The Atlantic (Opinion)
By David Frum
Jan/Feb Issue
The
angriest and most pessimistic people in America aren’t the hipster
protesters who flitted in and out of Occupy Wall Street. They aren’t the
hashtavists of #BlackLivesMatter.
They aren’t the remnants of the American labor movement or the savvy
young dreamers who confront politicians with their American accents and
un-American legal status.
The
angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used
to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not
poor; people who are
irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male
became an accusation rather than a description.
You
can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations
for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites
without a college degree
express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in
the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and
substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.
White
Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in
American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even
the political party they typically
vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which
they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed
off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the
pollsters, “That’s my guy.”
They
aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in
ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this
country used to be better for
people like them—and they want that older country back.
You
hear from people like them in many other democratic countries too.
Across Europe, populist parties are delivering a message that combines
defense of the welfare state
with skepticism about immigration; that denounces the corruption of
parliamentary democracy and also the risks of global capitalism. Some of
these parties have a leftish flavor, like Italy’s Five Star Movement.
Some are rooted to the right of center, like
the U.K. Independence Party. Some descend from neofascists, like
France’s National Front. Others trace their DNA to Communist parties,
like Slovakia’s governing Direction–Social Democracy.
These
populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health
care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against
bankers and technocrats
who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims
and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that
depresses wages and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican
because they fear the Democrats want to take from
them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their
view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack
Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to
fear more and more strongly that their party
does not have their best interests at heart.
Against
all evidence, GOP donors interpreted the Tea Party as a movement in
favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
A majority of Republicans worry that corporations and the wealthy exert too much power. Their party leaders work to ensure that these same groups can exert even more. Mainstream Republicans were quite at ease with tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the subsequent stimulus. Their congressional representatives had the opposite priorities. In 2008, many Republican primary voters had agreed with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who wanted “their next president to remind them of the guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.” But those Republicans did not count for much once the primaries ended, and normal politics resumed between the multicultural Democrats and a plutocratic GOP.
This
year, they are counting for more. Their rebellion against the power of
organized money has upended American politics in ways that may
reverberate for a long time.
To understand what may come next, we must first review the recent past.
Not so long ago, many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.
But
even as Putnam’s book went into paperback, that notion was falling
behind the times. In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had
tumbled to the lowest level
since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in
November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections
of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before
the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it
dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive
events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11
terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and
stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.
Putnam
was right that Americans were turning away from traditional sources of
information. But that was because they were turning to new ones: first
cable news channels
and partisan political documentaries; then blogs and news aggregators
like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; after that, and most
decisively, social media.
Politics
was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century
than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a
supporter of a
different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans
said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.
Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap
with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion,
lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if
you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests
Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it
predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if
you’re also a woman.
Meanwhile,
the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them
all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not
between them. Since 1984, nearly
every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest
between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary
Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and
a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains
of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt,
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton). The Republicans have their
equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street”
candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and
especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep
sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.
Not anymore, at least not for the Republicans.
The
Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S.
economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In
2014, real median household
income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well
below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst
economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have
not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery
and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.
It
was these pessimistic Republicans who powered the Tea Party movement of
2009 and 2010. They were not, as a rule, libertarians looking for an
ultraminimal government.
The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led
by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea
Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market
orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness
of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t
work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”
It’s
uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that
read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person
wasn’t spouting gibberish.
The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to
squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance
health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the
figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were
noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27
percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue
resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of
redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving
“them.”
Yet
even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the
hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected
officials. A substantial minority
of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes
on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul
Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21
percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17
percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to
Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to
citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority,
by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.
As
a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not.
So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all
evidence, both groups interpreted
the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall
Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of
great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are
completely wrong.
It
was mitt romney who got the first post–Tea Party presidential
nomination, and he ran on a platform of Conservatism Classic: tax cuts,
budget cuts, deregulation, free
trade—all lightly seasoned with some concessions to the base regarding
stricter immigration enforcement. The rank and file did not like it. But
they could not stop it. The base kept elevating “not Romneys” into
first place, and each rapidly failed or fizzled;
Romney, supported by a cumulative total of $139 million in primary
funds by March 2012, trundled on.
Romney
ultimately lost the presidential election, of course, to the surprise
and dismay of a party elite confident of victory until the very end. One
might have expected
this shock to force a rethink. The Republicans had now lost four out of
the past six presidential elections. Another election had been won only
in the Electoral College, despite the loss of the popular vote. Even
their best showing, 50.7 percent of the vote
in 2004, represented the closest escape of any incumbent president who
won reelection since the first recorded popular vote.
