It could work out OK for the GOP–but it probably won’t
by David Atkins
A little reminder from the New York Times:
“It’s civil war in the G.O.P.,” said Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative warrior who helped invent the political direct mail business.
The moment draws comparisons to some of the biggest fights of recent Republican Party history — the 1976 clash between the insurgent faction of activists who supported Ronald Reagan for president that year and the moderate party leaders who stuck by President Gerald R. Ford, and the split between the conservative Goldwater and moderate Rockefeller factions in 1964.
Some optimistic Republicans note that both of those campaigns planted the seeds for the conservative movement’s greatest success: Reagan’s 1980 election and two terms as president.
“The business community thought the supply-siders were nuts, and the country club Republicans thought the social conservatives scary,” William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said of those squabbles. “That all worked out O.K.”
From one perspective that is certainly true. While liberals have been winning the social wars, the economic battles have been shifting farther and farther to the right. Democrats certainly shouldn’t be crowing too early.
But I would be remiss not to point out that there is a huge difference between 1964 or 1980 and today: Republicans were able to cynically capitalize on resentment against the civil rights and environmental movements in an opportunistic ploy of breathtaking evil. The entirety of the politics of the last 50 years has been about little else.
At no point in the last 50 years was lowering the taxes on the wealthy a popular move, nor was empowering corporations over people. But for the last many decades Republicans had an ace up their sleeve. It turned out that a majority voters were willing to tolerate an untold host of otherwise unpopular policies benefiting the plutocratic class, as long as the Republican Party (and a significant chunk of Democrats as well) would promise to put the civil rights genie back in the bottle. For a silent majority of the country, loose women and uppity minorities were more scary than rich fat cats. That remained true from 1968 right up to just a few years ago.
It may be that conservatives can bounce back from this civil war to shine even more brightly and even more conservatively than before, as they have done in the past. But I don’t think so.
The Objectivist plutocratic policies of the last 50 years never were popular. A majority of the country never really bought into supply side economics. Reagan won elections not by convincing the public that giving lots of money to rich people would help the economy, but by promising to kick the butts of commies, feminists and welfare queens. The key insight of What’s the Matter with Kansas is that Kansans aren’t really voting to cut Charles Koch’s taxes: they’re voting to poke fingers in the eyes the of social engineering coastal liberals they resent.
The challenge for the GOP, of course, is that racism and sexism no longer have the electoral zing they used to. Many of the voters most animated by those issues are aging out of the electorate, and a much more inclusive and diverse new generation is replacing them.
All that’s left now is an appeal to literally the least popular parts of the conservative agenda–the ones that were previously quietly passed while voters were distracted by the bright shiny objects. The last Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote didn’t do so because voters liked his economic policies, but because he promised to be tougher against Muslims after 9/11. Republicans have always won on prejudice, not on economics.
Will the Republican Party manage to rise from the fires of its civil war with a new Objectivist image and dominate the electorate? Maybe. But I highly doubt it. That’s not what worked for them in 1964 or 1980. Prejudice did. And unfortunately for them, the country’s demographics are working against them this time around.
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