As a way of advancing the argument I've made recently in my posts about the Futures of the Republicans and the Democrats, this New Yorker article by George Packer's entitled "The Fall of Conservatism" makes a similar case. He begins with the story, largely told by Rick Perlstein's new sequel to his earlier Before the Storm, how the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution was laid by Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon in 1971:
Polarization is the theme of Rick Perlstein’s new narrative history
“Nixonland” (Scribners), which covers the years between two electoral
landslides: Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and George McGovern’s in
1972. During that time, Nixon figured out that he could succeed politically “by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s,” which were also his own. In Perlstein’s terms, America in the sixties was divided, like the Sneetches on Dr. Seuss’s beaches, into two social clubs: the Franklins, who were the in-crowd at Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College; and the Orthogonians, a rival group founded by Nixon after the Franklins rejected him, made up of “the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.” Orthogonians deeply resented Franklins, which, as Perlstein sees it, explains just about everything that happened between 1964 and 1972: Nixon resented the Kennedys and clawed his way back to power; construction workers resented John Lindsay and voted conservative; National Guardsmen resented student protesters and opened fire on them. . . .The sixties, which began in liberal consensus over the Cold War and civil rights, became a struggle between two apocalyptic politics that each saw the other as hellbent on the country’s annihilation. The result was violence like nothing the country had seen since the Civil War, and Perlstein emphasizes that bombings, assaults, and murders committed by segregationists, hardhats, and vigilantes on the right were at least as numerous as those by radical students and black militants on the left. Nixon claimed to speak on behalf of “the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators,” but the cigar smokers in that South Carolina hotel were intoxicated with hate.
Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
The Nixon White House didn’t enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. “Positive polarization” helped the Republicans win one election after another—and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.He goes on to say that while this has worked in the past, this method has run its course, and I agree. There’s been a shift, and Republicans get it even if too frequently burnt Dems don’t:
On May 6th, Newt Gingrich posted a message, “My Plea to Republicans:
It’s Time for Real Change to Avoid Real Disaster,” on the Web site of
the conservative magazineHuman Events. The former House
Speaker warned, “The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if
Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if
Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to
fail.” Gingrich offered nine suggestions for restoring the Republican
“brand”—among them “Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically”
and “Implement a space-based, G.P.S.-style air-traffic control
system”—which read like a wonkish parody of the Contract with America.
By the next morning, the post had received almost three hundred
comments, almost all predicting a long Republican winter.
Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow
at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich’s
diagnosis. “There’s an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn’t yet been
made clear by defeat at the polls,” he said. “The conservative idea
factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but
nobody agrees what to do about it.”
Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric
Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business,
and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Obama will have his ups and downs; he will make mistakes, and the media will freak out and worried supporters will wring their hands, but he will win in November. McCain is the best the GOP could find this year of a very weak group of candidates, and he doesn’t have nearly enough of what it would take to defeat Obama. He has no juice and the movement has run out of gas. The GOP will go through the motions but they don’t really expect to win; they can only hope the Dems do something to lose it. Unlikely.
The backlash is over–it has been a resentment- and fear-driven phenomenon that can only loosely be described as a movement. It has done immense damage to our nation, and people who have been sympathetic to propaganda of movement conservatism are finally understanding what a con the whole thing has been.
I disagree with Buchanan–it was always a racket, and the people who thought it was a movement were simply victims of the con. And the racketeers who crafted this con have not gone away. They’ll go into retreat for a while, but they’ll be back with a new con when the opportunity presents itself. And the key will be the mood of the low information types in the middle. The Dems will pry them away from the GOP in the short run, but will they be able to hold on to them? That for me is the most significant political challenge for the Dems in the next twenty years.
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