Reviving Conservatism, Part I: What Happened?

(Part II will follow in a couple of days. This post is a long one, as is the one to come. They’ve taken a lot of thought and and lot of work to write. This post alone has taken well over two hours to write.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the coming election and doing a lot of reading. It seems that nearly everyone with an opinion has something to say about the sad decline of the Republican Party and of conservatism as a political movement with any real influence in this country. To be sure, conservatism these days has a lot of problems and it’s tough to tell, from reading the various smart people opining on the matter, what the problem is and what to do about it.

Some, like Robert McCain who knows from being abandoned by a political party from his years as a Democrat, lay the blame mostly on the President and think that conservatives ought to flee the impending electoral disaster. Others, like California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, believe that the problem isn’t policy but presentation – that the Republican “brand” need to be repackaged and sold anew. There are those like George Packer at the New Yorker who believe they can diagnose the problem with conservatism by talking to such notable critics of conservatism as David Frum. David Brooks, and Pat Buchanan (a method properly and quickly derided by see-dubya). Karl Rove showed up on Fox News Sunday, threw down a few strategies and tactics and promptly got himself smacked around by Mark Tapscott who gave a five-point redemption plan of his own. Ed Morrissey dove in and tinkered with Tapscott’s plan, knocking out a couple timid timbers and leaving a couple more in place. Even Fred Thompson has wandered into blogging to occasionally drop some folksy conservative wisdom on the matter.

Now that’s a lot of punditry and it’s all taken place in the past two weeks or so.I could, if I wanted, go back even farther and find five or six times as many news stories and press releases and blog posts either mourning the death of conservatism or pounding on its chest trying to bring it back to consciousness. I won’t because I value my eyesight far too much. Suffice it so say that there are a lot of intertubes being clogged by the issue these days.

Which means, of course, that I’m going to wade into the issue because I’m a blogger and I simply can’t help myself. Well, that and I believe I do have something worthwhile to say about it, considering I’m a conservative who left the Republican Party in 2000 because its best effort for President that year involved John McCain vs. George W. Bush.

To really figure out what conservatives can or should do right now, I think it’d be useful to see what it has done and, more importantly, what it has not done, to get itself into this predicament. You’ll see me flip back and forth between the words “conservative” and “Republican”. I do not mean to say that the two are identical. I am proof that they are not. I believe, though, that the fortunes of conservatives and the Republican party are intertwined in such a way that they can not be entangled without serious and lasting image to both. I realize there are those who think that conservatives should leave for a third party and I do not doubt their sincerity nor the conviction of their belief. I don’t see that as a viable long-term option, though. No third party can influence politics in a way that befits the powerful principles of conservatism. No third party can provide a route that will return conservative policies to the forefront of the American conversation. In the end, conservatives and Republicans are in the boat together. We might as well look clearly at what has driven them so far afield rather then figure out how we can split them apart.

With that, I’d like to look at what I believe are the three problems that have gotten Republicans and conservatives both into this awful mess.

Problem One: Conservatives Confused Tactics with Principles

Do you remember a guy named Newt Gingrich and something called the Contract with America? If you don’t, let me briefly recap. Newt Gingrich was a Representative from Georgia who got tired of watching the Democratic majority treat Congress like its very own Grotto, America like its property, and Americans like vassals. He started a groundswell among other young Republican members of Congress to change the way business was done in Washington starting with the rampant corruption of the majority. He used the relatively minor House Post Office Scandal as a rallying banner and made America a very simple promise. His promise was this: if you elect Republicans to a majority, we will run a clean shop, we will enact these ten basic common-sense reforms in the first hundred days, and we will live by them. Voters believed his message of reform and in the election of 1994 gave Republicans a stunning and historic victory.

The main part of that promise, called the Contract with America was actually successful. The Republicans kept the promise and passed every item, though many of them didn’t get past the Senate or were vetoed by President Clinton.

And then things just kind of got back to what they used to be. Republicans in the majority started acting as entitled as their counterparts. They grew fat on pork, used committee positions as bribes for their fellow Representatives, and blew up the budget like they were on an episode of Supermarket Sweep. If you were to ask the average Republican House member about the contract with America, they’d smile and clap you on the back and tell you what a good job they did.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Newt Gingrich pitched the Contract as a statement of principles and we voted on it like it was a statement of principles, which it really was. Hit the link and read it. It isn’t just a laundry list of nice stuff. Each point has a reason behind it, a fundamental principle that under girded it, gave it strength, and made it resonate.

Over time, though, Republicans forgot the principles behind the Contract and governed like they had no principles at all. Any reference to the Contract after a couple years was relegated to how they could cook up another laundry list with which to hook the voters. They forgot that it wasn’t the what of the Contract that mattered but the why. The principles mattered less and less and the gimmick mattered more and more. Soon, it wasn’t the guts of the Contract that Republicans sought to emulate but the bullet point agenda. They weren’t interested in dealing with the guts of the issues but in giving the issues a cute name you could fit on a bumper sticker. Their most important people weren’t thinkers but sloganeers and campaign managers. The game for Republicans and conservatives both became willing elections instead of refining and strengthening the things that brought them to office in the first place.

