Wildalaska
Moderator
I asked Frum if the movement still existed. “We’ll have people formed by the conservative movement making decisions for the next thirty to forty years,” he said. “But will they belong to a self-conscious and cohesive conservative movement? I don’t think so. Because their movement did its work. The core task was to stop and reverse, to some degree, the drift of democratic countries after the Second World War toward social democracy. And that was done.”
As we started to leave, Frum smiled. “One of Buckley’s great gifts was the gift of timing,” he said. “To be twenty-five at the beginning and eighty-two at the end! But I’m forty-seven at the end.”
When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—“and now I feel estranged,” he said. “I just don’t feel it’s exciting, I don’t feel it’s true, fundamentally true.” In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed “true.” Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. “American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn’t a big one,” he said. “The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don’t know if they can.” He added, “You go to Capitol Hill—Republican senators know they’re ****ed. They have that sense. But they don’t know what to do. There’s a hunger for new policy ideas.”
The Heritage Foundation Web site currently links to video presentations by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, “challenging Americans to consider, What Would Reagan Do?” Brooks called the conservative think tanks “sclerotic,” but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley—who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley—refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a “believing Christian.” At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn’t measure up to Commentary’s intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: “It’s a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals.”
The orthodoxy that accompanies this kind of insularity has had serious consequences: for years, neither National Review nor Commentary was able to admit that the Iraq war was being lost. Lowry, who received the editorship from Buckley before he turned thirty, told me that he particularly regretted a 2005 cover story he’d written with the headline “WE’RE WINNING.” He said, “Most of the right was in lockstep with Donald Rumsfeld. We didn’t want to admit we were losing and said anyone who said otherwise was a defeatist. One thing I’ve loved about conservatism is its keen sense of reality, and that was totally lost in 2006.” Last year, National Review ran a cover article on global warming, which Lowry, like Brooks, Frum, and other conservatives, listed among the major issues of our time, along with wage stagnation and the breakdown of the family. Although the article, by Jim Manzi, proposed market solutions, the response among some readers, Lowry said, was “ ‘How dare you?’ A bunch of people out there don’t want to hear it—they believe it’s a hoax. That’s the head-in-the-sand response.”
A similar battle looms between traditional supply-side tax cutters and younger writers like National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who has proposed greatly expanding the child tax credit—using tax policy not to reduce the tax burden across the board, in accord with conservative orthodoxy, but to help families. These challenges to dogma, however tentative, are being led by Republican constituencies that have begun to embrace formerly “Democratic issues.” Evangelical churches are concerned about the environment; businesses worry about health care; white working-class voters are angry about income inequality. But nothing focusses the mind like the prospect of electoral disaster: last November, Lowry and Ponnuru co-wrote a cover story with the headline “THE COMING CATACLYSM.”
It’s probably not an accident that the most compelling account of the crisis was written by two conservatives who are still in their twenties and have made their careers outside movement institutions. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, editors at the Atlantic Monthly, are eager to cut loose the dead weight of the Gingrich and Bush years. In their forthcoming book, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday), Douthat and Salam are writing about, if not for, what they call “Sam’s Club Republicans”—members of the white working class, who are the descendants of Nixon’s “northern ethnics and southern Protestants” and the Reagan Democrats of the eighties. In their analysis, America is divided between the working class (defined as those without a college education) and a “mass upper class” of the college educated, who are culturally liberal and increasingly Democratic. The New Deal, the authors acknowledge, provided a sense of security to working-class families; the upheavals of the sixties and afterward broke it down. Their emphasis is on the disintegration of working-class cohesion, which they blame on “crime, contraception, and growing economic inequality.” Douthat and Salam are cultural conservatives—Douthat became a Pentecostal and then a Catholic in his teens—but they readily acknowledge the economic forces that contribute to the breakdown of families lacking the “social capital” of a college degree. Their policy proposals are an unorthodox mixture of government interventions (wage subsidies for lower-income workers) and tax reforms (Ponnuru’s increased child-credit idea, along with a revision of the tax code in favor of lower-income families). Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart. Nor are they prepared to accept as large a role for government as required by the deep structural problems they identify. Douthat and Salam are as personally remote from working-class America as any élite liberal; Douthat described their work to me as “a data-driven attempt at political imagination.” Still, any Republican politician worried about his party’s eroding base and grim prospects should make a careful study of this book.
Frum’s call for national-unity conservatism and Douthat and Salam’s program for “Sam’s Club Republicans” are efforts to shorten the lean years for conservatives, but political ideas don’t materialize on command to solve the electoral problems of one party or another. They are generated over time by huge social transformations, on the scale of what took place in the sixties and seventies. “They’re not real, they’re ideological constructs,” Buchanan said, “and you can write columns and things like that, but they don’t engage the heart. The heart was engaged by law and order. You reached into people—there was feeling.”