And
yet, within hours of Romney’s defeat, Republican donors, talkers, and
officials converged on the maximally self-exculpating explanation. The
problem had not been the
plan to phase out Medicare for people younger than 55. Or the lack of
ideas about how to raise wages. Or the commitment to ending
health-insurance coverage for millions of working-age Americans. Or the
anthems to wealth creation and entrepreneurship in a country
increasingly skeptical of both. No, the problem was the one element of
Romney’s message they had never liked anyway: immigration enforcement.
Maybe it was not a good idea for Jeb Bush’s allies to describe his fund-raising strategy as “shock and awe.”
Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.
Nobody
expressed the party elites’ consensus view more assuredly than Charles
Krauthammer. “Ignore the trimmers,” he wrote in his first postelection
column. “There’s no
need for radical change. The other party thinks it owns the demographic
future—counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem. Do not,
however, abandon the party’s philosophical anchor … No reinvention when
none is needed.”
“We’ve
gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether,” Sean Hannity told
his radio audience the day after the election. “It’s simple for me to
fix it. I think you
control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that
are here, you don’t say, ‘You gotta go home.’ And that is a position
that I’ve evolved on.”
A
co-owner of Fox News—Krauthammer and Hannity’s TV network—agreed: “Must
have sweeping, generous immigration reform,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch on
November 7, 2012. “It
would be inhumane to send those people back, to send 12 million people
out of this country,” the casino mogul and Republican donor Sheldon
Adelson told The Wall Street Journal in December of that year. “We’ve
got to find a way, find a route, for those people
to get legal citizenship.” The Republican National Committee made it
all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party
eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a
notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive
immigration reform.” To advance the cause, Paul Singer, one of the most
open-pocketed GOP donors, made a six-figure contribution to the
National Immigration Forum that spring.
If
all of this sounds like a prescription for a Jeb Bush candidacy for
president … well, perhaps that was not an entirely unintended
consequence.
Almost
as soon as the new Congress convened in 2013, Senate Republicans worked
to strike a deal over immigration issues. A bipartisan “Gang of Eight,”
including Florida’s
ambitious young Marco Rubio, agreed on a plan that would create a path
to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and substantially
increase legal-immigration limits for both high- and low-skilled
workers. Otherwise, the party yielded on nothing and
doubled down on everything. No U-turns. No compromises.
The
new strategy soon proved a total and utter failure. George W. Bush’s
tax cuts for high earners expired in 2013, and Republicans could not
renew them. The drive to
cut the deficit ended in budget sequestration, whose harshest effect
fell on the military. The Gang of Eight deal never came to a vote in the
House. All the while, Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid.
Instead of holding on to their base and adding
Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at
all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved
of their party’s congressional leadership—an intensity of disapproval
never seen by the Republican majority of the
1990s nor by Democrats during their time in the majority after the 2006
midterm elections.
In
fact, disapproval had flared into an outright revolt of the Republican
base in the summer of 2014. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the No. 2
man in the Republican
caucus, had emerged as a leader of the new line on immigration. Up for
reelection in Virginia’s Seventh District, Cantor was challenged that
year by a conservative Christian professor of economics, Dave Brat.
During Obama’s first term, Tea Party insurgents
had toppled incumbents and defeated party favorites in primaries from
Delaware to Nevada. Those challenges had ended badly in the general
election, for the most part: Tea Party Republicans lost at least five
Senate seats that might plausibly have been won.
Party leaders believed the lesson had been learned and expected their
voters to be more tractable in future elections.
Cantor’s
loss to Brat jolted House leaders. Immigration reform slipped off their
agenda. Marco Rubio repudiated his own deal. But Republican elites
outside Congress did
not get the message. They rationalized Cantor’s defeat as a freak
event, the sad consequence of a nationally minded politician’s neglect
of his district. They continued to fill the coffers of Jeb Bush and, to a
lesser extent, Rubio and Scott Walker, all reliable
purveyors of Conservatism Classic. Last February, three of the party’s
most important moneymen—the fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, the
health-care investor Mike Fernandez, and the national finance chair of
Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, Spencer Zwick—publicly
urged the GOP to push ahead toward more-open immigration. “America
should be a destination for hardworking immigrants from all over the
world,” said Puzder, an advocate of importing more low-skilled laborers
to meet the needs of his high-turnover industry.
Zwick said that any presidential candidate who wanted to be taken
seriously had better “be in a similar place” to Jeb Bush on the
immigration issue.