Problem Two: Conservatives Got Timid

Let’s go back to the Contract. Why did so many of the relatively minor reforms get only as far as a successful House vote? Why were there House members in front of cameras every day inveighing against the left in the Senate and the White House that were standing in the way of the obvious will of the people? Why weren’t conservatives using every ounce of their newfound power to push the principles behind the Contract as deeply into the rules of the body as they possibly could?

I think they, with a few notable exceptions, were simply too scared to stand up and be counted. In a lot of ways, their timidity is understandable. I’m not sure how I could get up every day knowing I’d be spending it fighting an entrenched media, a power-savvy Democratic Party, and a charming President. It had to have been a tough job. Nevertheless, it’s the job they asked to have, the job they worked to obtain and we had to expect them to do it.

The culmination came not even a year after Republicans took the majority. In late 1995 and early 1996 the Republicans shut down the Federal government over the 1996 budget. The stories back then were predictable: President Clinton was the tear-eyed but resolute hero of the downtrodden Federal worker and Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole were the evil Scrooges who would have old people eating dog food and sick people dying in the streets. Newsweek has already put Gingrich on its cover in caricature as “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” the year before. That was tough, but it wasn’t anything the right hadn’t faced before.

Still, it was enough. In the end, the Republicans lost their nerve and caved in. As a result, they were cast as losers and hypocrites on the budget ever since (with some merit, I must add) and they haven’t tried something even half as bold since then. Republicans have prety much fled the field and have done whatever they’ve done mostly behind closed doors and out of the view of the public.

Conservatives, though, have compounded this problem by being timid not only with the left but also with fellow Republicans. What bold new policy proposals have you seen from conservatives in Congress this past year? Has anyone even attempted to broach the matter of the collapsing Social Security system since they let the matter die a few years ago?

No. They really haven’t. Beyond the occasional attempt by a conservative or two to get something as humble as earmark reform, we’ve seen nothing bold at all from conservatives. They’ve grown timid in their defeat.

Problem Three: Conservatives Forgot their Voters

I could perhaps have folded this into the first problem but from where I sit, it’s a separate matter. While conservatives did indeed conflate gimmick with principle, the worse mistake was underestimating their voters. One of the reasons that Ronald Reagan was so successful was because the voters really mattered to him, not as tallies on Election Day, but as flesh and blood human beings who had to live with what he did as President long after he was out of office. That is one of the reasons he spoke so fervently about a long-lasting, even permanent, Republican majority in Congress. He believed that the principles of conservatism, fueling the engine of the GOP would serve America well for decades.

The Republicans started out that way in 1994. Gingrich and Company moved political mountains that first year and even managed a real triumph with welfare reform. They did it with pretty healthy support from the electorate largely because they were seemingly always talking to the electorate. By 2000, though Republicans has left conservatives some distance behind. The new fad was “compassionate conservatism”, the prideful brother of real conservatism that says that good people can bend the mighty engine of government toward beneficial uses. By 2004, conservatives were barely fighting to hold their heads above water in the face of a President and a party that thought nothing of passing two huge new bureaucracies, giving more power to the hated Department of Education, and turning around exactly backwards on the immigration problem from where the party has stood just 16 years before. What happened? Instead of consulting the voters to find out what they wanted, the GOP dictated to the voters the way it would be. They had become exactly what voters did not want – elites who lorded over them from upon high (does Comprehensive Immigration Reform ring a bell?).

Even now, the GOP refuses to listen to the few vocal conservatives who remain and who do often listen to the people. They shun people like Tom Coburn and John Shadegg. Entrenched leaders lecture and threaten reform-minded members like Mike Pence, Jim DeMint, Jeff Flake, and Jeb Hensarling as if they were John Houseman in The Paper Chase. Over the past couple of years, it’s been tough to tell folks like Ted Stevens, Larry Craig, Duke Cunningham, and Tom Foley from the likes of Tip O’Neill, Dan Rostenkowski, Jim Wright, and Barney Frank of not even twenty years ago.

Not that conservatives are making a particularly big pitch to the electorate themselves. Save for a few, conservatives have turned much of their energy inwards, talking among themselves as conventions and in panel discussions. They hold seminars and retreats. They don’t hold many town meetings, or press to get on the Sunday talk shows very often. They talk at CPAC, but where else do they get in front of the cameras? Most Americans can name a prominent liberal politician. Can they name a prominent conservative?

It is not easy to lose the majority in a scant few years, but the Republicans and the conservatives among them have done it. This November they face an even worse defeat that will genuinely threatens the long-term health of the party. They have gotten to this point because of pride, forgetfulness, and a love of the power they once eschewed. Conservatives have a lot of work to do to get to the point where they can proudly vie for the voters’ attention again. That’s the subject of Part II.

(Edited to tighten up the prose and to eradicate a couple errant typos that esscaped me in the wee hours this morning)

Tags: 2008 Election, Republicans