flourish of ideological zeal, this was soon tempered by the rising unpopularity of Newt Gingrich. This was especially so in the Senate, led initially by Bob Dole, whose penchant for compromise and deal-making had so degraded his standing with conservatives that he had to tack to the right in the general election of 1996, by picking Jack Kemp as his running mate and saying things about taxes that he clearly didn't mean. This didn't work either.

Nor did things improve in either house under Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert. Most candidates through this period tried to dispense enough conservative rhetoric to stave off primary challenges, but then ran to the center in the general in accordance with Nixon's adage, which by now had become received wisdom. More importantly, their legislative priorities were calibrated to facilitate this strategy, which meant that they would only stand up to the Clinton administration on issues that already enjoyed very wide support—like the partial-birth abortion ban and welfare reform. These, of course, were conservative priorities, and so conservatives were gratified to an extent by Republican efforts on behalf of these causes. But the fact that conservative priorities were only addressed when they also enjoyed broad support amongst moderates—of both parties, usually: bipartisanship was the buzzword of the era—was not overlooked. Republican politicians were happy to have the votes of conservatives, and they would expend a lot of rhetorical energy to get them, but they would not even try to give them anything of substance unless most moderates were already on board. In effect, it was moderates who were setting the agenda of America's conservative party. This was no way to earn the loyalty of conservatives of any stripe, nor did it have a healthy effect on the position of moderates within the Republican coalition, since they had no incentive to find a way to integrate their priorities with those of conservatives, which would have made the coalition more stable and the Republican agenda more broadly compelling.

There were two main explanations given to conservatives for this pattern of behavior. The first was that only so much could be expected with Bill Clinton waiting in the White House with his veto pen. Just stick with us until we get a Republican in there, they said, and then things will be different. Which was plausible enough, and we will soon see how that worked out. But before that we should consider the other explanation.

This was that only so much could be expected from a majority so narrow that it rests upon the votes of the likes of Arlen Specter, John Chaffee, and Jim Jeffords. True enough. If, during this period, the self-described conservative party had attempted to do anything actually conservative, then the effort would have been stopped cold by a small cohort of its own members.

But the problem with this explanation is that, so long as this sort of Nixonian politics is being practiced, no other outcome is likely. The Republicans of this era, like Bush and Nixon before them, were juggling the interests of competing factions, keeping everybody just happy enough but earning nobody's loyalty. Any effort they might make along these lines to expand their base of support to the point where such a small cohort would no longer be able to thwart the will of the majority of the caucus would run the serious risk of alienating some small but electorally necessary contingent of their existing supporters, which could easily be fatal to their loyalty to the party, since it had done so little to earn their loyalty. The Nixonian strategy, then, can lead to a vicious circle. If you pursue this strategy, you will probably do no better than a slim majority, which in turn necessitates a legislative strategy that can only serve to benefit a Nixonian electoral strategy. And every time this cycle is repeated, all the factions of the party lose a little bit more enthusiasm for the cause. During the nineties, Clinton was employing the Nixonian strategy himself, only his version was called triangulation. When two sides, with similar resources, employ similar strategies against each other, the likely result is a stalemate. And that is pretty much what happened, thereby ensuring that this vicious circle would continue to obtain for the GOP throughout his term in office.

This near-stalemate persisted in the 2000 election, which ended in a virtual tie. George W. Bush is more idealistic than his father, but his ideals like "compassionate conservatism" are just so constellated as to have precisely the same effect as his father's pragmatic approach. Plus, his ideals were guided by the likes of Karl Rove, whose approach to politics closely resembles the Nixonian strategy. Bush ran to the right of John McCain in the primaries, but he became much more compassionately conservative in the general. His overall agenda gave just enough to both sides to make both elements of this strategy plausible to voters.

But though Bush's 2000 victory was by the narrowest of margins, it was a victory nonetheless. Finally, as promised, the Republicans were in control of both of the (openly) political branches. (The GOP majority in the Senate was made a problematic proposition for a little while, but this was remedied in 2002.) We would finally see what great, conservative things could be accomplished without a Democratic president threatening a veto at every turn.

Which turned out to be not much. Taxes got cut a bit, but only temporarily. The Partial-Birth Abortion Act was finally signed, but this had little practical effect and, as noted above, should be viewed more as a moderate than a conservative accomplishment. Two (seemingly) good justices were confirmed, but this was not enough for most conservative purposes, because of the sorry state of the Supreme Court to begin with due to previous Republican presidents' many ill-advised appointments. And so on.

Most conservative victories of this era have come in the field of national security. However, since these were largely driven by recent, independent events like 9/11, they could not serve to assuage the long-standing discontent of any faction, but only to distract the discontented temporarily. Further, even these victories have been tempered with a number of failures and half-measures: John Bolton was not confirmed; no serious effort has been made to make the bureaucracies at the State Department and the CIA answerable to their elected superiors (and hence to the electorate); and there remain grave doubts about the Bush administration's seriousness with respect to the threats from Iran and elsewhere.

The gratitude and loyalty that conservatives—or any Republican—might feel towards Bush is therefore likely to be somewhat limited. Which is rather inconvenient for him, since the reasons they might have to be angry with him are rather more pronounced: the farm bill, the prescription drug benefit, immigration, steel tariffs, McCain-Feingold, No Child Left Behind, the minimum wage, "when people are hurting," etc.