Maybe
it was not a good idea for Jeb Bush’s allies to describe his
fund-raising strategy as “shock and awe.” Perhaps the Iraq War reference
stirred painful memories, even
among Republicans. Still, Bush’s fund-raising genuinely inspired awe.
In his financial disclosure for the second quarter of 2015, Bush
reported raising $11.4 million for his formal campaign and another $103
million for his super PAC. These funds were provided
by a relatively small number of very wealthy people. Of Bush’s
presidential-campaign dollars, only 3 percent arrived in amounts of $200
or less. Almost 82 percent arrived in the maximum increment of $2,700.
Nearly 80 percent of Bush’s super-PAC take arrived
in increments of $25,000 or more; about a quarter of the haul was made
up of donations of $1 million or more.
Yet
seldom in the history of fund-raising has so much bought so little, so
fleetingly. Between December 2014 and September 2015, Jeb Bush plunged
from first place in the
Republican field to fifth. Between late September and mid-October, he
purchased 60 percent of all political spots aired in New Hampshire. That
ad barrage pushed his poll numbers in the state from about 9 percent to
about 8 percent.
As
the governor of Florida, Bush had cut taxes and balanced budgets. He’d
challenged unions and championed charter schools. At the same time, Bush
passionately supported
immigration liberalization. The central event in his life history was
his reinvention as an honorary Latino American when he married a Mexican
woman, Columba Garnica de Gallo. He spoke Spanish at home. He converted
to Catholicism. He sought his fortune with
a Cuban American business partner. In his most quotable phrase, he
described illegal immigration as an “act of love.”
Bush’s
update of Conservatism Classic had made him a hit with the party’s big
donors. He had won accolades from Karl Rove (“the deepest thinker on our
side”) and Arthur
Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute (“a
top-drawer intellect”). Yet within five weeks of his formal declaration
of candidacy on June 15, Bush’s campaign had been brutally rejected by
the GOP rank and file.
From
Jupiter Island, Florida, to Greenwich, Connecticut; from Dallas’s
Highland Park to Sea Island, Georgia; from Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to
California’s Newport Beach,
the baffled question resounded: What went wrong?
Big-dollar
Republican favorites have run into trouble before, of course. Rudy
Giuliani imploded in 2007–08; Mitt Romney’s 2012 nomination was knocked
off course as Republicans
worked their way through a series of alternative front-runners: Rick
Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and finally Rick Santorum. But
Giuliani lost ground to two rivals equally acceptable to the donor
elite, or nearly so: Mitt Romney and John McCain. In 2011–12,
the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six
weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated
among social and religious conservatives.
The
mutiny of the 2016 election cycle has been different. By the fall of
2015, a majority of Republicans favored candidates who had never been
elected to anything: Donald
Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina. Fiorina’s campaign was perhaps
not so unusual. A former CEO, she appealed to the same business-minded
Republicans who might have voted for Romney in 2012. Carson appealed to
the same religious conservatives that candidates
like Mike Huckabee and Santorum had appealed to in prior presidential
cycles. What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned
party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign
policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said
rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the
campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and
blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by
millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom
of their party elite.
Trump’s
grim pessimism didn’t resonate with those who’d ridden the S&P 500
giddily upward. But it found an audience all the same.
When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism. “We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems … We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.”
That
message did not resonate with those who’d ridden the S&P 500 from
less than 900 in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2015. But it found an
audience all the same. Half of
Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or
before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov.
Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight
percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned
more than $100,000.
Trump
Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they
were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor
were they highly
religious by Republican standards.
What
set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and
the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of
Trump supporters wished
to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants
born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all
Republicans. More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted
Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged
that the president was born in the United States, according to an
August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six
percent believed the president was a Muslim.
Trump
promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s
austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if
somebody like me doesn’t
bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the
hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money
in, and we’re going to save it.”
He
promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in
the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War
III,” he told The Washington
Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the
politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions
in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”
He
promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had
swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our
system is broken. I gave
to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a
businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know
what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years
later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken
system.”
He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican immigration policy.
It
cannot last, can it? “The casino does not always win,” Stuart Stevens,
Mitt Romney’s lead strategist during the 2012 campaign, quipped to me in
September. “But that’s
the way to bet.” The casino won in 2012, and will very likely win again
in 2016.
And
yet already, Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential
candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris
Christie’s. He has thrown
into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into
the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long
relegated to the margins.
Something
has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old
slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the
orthodox candidates more
vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016.
Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
The
contest for the presidency turns on external events as much as—or more
than—internal party politics. George W. Bush’s team believed that the
last-minute revelation
of a 1976 drunk-driving arrest cost him the popular vote in the 2000
election. Jimmy Carter blamed his 1980 defeat on the debacle of the
attempted rescue of American hostages in Iran. So anything can happen.
