Republicans at a Fork in the Road

Following on the previous post, let's return for a moment to the "Movement 2.0" conversation. Consider these two points from Soren Dayton's post about possible ways forward for the GOP coalition:

Another option would be to continue to play for the working class, as Bush so incredibly succeeded in 2004, with "the party of capital" winning the white working class vote by 23%. The problem is that we lost a bunch in 2006, and we are unlikely to succeed in 2008. However, that would be the strategy of the Sams Club Republican advocates....

Another option would be the resurgence of a reformist movement in the GOP. This would be a strategy for holding on to the upper-middle class and appealing to students. There would be process reforms like earmark reform, which is clearly a Republican issue, and ethics reform, which could be. There are more complicated parts like redistricting, which is a Republican issue in California, but Democratic in places where GOPers lose from it. There’s actually a natural technological niche here with things like the Sunlight Foundation, Ruffini’s open API stuff, etc. There is a historical antecedent in the TR Progressive movement, and it doesn’t damage the existing coalition too much. Right now, this is a post-partisan issue rather than a partisan one. But once the Democrats take charge, it will quickly become a partisan one. It is already starting. In fact, we could use the cover of a Hillary Clinton presidency to co-opt the anti-Hillary anger into a constructive direction.

Dayton says he favors the latter approach, though he concedes it may be "too post-partisan" for many conservative activists. He also hints at melding a reformist politics onto a redoubled pro-war line.

There's no doubt that pro-war voters are a crucial component of the Republican base right now, though while Dayton sees this constituency as "part of the answer" for the GOP coalition, there's also the possibility that they are part of the problem for Republicans, forcing the party's candidates into a hard-line position that repels mainstream voters (including critical constituencies like Hispanics and young voters).

But let's broaden the frame. Dayton has a series of very interesting posts on the subject of conservative renewal. In one, he observes:

[T]he deeper problem is that we need to re-evaluate and re-configure our core issues so that they appeal to 60-70% of the American people. After all, and as I have noted, you cannot win elections without independents. Right now the Dems are winning because the GOP is not competing. "You can’t beat something with nothing."

The problem is how to get to that 60-70%. It seems that, among the brighter young conservative activists, two broad approaches are emerging, and right now they are competing against each other.

Here's how Reihan Salam defined them:

I see two ways to do this: a moralistic domestic reformism that ties together the applied neoconservatism of welfare reform and crime-fighting, the social conservatism of moving to reduce the number of abortions (through restrictions or abortion alternatives) and income-splitting and other marriage-friendly and family-friendly measures, and a civic nationalism that emphasizes America's common culture and the central importance of assimilation and integration....

Or War on Terror nationalism, which focuses on the defeat of America's enemies to the exclusion of domestic issues.

Right now, WOT nationalism is surprisingly potent, certainly in the Republican primary race. In part, this is a function of the collapse of the GOP's big tent. My sense is that the shelf-life of War on Terror politics is limited. Over the long term, I think a commitment to WOT nationalism will shrink the Republican Party.

Dayton essentially makes the contrasting case in a series of posts criticizing Mike Huckabee for the candidate's nativism, economic populism, and isolationism. If Dayton seems to favor a combination of "post-partisan" reformism, libertarian-esque economic policies, and something like the "war on terror nationalism" Salam identifies, Huckabee apparently represents the specter of "Buchanan/McGovern Republican[ism]," which would amount to "isolationism, protectionism, and "'culture war.'"

This is where I begin to put words in mouths, creating oppositions where the original authors might be more inclined to look for nuance, but let's take all this discussion as an opportunity to outline two broad possible futures for the right's coalition.

One is something like "moralistic domestic reformism," which would meld a slightly softened form of social conservatism to a right-wing version of economic populism. The other is a kind of libertarian pro-war nationalism with an added focus on procedural reform issues. We've seen how critics of each approach might characterize them. It's probably safe to say that inasmuch as there is a presidental candidate to represent each tendency, it's Huckabee for the former and Giuliani for the latter.