Sam Tanenhaus summed up the 2008 race with a simple formula: Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama. From the ruins of Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, conservatives began the march that brought them fully to power sixteen years later. If Obama wins in November, it will have taken liberals thirty-six years. Tanenhaus pointed out how much of Obama’s rhetoric about a “new politics” is reminiscent of McGovern’s campaign, which was also directed against a bloated, corrupt establishment. In “The Making of the President 1972,” Theodore White quotes McGovern saying, “I can present liberal values in a conservative, restrained way. . . . I see myself as a politician of reconciliation.” That was in 1970, before McGovern was defined as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” and he defined himself as a rigid moralist more interested in hectoring middle Americans than in inspiring them.
Obama, of course, is an entirely different personality in a different time, but the interminable primary campaign has shown his coalition to look very much like McGovern’s: educated, upper-income liberal voters; blacks; and the young. Nixon beat McGovern among the latter even after the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen; but times have changed so drastically that, according to Pew Research Center surveys, almost sixty per cent of voters under thirty now identify more strongly with the Democrats, doubling the Party’s advantage among the young over Republicans since 2004. And the demographic work of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” showed that the McGovern share of the electorate—minorities and educated professionals working in post-industrial jobs—is expanding far faster than the white working class. This was the original vision of a McGovern adviser named Fred Dutton, whose 1971 book, “Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s,” cited by Perlstein, foresaw a rising “coalition of conscience and decency” among baby boomers. The new politics was an electoral disaster in 1972, but it may finally triumph in 2008.
If not, it will be because Democrats still can’t win the Presidency without the working-class Americans who remain the swing vote and, this year, are up for grabs more than ever. Hillary Clinton has denied Obama a lock on the nomination by securing large majorities of swing voters, beginning in New Hampshire and culminating last week in West Virginia. It took the Obama campaign months to realize that a 2008 version of the McGovern coalition will barely be sufficient to win the nomination, let alone the general election. The question is how Obama can do better with the crucial slice of the electorate that he hasn’t been able to capture. Recently, he has gone from bowling in Pennsylvania and drinking Bud in Indiana to talking about his single mother, his wife’s working-class roots, and his ardent patriotism on the night of his victory in North Carolina. But the problem can’t be solved by symbols or rhetoric: for a forty-six-year-old black man in an expensive suit, with a Harvard law degree and a strange name, to walk into V.F.W. halls and retirement homes and say, “I’m one of you,” seems both improbable and disingenuous.
The other extreme—to muse aloud among wealthy contributors, like a political anthropologist, about the values and behavior of the economically squeezed small-town voter—is even more self-defeating. Perhaps Obama’s best hope is to play to his strength, which is a cool and eloquent candor, and address the question of liberal élitism as frontally as he spoke about race in Philadelphia two months ago. He would need to say, in effect, “I know I’m not exactly one of you,” and then explain why this shouldn’t matter—why he would be just as effective a leader for the working and middle class as his predecessors Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, who were élites of a different kind. Above all, Obama should absorb what the most thoughtful conservatives already know: that these voters see the economic condition of the country as inextricable from its moral condition.
Last month, I saw John McCain speak in a tiny town, nestled among the Appalachian coal hills of eastern Kentucky, called Inez. He was in the middle of his Time for Action Tour of America’s “forgotten places” (including Selma, Alabama; Youngstown, Ohio; and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans). It was a transparent effort to stay in the media eye and also to say, as his speechwriter Mark Salter later told me, “I’m not going to run an election like the last couple have been run, trying to grind out a narrow win by increasing the turnout of the base. I don’t want to run a campaign like that because I don’t want to be a President like that. I want to be your President even if you don’t vote for me.” As every new conservative book points out, the Bush-Rove realignment strategy would fail miserably this year, anyway.
Inez is the place where Lyndon Johnson came to declare war on poverty, in 1964. He sat on the porch of a ramshackle, tin-roof house, which still stands (just barely) on a hillside above Route 3, looking a little like a museum of rural poverty in a county that has recently prospered because of coal. McCain was to appear in the county courthouse, on the short main street of Inez, and the middle-aged men I sat with in the second-floor courtroom all remembered Johnson’s visit and had nothing but good things to say about his anti-poverty programs. Kennis Maynard, the county prosecutor, a cheerful, thickset man in a blue suit, had saved enough money for law school from a job in the mines that he got with the help of a federal work program. His family was so poor that they were happy to accept government handouts of pork, canned beans, and cheese. The courthouse in which we were sitting was a New Deal project, circa 1938. Maynard, like the other men, like most of nearly all-white Martin County, is Republican—mainly, he said, because of cultural issues like abortion. But Maynard and the others said that McCain had better talk about jobs and gas prices if he wanted to keep his audience.
