Salam, Douthat, and the Movement
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 31st, 2007 10:42 pmRoss Douthat and Reihan Salam don’t take kindly to some offhand comments in my latest post on “the movement.” Ross — I think the Atlantic is a great magazine, for all the reasons you outline. To the list of seminal articles I’d add Gregg Easterbrook’s 1986 “Ideas Move Nations,” which detailed how the proliferation of think tanks in the late ’70s and early ’80s spawned a renaissance of conservative ideas. It’s a theme that’s very relevant to today’s discussion. With an enraged base and small-ball politics in Washington, how do we recreate some of that ideological magic?
Salam deep dives in his response, but I’m tempted to say he missed my point. Good or bad — and like Salam, I find a lot of good in NCLB’s accountability standards — my main point is that Big Government Conservatism has diluted the conservative brand as we know it. I’m not here to argue the substance of what Bush did and didn’t do. I’m merely making a technical evaluation that these policies have driven a wedge between the Republican Party and its conservative activist base. By the base — which I alternatively term the movement — I mean conservatives outside Washington who feel viscerally about three issues: 1) winning in Iraq, 2) stopping the spending, and 3) border enforcement. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not talking about the think tanks.
Douthat and Salam are believers in Big Government Conservatism, but argue that it’s been botched in its execution. Their vision of “Sam’s Club Republicanism” is that of a lower-middle class majority held in place by government largesse with a conservative face.
I’m here to break the news to them that it won’t work. Republican voters are not motivated by a sense of entitlement. (That might be why they’re Republicans.) Whenever we’ve tried to give away the goodies (Medicare Part D, NCLB, etc.), we have not succeeded in creating loyal new Republican constituencies. The activist base that listens to Rush and dials Congress is up in arms about a bridge in Alaska and the 2% of the budget that is education spending. They won’t take kindly to a beefed-up version of Big Government Conservatism.
People vote their values (writ large) not a narrow Thomas Frankian sense of economic interest. And it cuts both ways. That’s why the church attendance gap does more to explain voting patterns than income. It’s why the toniest, most cosmopolitan parts of big cities vote 80% Democratic, while their French counterparts earlier this month voted 80% for Sarkozy. We aren’t Europe, where our politics revolves around class, and we shouldn’t try to be.
What the welfare state Republicanism that Douthat and Salam advocate (in the name of the “base” no less) most resembles are the economic policies of Richard Nixon and the One Nation Conservatism of Ted Heath in the U.K. Which is precisely what the New Right in America and Thatcherism in Britain rose in opposition to. The revolt against Country Club Republicanism and its accommodation with government is one of the few reasons why we can speak of a “movement” and a “base” today.
That’s why I write that when the movement is strong, the GOP becomes more conservative and government gets smaller. When we govern without reference to what our voters want, the brand is diluted, government gets bigger, and voters are confused about what we really stand for.
Ronald Reagan had a simple message that distilled conservatism to its very essence. His ideas had powerful backing from conservative intellectuals and the movement, but the virtue of his message was in its simplicity and clarity. Lower taxes. Less government. More freedom. Defeat the Soviets.
Pundits like David Brooks and magazines like the Atlantic may still be relevant to the national debate, but they’re ultimately selling something that movement-oriented Republicans don’t want and won’t buy.
UPDATE: Soren Dayton chimes in again with an excellent post on redefinition. It’s an interesting history lesson. It was no accident that JFK was the one championing tax cuts. Indeed, most conservatives opposed them. (Barry Goldwater voted no.) We were obsessed with deficits first, as a way of stopping new government entitlements.
Eventually, that got changed. We became the party of tax cuts. We tolerated deficits.
Parties can change. That change can come from the top, or from the bottom.
The difference between Reagan’s redefinition and now (with fissures on education, spending, and immigration) is that Reagan’s changes had buy-in from the base. The tax cut message was hugely appealing and consistent with Reagan’s liberty theme. What Reagan did was correct a market failure. The GOP wasn’t maximizing its potential as the green eyeshades party. We were talking about liberty (Goldwater was the closest thing we’ve had to a libertarian), but we only applied it to Washington, not people’s pocketbooks. Reagan bridged the divide.
Fast forwarding to today, it’s not that the accountability message is not conservative. Republicans have been talking about standards for our schools forever. It’s that it simply doesn’t outweigh the small government and federalism interests. So, though NCLB’s goals can be called conservative in the intellectual sense, they never really penetrated the movement (which doesn’t seem to have strong feelings on it either way). And the current immigration debate, as chronicled by Peggy Noonan, shows the perils of failing to get buy-in from the base first.
