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
Comments (0) 
Trackbacks (1) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
[…] I disagree with Patrick Ruffini quite often, particularly on his decision to support Rudy Giuliani (though as of today he has apparently resigned from Giuliani’s campaign). However, he has two terrific blog posts from the last few days that are really worth a read on what the Bush presidency really means to the conservative movement. Which seems to be the major topic on this and other conservative blogs in the last couple days. By Alex, 6/1/2007, 4:21 pm o’clock […]