Bush did these things willingly, but they probably would have been inevitable even otherwise, given the narrowness of the Republican congressional majorities (still reliant on the likes of Arlen Specter and now Lincoln Chaffee—though no longer Jeffords, who had already fired his single bullet at his former party), the narrowness of Bush's own victories, and especially the Nixonian/Rovian approach to elections and governance which requires the balancing of so many often-incompatible interests. According to the rules that Bush was playing by, he would have lost the presidency in 2004 if he had not adopted a political philosophy that allowed for or even required such deviations from orthodox conservatism.

And now today we have an entirely fresh crop of presidential candidates, each of whom appears to be trying exactly the approach Nixon advised, and which, over the years, has caused a dangerous amount of discontent within the party. Rudy Giuliani has remade himself entirely from a prototypical Rockefeller Republican that he was through the whole of his mayoralty (Nelson Rockefeller was tough on crime too) into what he would have us believe is a down-the-line conservative today, outside of the piddlingly small matter of abortion. Mitt Romney has tried to do much the same thing, but far more blatantly and even less convincingly. Both of these have phrased many of their newly conservative positions in just such a way that will allow them to run back to the center when the time comes. Likewise, Mike Huckabee has adopted a number of conservative positions on economic, foreign, and immigration policy, but quite unconvincingly and in stark contrast both to his record as governor and to many of his current talking points. Even straight-talking John McCain has discovered the value of immigration enforcement at a very convenient juncture, and he has obscured his a number of his unconservative positions of late.

But these aren't bugs, we're told, they're features! Only Giuliani can reach out to moderates, or only McCain, or only Huckabee—and only because it is presumed that they will do precisely the opposite of what they are promising conservative primary voters they will do, though perhaps they have phrased their promises delicately enough that the press will refrain from calling them on their lies. (Of the four candidates, only the Romney campaign has refrained from this line of argument, but not for reasons that do him any great credit.)

Most of these candidates seem to be reliable conservatives in at least one respect. But many, perhaps most conservative voters, now with such a long history of having their priorities addressed inadequately if at all by their political leaders, are not merely suspicious but quite certain that these candidates will betray their professed conservatism in all other respects whenever doing so might present the slightest political or personal advantage. Given the facts on the ground, this is an entirely reasonable assumption, but this is a very unhealthy state of affairs.

It is only at this stage that the Machiavellian genius of the Nixonian electoral strategy makes itself known in all its glory. For though the strategy's faults ought to be clear by now, those it leaves out in the cold—which, eventually, is just about everybody—do not blame the perpetrators of this strategy, but rather each other. Somehow, all the big-government boondoggles of the Bush era are not the fault of Bush himself but of the social conservatives who forced Bush upon the Republican party, even though most of these social conservatives opposed Bush on this as well, and though they were hardly the only ones to back Bush in 2000. And if Giuliani can't even bring himself to say that Roe v. Wade is bad law, little blame for this is laid at the feet of Giuliani himself, but rather at those who dare to support him, even though most of them would more pleased than anyone if Giuliani started speaking sense on this point.

The current situation has put Republicans at each others' throats, not on the basis of substantial disagreements—which are fairly trivial within the Republican primary electorate, at least—but on the basis of the mere prioritization of areas in which substantial agreement exists. Republicans of all stripes, having accepted as inevitable that their political leaders will sell them out, have turned the primaries from an exercise in choosing the best candidate into an effort to gain some measure of control over the way they will be sold out.

And most of the candidates have done nothing to disabuse them of this notion. They seem to buy into it too. It would not be a difficult matter for any of them to make a far more convincing case that they are, in fact, the conservatives they are presenting themselves as during the primary season (I have made some suggestions for Giuliani in this regard here), but this, we must presume, would complicate their efforts to run back to the center during the general election and while in the White House. Given our long experience with candidates who exhibit this behavior, it is reasonable to conclude that a vote for Giuliani is in effect (but not in intent) a vote to remove the issue of abortion from the Republican agenda altogether. And it is reasonable to conclude that a vote for Huckabee is in effect (but not in intent) a vote to eliminate economic conservatism as a political force. And it is reasonable to conclude that a vote for Romney is in effect (but not in intent) a vote for the proposition that all things are negotiable in the modern Republican party. And it is reasonable to conclude that a vote for McCain is in effect (but not in intent) a vote to give up on conservatism entirely and replace it with whatever it is that makes John McCain do what he does. A vote for any of the remaining candidates will be, in effect, an attack on some part of the Republican coalition, and it is understandable that those being attacked in this way should feel attacked. However, it is not any segment of the Republican electorate that created this situation, but the leadership of the Republican party over the course of many years.

All of this has led us to our present predicament, where Republican voters of every stripe, having been pushed for years closer and closer to the limit of their tolerance, are being asked to make even greater sacrifices, and will probably have to suffer even greater disappointments than those that are being promised. The Republican party cannot survive this much longer. It is on the verge of falling apart.

It doesn't have to be this way. There is another electoral strategy that has been proven to work; that, contrary to the deification of its main exponent, is accessible to mere mortals; and that will allow a conservative politician (or for that matter, a liberal one—but not a moderate) to appeal to a majority of the electorate while retaining the freedom to do what he thinks is right, and hence to create a reservoir of good will with those voters who share his principles. This is the Reagan way. Unfortunately, the only Republican candidate who seemed interested in such an approach has been rejected by the voters, but it is still—theoretically, at least—accessible to the remaining candidates. The details of this, however, will have to be left for another time.