Tagged: movement 
reihan salam ross douthat
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by Patrick Ruffini :: May 31st, 2007 7:25 am
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What Is and Isn’t Movement Politics
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 30th, 2007 2:44 pmSoren Dayton sums up our discussion nicely. I find that there is not very much to add, except to reiterate the centrality of ideas in defining any new Republican coalition. The problem with the Democrats’ new movement is that nobody knows what they were elected to do. End the war in Iraq? Maybe not so much. By contrast, whenever we have come to power in a movement election, we have explicitly spelled out our ideas, even to a fault.
Soren says there is currently a hodgepodge of ideas out there that will need to be hashed out in this primary and future ones:
The question for us is going to be what constituencies or ideas we can add, in a coherent way. And we need to figure out who we have been bleeding and why. There are several ideas floating. One is anti-immigration, which is both wrong and small ball. One is David Brooks’ recent musings. One is Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s “Sam’s Club Republicans”. The Bush answer is that we expand the current coalition beyond its white base. It is becoming entirely clear that some nostalgic returning to Reagan will not do it. That is why the Fred Thompson candidacy is both soothing and ultimately losing. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have other answers. Another answer is Mitt Romney’s, which would resemble the Thompson/Reagan strategy with a new image on health care. It is hard to know who he would add, except at the margins. No ideas, just image.
I think it’s useful to distinguish which ideas can be accomplished via a movement, and which can’t be. You’re never going to get immigration done via a movement, or health care probably, because the politics of solving these problems long-term are either inimical or not particularly relevant to the priorities of the movement. We have to remember that this is the conservative movement.
I was struck by another Soren-linked piece on what Bush did in ‘99, when the party was last redefined. David Brooks notes,
By now, this should sound familiar. And it should be clear that while some Republicans argue that big government conservatism started under George W. Bush and that the G.O.P. was in decent shape until Bush ruined it, this is a total myth. In fact, it was Bush in 1999 who single-handedly (though temporarily) rescued the Republican Party. He did it not by courting Republican interest groups, but by coming up with something new. On July 22, he delivered a speech in Indianapolis in which he explicitly distanced himself from Washington Republicans and laid the groundwork for compassionate conservatism.
One has to remember where we were at the time. Congressional Republicans were absolutely getting owned by Bill Clinton, who had defined us as heartless and cruel. The GOP brand was in the dumps in early ‘99, and Bush lent some of his legitimacy as the Presidential frontrunner to rescue the GOP brand. And Republicans could and would agree to anything to end the Clinton/Gore era.
Bush’s message was at least coherent. It was a savvy tactical response to Republicans constantly getting cut up by the rhetorical meatgrinder of the Clinton presidency. In time, people would come to appreciate the President’s plainspoken and direct approach to politics, in contrast to Clinton’s prevarication. And he was remarkably successful at doing what he set out to do. Eight years later, no one thinks of the Republican Party as stingy Scrooges eager to starve grandma.
The problem with this strategy is that it was counterprogramming. It undermined our core brand (where movements are all about distilling the core brand). And it not only nudged us in the direction of government action; at times it jerked us violently in that direction. Being sympathetic to the needs of seniors became a $400 billion prescription drug plan. Being more attentive to public schools meant doubling the Department of Education. New look immigration policies meant treating enforcement as an afterthought. A needed tactical response to the Clinton era became an attempted long-term redefinition of the Republican Party that nobody, right or left, really wanted. It all seemed very, very extravagant.
What Bush did in domestic policy was redefine a wayward party by triangulating in a sort of Clinton-Blair “Third Way” mold. Though necessary at the outset, the problem with this kind of politics is that it eviscerates the movement. How do you think we got the netroots? After a decade of Bill Clinton watering down core Democratic principles. (A Hillary nomination, with the netroots rallying behind it, would be rich with irony.)
What Reagan in office represented and what Bush on the GWOT represents is power aligned with movement priorities. For good or ill, that’s what successful movement politics demands. A new conservative movement would, as the gravitational pull of these things go, make the GOP more conservative. And that would mean largely undoing the Bush legacy in domestic policy. A new agenda will not come from the pages of the New York Times or the Atlantic.
