What Is and Isn’t Movement Politics

by Patrick Ruffini :: May 30th, 2007 2:44 pm

Soren 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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