But that does not mean anything will happen. Barring
shocks, presidential elections turn on the fundamentals of economics,
demography, and ideology.
The
puzzle for the monied leaders of the Republican Party is: What now? And
what next after that? None of the options facing the GOP elite is
entirely congenial. But there
appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign
season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.
Option 1: Double Down
The
premise of the past few thousand words is that the Republican donor
elite failed to impose its preferred candidate on an unwilling base in
2015 for big and important
reasons. But maybe that premise is wrong. Maybe Jeb Bush has just been a
bad candidate with a radioactive last name. Maybe the same message and
platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier
candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s
campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe
$100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative,
enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
And
if not Rubio, maybe the core donor message could still work if joined
to a true outsider candidacy: Ben Carson’s, for example. Carson is often
regarded as a protest
candidate, but as The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes enthused back in
January 2015: “One thing not in doubt is Carson’s conservatism. He’s the
real deal, an economic, social, and foreign policy conservative.”
Carson may say wacky things, but he does not say
heterodox things.
Yet
even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while
doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win
presidential elections. The
“change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy
from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican
presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American
voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to
list education and health care as issues that are extremely important
to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible
to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.
So …
Option 2: Tactical Concession
Perhaps
some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of
the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie
campaign. Instead
of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz
and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration
Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave
open the possibility of guest-worker programs or
other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement. But
Cruz and Christie have seen the reaction to Donald Trump’s message, and
appear to appreciate the need to at least seem to do something to
redress the grievances of the Republican base.
Much
of the donor elite could likely be convinced that while Jeb Bush’s idea
of immigration reform would be good to have, it isn’t a must-have. Just
as the party elite
reached a pact on abortion with social conservatives in the 1980s, it
could concede the immigration issue to its Main Street base in the
2010s.
The party elites’ “change nothing but immigration” advice after Romney’s defeat was a self-flattering fantasy from the start.
Yet
a narrow focus on immigration populism alone seems insufficient to
raise Republican hopes. Trump shrewdly joins his immigration populism to
trade populism. On the
Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’s opposition to open borders is
logically connected to his hopes for a Democratic Socialist future: His
admired Denmark upholds high labor standards along with some of the
world’s toughest immigration rules. Severed from a larger
agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in
2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst
like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always
has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must
compete more broadly than that.
Which brings us to …
Option 3: True Reform
Admittedly,
this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites
could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of
the middle class.
Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare
rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to
deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise
immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them.
Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward,
and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take
seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and
the anticompetitive practices that inflate
college tuition. Remember that Republican voters care more about
aligning government with their values of work and family than they care
about cutting the size of government as an end in itself. Recognize that
the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war
outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.
Such
a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young
beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard
infrastructure—bridges, airports,
water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the
Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in
center-right.
To
imagine the change is to see how convulsive it would be—and how
unlikely. True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad
multiethnic coalitions of the middle
class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking
countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But
the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the
experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled,
and unnecessary. In parliamentary democracy, winning or losing is
starkly binary: A party either is in power or is the opposition. In the
American system, that binary is much blurrier. Republicans can, of
course, exert some control over government as long
as they hold any one of the House, Senate, or presidency.
Which brings us finally to …
Option 4: Change the Rules of the Game
“The
filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late
actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a
National Review cruise shortly
after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans
feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would
benefit them at any given moment. Liberals loved the interventionist
Supreme Court in the 1960s and ’70s, hated it
in the 1990s and 2000s—and may rotate their opinion again if a
President Hillary Clinton can tilt a majority of the Supreme Court their
way. It’s an old story that may find a new twist if and when
Republicans acknowledge that the presidency may be attainable
only after they make policy changes that are unacceptable to the party
elite.
There
are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a
supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the
communications firm Purple
Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the
House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in
state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With
that kind of grip on state government, in particular,
Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that
sustain their hold on the national legislature. The president may be
able to grant formerly illegal immigrants the right to work, but he
cannot grant them the right to vote. In this light,
instead of revising Republican policies to stop future Barack Obamas
and Hillary Clintons, maybe it’s necessary to revise only the party
rules to stop future Donald Trumps from confronting party elites with
their own unpopularity.
The
inaugural issue of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine
launched in 1995, depicted then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
swinging into action, a submachine
gun blazing in his left hand, under the headline “Permanent Offense.”
But that was then. Maybe the more natural condition of conservative
parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding
defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses?
Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things
that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it
requires uncomfortable change.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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