Tagged: bush movement strategy
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by Patrick Ruffini :: May 29th, 2007 7:24 am
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Re: Movements, Campaigns & Parties
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 27th, 2007 9:59 pmSoren Dayton calls me out in response to my post on different modes of activism (movement vs. campaign). He thinks I lean very heavily to the campaign-centric view prevalent in the GOP these days (use the campaign to win the election, not build a long-term movement).
The online left is a movement to reinvent and renew the Democratic party. The question for the GOP is whether we need something similar. A newly organized coalition, etc. I think that the answer is “yes.” Perhaps Patrick disagrees with me?
Actually, I don’t. My objective in the original post was to lay out a framework in which winning campaigns could build and sustain a movement beyond Election Day. Campaigns should be cumulative. We don’t have time to relearn all the lessons from cycle to cycle, nor to reactivate our volunteers. I think one of the things the Left has done well is give people things to do in between elections. My initial point was narrow and technical — that the top-down model still works for the final 72 hours. The real question is what do we do the other 1,458 days? I think the answer is to much more lateral, community-oriented, and bottom-up.
During the campaign, Karl Rove told the story of when he went in to brief the President on the re-elect plan. At one point, POTUS interrupted him, laying out a few non-negotiables of his own. And one of his admonitions was this: “leave something behind.” Use the campaign to build something lasting: a volunteer army who got involved for the first time in 2004, and stayed involved in the Republican Party over the long haul.
The question is whether the top-down model can coexist with the community model. That’s one that all the campaigns are trying to figure out. I think the answer is yes, in the sense that’s how all purpose-driven organizations succeed (I borrow Rick Warren’s phrase for a reason). Whether it was the WWII platoon members who were fighting mainly for the guys next to them in the foxhole, or the megachurch small group movement pioneered by Warren, the smallest parts of armies or movements have found purpose in each other, not just the greater cause. Implicit in this is that we can’t be all top-down all the time and expect people to willingly come back. There has to be some autonomy for small groups within the party/movement to innovate and define their own way.
But there is the question: What do we mean by “movement?” I know Soren means something more than that which parties do in the off-years. And does the conservative movement need a reboot?
I think it does. And I wouldn’t have said that a year ago, or even six months ago.
One of the reasons I haven’t always identified 100% with “the conservative movement” is that said movement as we primarily know it primarily exists in D.C. office buildings and no longer does a lot of grassroots shoeleather work. (Groups like FreedomWorks with actual outside-D.C. presences are largely the exception.) Walk into a student workshop at CPAC, and they’ll still be telling you to read Hayek and Mises, which 1) isn’t very practical, and 2) is pretty much what we’ve been telling our young for 40 years.
One of the reasons why the Republican Party’s 72 Hour plan was such a revolution was the conservatives hadn’t really done much precinct organizing in a sophisticated fashion since the Goldwater campaign (with the possible exception of the Christian Right in the ’70s and ’80s). Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm is said to be canonical for the Left in building its new progressive infrastructure, but the Right could stand to re-learn the lesson of how campaign manager Cliff White planned the takeover of the Party state-by-state, county-by-county in the years leading up to 1964. Even in losing, the Goldwater campaign paid a great deal of attention to organizing at the precinct level.
The problem with this example, and the Dean example that Soren cites, is that these campaigns not only lost, but seemed fated to lose. That doesn’t give much comfort to serious party types, who may understand the need for a movement, but who ultimately will never be in a position to gamble the next election on a campaign for whom winning is secondary.
So, the movement will probably have to be outside the current campaigns.
Even then, the question is what does a new conservative movement look like? We’ve been running on low taxes, social conservatism, strong defense for thirty years. Are there new issues to rally around? Usually, movements arise because of needs unmet by the establishment. Right now, that’s immigration and spending (though on the latter, the leadership pays lip service to the cause).
I’m not sure chest-thumping on immigration and spending are Big Ideas, in the same way that defeating the Soviets or moving to a real market-based economy were Big Ideas. And you kind of need a Big Idea to launch a movement. Bush’s Social Security plan was a Big Idea, but the base showed no signs of being at all invested in it, the Congressional party ran for the hills, and some in the base saw it as shifting the focus away from their own agenda items.
We can all agree on the need for a new movement, one that’s outside Washington, that uses technology, that focuses intently on precinct politics. But I think we need some new Big Ideas to rally behind.
Tagged: campaigns movement online politics strategy
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links for 2007-05-27
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 27th, 2007 7:21 am-
What’s happening this cycle could be ground-breaking, in that Rock the Vote is building a voter registration engine with an API anyone can innovate on top of. Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of t
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by Patrick Ruffini :: May 25th, 2007 7:24 am-
Wow.