As we started to leave, Frum smiled. “One of Buckley’s great gifts was the gift of timing,” he said. “To be twenty-five at the beginning and eighty-two at the end! But I’m forty-seven at the end.”
When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—“and now I feel estranged,” he said. “I just don’t feel it’s exciting, I don’t feel it’s true, fundamentally true.” In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed “true.” Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. “American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn’t a big one,” he said. “The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don’t know if they can.” He added, “You go to Capitol Hill—Republican senators know they’re ****ed. They have that sense. But they don’t know what to do. There’s a hunger for new policy ideas.”
The Heritage Foundation Web site currently links to video presentations by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, “challenging Americans to consider, What Would Reagan Do?” Brooks called the conservative think tanks “sclerotic,” but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley—who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley—refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a “believing Christian.” At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn’t measure up to Commentary’s intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: “It’s a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals.”
The orthodoxy that accompanies this kind of insularity has had serious consequences: for years, neither National Review nor Commentary was able to admit that the Iraq war was being lost. Lowry, who received the editorship from Buckley before he turned thirty, told me that he particularly regretted a 2005 cover story he’d written with the headline “WE’RE WINNING.” He said, “Most of the right was in lockstep with Donald Rumsfeld. We didn’t want to admit we were losing and said anyone who said otherwise was a defeatist. One thing I’ve loved about conservatism is its keen sense of reality, and that was totally lost in 2006.” Last year, National Review ran a cover article on global warming, which Lowry, like Brooks, Frum, and other conservatives, listed among the major issues of our time, along with wage stagnation and the breakdown of the family. Although the article, by Jim Manzi, proposed market solutions, the response among some readers, Lowry said, was “ ‘How dare you?’ A bunch of people out there don’t want to hear it—they believe it’s a hoax. That’s the head-in-the-sand response.”
A similar battle looms between traditional supply-side tax cutters and younger writers like National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who has proposed greatly expanding the child tax credit—using tax policy not to reduce the tax burden across the board, in accord with conservative orthodoxy, but to help families. These challenges to dogma, however tentative, are being led by Republican constituencies that have begun to embrace formerly “Democratic issues.” Evangelical churches are concerned about the environment; businesses worry about health care; white working-class voters are angry about income inequality. But nothing focusses the mind like the prospect of electoral disaster: last November, Lowry and Ponnuru co-wrote a cover story with the headline “THE COMING CATACLYSM.”
It’s probably not an accident that the most compelling account of the crisis was written by two conservatives who are still in their twenties and have made their careers outside movement institutions. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, editors at the Atlantic Monthly, are eager to cut loose the dead weight of the Gingrich and Bush years. In their forthcoming book, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday), Douthat and Salam are writing about, if not for, what they call “Sam’s Club Republicans”—members of the white working class, who are the descendants of Nixon’s “northern ethnics and southern Protestants” and the Reagan Democrats of the eighties. In their analysis, America is divided between the working class (defined as those without a college education) and a “mass upper class” of the college educated, who are culturally liberal and increasingly Democratic. The New Deal, the authors acknowledge, provided a sense of security to working-class families; the upheavals of the sixties and afterward broke it down. Their emphasis is on the disintegration of working-class cohesion, which they blame on “crime, contraception, and growing economic inequality.” Douthat and Salam are cultural conservatives—Douthat became a Pentecostal and then a Catholic in his teens—but they readily acknowledge the economic forces that contribute to the breakdown of families lacking the “social capital” of a college degree. Their policy proposals are an unorthodox mixture of government interventions (wage subsidies for lower-income workers) and tax reforms (Ponnuru’s increased child-credit idea, along with a revision of the tax code in favor of lower-income families). Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart. Nor are they prepared to accept as large a role for government as required by the deep structural problems they identify. Douthat and Salam are as personally remote from working-class America as any élite liberal; Douthat described their work to me as “a data-driven attempt at political imagination.” Still, any Republican politician worried about his party’s eroding base and grim prospects should make a careful study of this book.
Frum’s call for national-unity conservatism and Douthat and Salam’s program for “Sam’s Club Republicans” are efforts to shorten the lean years for conservatives, but political ideas don’t materialize on command to solve the electoral problems of one party or another. They are generated over time by huge social transformations, on the scale of what took place in the sixties and seventies. “They’re not real, they’re ideological constructs,” Buchanan said, “and you can write columns and things like that, but they don’t engage the heart. The heart was engaged by law and order. You reached into people—there was feeling.”