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Adrienne’s primer on local blogging.
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Beautiful.
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In other words, once you filter the Ron Paul spammers out of the equation, you find out that he is widely despised on the right side of the blogosphere.
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Staying in Touch Post-Election
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 24th, 2007 9:57 pmOver at her blog, Adrienne made this comment about the need to build and sustain a grassroots organization long after the election is over:
A good example of this is to contrast the Dean Model and the Bush/Cheney Mobilization Plan. The Dean Model established relationships with smaller target groups. Correspondence was written by real individuals and supporters were engaged through open communications, such as a blog. Members were motivated to not only campaign for their candidate, but to also volunteer and participate in community programs. The Bush/Cheney Plan, however, used grassroots tactics but through top-down communication. Individuals were organized, but no sense of community was achieved and the movement fell apart soon after the election, whereas the Dean campaign reorganized into Democracy for America.
I can sing chapter and verse on why our model was better. Lateral communications (or community building amongst supporters) is a worthwhile goal in itself, but often gets confused with what it takes to do GOTV in the final days of an election. That’s when you want a unified message, and you don’t want canvassers coming up with their own talking points. The end result of that strategy is Dean in Iowa.
But in the run-up to the election, in the times between the Super Saturdays, the W ROCKS events, the Test Drives for W, and the 72 Hour Plan, community building was a tremendously important part of cementing and solidifying that grassroots army. At those moments, the Bush Grassroots Machine was something to behold. Over 500,000 Americans attended a Bush house party organized on GeorgeWBush.com. At its height, we were able to organize 8,000 parties to the Kerry campaign’s 5,000. The parties themselves were composed about half of folks whom the host had invited, and half from other supporters nearby who had heard about the event via email or the Web. And people did meaningful actions at these parties, like send voter registration postcards or go door to door using targeted walk lists. It was frickin’ awesome.
Did we sustain it? Well, that’s a fair question. The Bush list did continue on at the RNC. We did parties. We activated the base on key issues. That’s a greater continuity of effort than we saw on the other side. Terry McAuliffe famously boasted of wanting to bring all the Democrat candidate email lists in-house to the DNC. In the end, not one obliged, not even John Kerry. He kept his own list, blasted to it regularly during the 2006 elections, and as Chris Cillizza has been fond of harping on, that 3 million list alone was probably the only reason he could be considered viable for 2008.
That said, I do think this was a teachable moment. I think we could have been even more successful if GeorgeWBush.com had been kept active, and all volunteer community-building been kept alive under the Bush brand name. That is, after all, what people signed up for in the first place. People who would never even consider aligning with a political party will sign up to follow a candidate. Why not leverage that as long as possible, preferably for the duration of his Presidency? I think this should be the model for whomever wins in 2008. (It would still be paid for by the national committee, and not some ersatz re-elect group.)
This brings me to another best practice that applies to every single out-of-cycle Senator, Governor, and safe-district House member. Stay in touch after the election! You should be sending an email to your list about every month or so, updating them on your legislative accomplishments, and proactively using the list for advocacy. Though he’s only up in 2008, Dick Durbin ran an online petition for Barack Obama in 2006. Eric Cantor is unlikely to be seriously challenged in his Richmond-area district, but he’s building a relationship with conservatives nationwide through his No Amnesty petition. This is smart, smart, smart.
We all saw how the Presidential candidates waged campaigns in waiting through their leadership PACs last year. The Internet effectively drops the marginal cost of that kind of activity down to zero. A small-state Governor or Senator looking to run in 2012 or 2016 can transcend their limited footprint in the national media by building a name for themselves through blogging and issuing calls to action that redound to the benefit of the cause.
And remember: this isn’t all about the loosey-goosey kumbaya community-building that Republican political operatives remain (to some degree rightly) skeptical of. This is a strategy to get you names. And eventually money. It puts you in a stronger position for re-election. By the time six years are up, well over half the names on your email list will have gone bad, so you have to find ways to get them to re-up in the interim.
If you’re a Senator up in 2010 or 2012, there are easy things you can do right now to sustain the volunteer community that elected you, and ensure they are there for you next time.
Tagged: community online politics strategy volunteers
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by Patrick Ruffini :: May 24th, 2007 7:28 am
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by Patrick Ruffini :: May 23rd, 2007 7:24 am-
The Web 2.0 bubble is about to burst.