Sam Tanenhaus summed up the 2008 race with a simple formula: Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama. From the ruins of Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, conservatives began the march that brought them fully to power sixteen years later. If Obama wins in November, it will have taken liberals thirty-six years. Tanenhaus pointed out how much of Obama’s rhetoric about a “new politics” is reminiscent of McGovern’s campaign, which was also directed against a bloated, corrupt establishment. In “The Making of the President 1972,” Theodore White quotes McGovern saying, “I can present liberal values in a conservative, restrained way. . . . I see myself as a politician of reconciliation.” That was in 1970, before McGovern was defined as the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” and he defined himself as a rigid moralist more interested in hectoring middle Americans than in inspiring them.
Obama, of course, is an entirely different personality in a different time, but the interminable primary campaign has shown his coalition to look very much like McGovern’s: educated, upper-income liberal voters; blacks; and the young. Nixon beat McGovern among the latter even after the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen; but times have changed so drastically that, according to Pew Research Center surveys, almost sixty per cent of voters under thirty now identify more strongly with the Democrats, doubling the Party’s advantage among the young over Republicans since 2004. And the demographic work of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” showed that the McGovern share of the electorate—minorities and educated professionals working in post-industrial jobs—is expanding far faster than the white working class. This was the original vision of a McGovern adviser named Fred Dutton, whose 1971 book, “Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s,” cited by Perlstein, foresaw a rising “coalition of conscience and decency” among baby boomers. The new politics was an electoral disaster in 1972, but it may finally triumph in 2008.
If not, it will be because Democrats still can’t win the Presidency without the working-class Americans who remain the swing vote and, this year, are up for grabs more than ever. Hillary Clinton has denied Obama a lock on the nomination by securing large majorities of swing voters, beginning in New Hampshire and culminating last week in West Virginia. It took the Obama campaign months to realize that a 2008 version of the McGovern coalition will barely be sufficient to win the nomination, let alone the general election. The question is how Obama can do better with the crucial slice of the electorate that he hasn’t been able to capture. Recently, he has gone from bowling in Pennsylvania and drinking Bud in Indiana to talking about his single mother, his wife’s working-class roots, and his ardent patriotism on the night of his victory in North Carolina. But the problem can’t be solved by symbols or rhetoric: for a forty-six-year-old black man in an expensive suit, with a Harvard law degree and a strange name, to walk into V.F.W. halls and retirement homes and say, “I’m one of you,” seems both improbable and disingenuous.
The other extreme—to muse aloud among wealthy contributors, like a political anthropologist, about the values and behavior of the economically squeezed small-town voter—is even more self-defeating. Perhaps Obama’s best hope is to play to his strength, which is a cool and eloquent candor, and address the question of liberal élitism as frontally as he spoke about race in Philadelphia two months ago. He would need to say, in effect, “I know I’m not exactly one of you,” and then explain why this shouldn’t matter—why he would be just as effective a leader for the working and middle class as his predecessors Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, who were élites of a different kind. Above all, Obama should absorb what the most thoughtful conservatives already know: that these voters see the economic condition of the country as inextricable from its moral condition.
Last month, I saw John McCain speak in a tiny town, nestled among the Appalachian coal hills of eastern Kentucky, called Inez. He was in the middle of his Time for Action Tour of America’s “forgotten places” (including Selma, Alabama; Youngstown, Ohio; and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans). It was a transparent effort to stay in the media eye and also to say, as his speechwriter Mark Salter later told me, “I’m not going to run an election like the last couple have been run, trying to grind out a narrow win by increasing the turnout of the base. I don’t want to run a campaign like that because I don’t want to be a President like that. I want to be your President even if you don’t vote for me.” As every new conservative book points out, the Bush-Rove realignment strategy would fail miserably this year, anyway.
Inez is the place where Lyndon Johnson came to declare war on poverty, in 1964. He sat on the porch of a ramshackle, tin-roof house, which still stands (just barely) on a hillside above Route 3, looking a little like a museum of rural poverty in a county that has recently prospered because of coal. McCain was to appear in the county courthouse, on the short main street of Inez, and the middle-aged men I sat with in the second-floor courtroom all remembered Johnson’s visit and had nothing but good things to say about his anti-poverty programs. Kennis Maynard, the county prosecutor, a cheerful, thickset man in a blue suit, had saved enough money for law school from a job in the mines that he got with the help of a federal work program. His family was so poor that they were happy to accept government handouts of pork, canned beans, and cheese. The courthouse in which we were sitting was a New Deal project, circa 1938. Maynard, like the other men, like most of nearly all-white Martin County, is Republican—mainly, he said, because of cultural issues like abortion. But Maynard and the others said that McCain had better talk about jobs and gas prices if he wanted to keep his audience.