It's difficult to escape old paradigms. Dayton cites James Antle's warning that "the fusion of economic populism and social conservatism has generally been a losing strategy in Republican politics," even while noting that "there are fewer economic conservatives in the party than there used to be." The concept of fusionism itself has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years; conservatives seem torn between declaring the old fusionism outdated and reminding themselves of the inherent value of the concept itself. Yet if the balance has been thrown -- if there is no longer equal weight between fiscal and social conservatives -- can fusionism really mean anything at all? Does it make sense to speak of a "new" fusionism, or was there only ever one kind of fusionism -- one which expired when the balance of forces it expressed began to shift?

In one sense, it's unfortunate that Giuliani and Huckabee enter this race with such a disparity in resources -- it would be fascinating to watch the battle between them develop along these ideological lines. Of course, there's an excellent chance that neither man will win the Republican nomination. It's possible that GOP voters either don't recognize, or simply aren't willing to pursue, the large-scale philosophical questions currently confronting the Republican party and the conservative movement.

Labels: conservative futures, conservatives, Mike Huckabee, Reihan Salam, Rudy Giuliani, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:49 AM 1 comments

  The Immigration Quandary

Returning to the question of "Movement 2.0" -- Ruffini and Dayton, while they seem understandably intrigued by the galvanizing possibilities, for conservatives, of a Hillary Clinton nomination, nonetheless recognize that Hillary hatred would not suffice as an ideological basis for a new movement. They go on to review a number of issues around which such a movement could potentially be organized.

The approach is interesting in how it seems to reflect a very common pattern of instrumentalist thinking among conservatives. In other words: here are two conservatives saying, "we need a movement -- what issues can we use to build it?" It seems to me that the liberal habit is the opposite: "We need health care -- how can we get it?" This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but I do think it has something to do with why conservatives have shown such a genius for politics -- for them, politics is the point; ideas are the means. In its more vulgar forms this instrumentalism manifests, for instance, as the "Konservetkult" culture war mentality so vividly described by Brad Reed and Roy Edroso; this is the mentality that brought us such joys as the Half Hour News Hour and the "Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time." Ruffini and Dayton are serious thinkers, not themselves prey to such mania; it's just interesting, on the larger level, how a useful adaptation (a flair for politics) can mutuate into a serious deformity.

With that long aside out of the way, let's briefly consider the first instrument in the new movement's potential arsenal of ideas. Ruffini says:

Even if Movement 2.0 is two or more years away, there are things we should be doing now to prepare. At this point in the Clinton years, MoveOn had already started. Perhaps the analog to that is the immigration issue, where the right kicked ass. But, again, what did we create with the immigration issue? Where is the million person email list of people who got involved because of immigration, and can now be activated on other issues? It sounds like people were thinking of the right techniques for radio, but not for online.

I can understand why conservative activists are tempted to see immigration as an issue upon which they can build. After all, in a pretty bad year for the right, it's where they scored their most significant victory. It fires up the base and it can be milked for patriotism points.

At the same time, I'm astounded. The victory was tactical, not strategic. Conservative activists forced Congressional members of their own party to react to the demands of the base and kill the immigration bill, even though the bill's provisions were broadly popular among the general public. And, of course, achieving the "victory" meant months of noisy activism that put the rather vicious bigotry of so much of the Republican base on public display, even as the party's more sober thinkers have realized that, if it cannot expand beyond white Christian nationalism, the GOP is doomed to long-term minority status. Thus Dayton says:

Yesterday, one of the stand-ins at Andrew Sullivan’s blog argued that perhaps we could add African-Americans through railing on immigration. I, personally, find the idea both morally repugnant and unlikely to succeed. We want to get African-Americans back by increasing racist sentiment? Probably not a winner. Nevermind that we would lose our Hispanics, so it might not even add votes. And business wouldn’t tolerate a protectionist agenda....

Another [option] would be to try to organize and reach out to Hispanics. Bush tried that with immigration, and the party revolted. (wrongly, in my opinion).

Dayton is entirely correct. The experience of "victory" seems to have confused very many conservative activists and pundits, but if they don't pay close attention to the bigger picture, that victory will be Pyrrhic (more than it already was). Immigration is an issue that divides the existing Republican coalition, prevents outreach to a crucial new constituency (and no matter how much conservatives reassure themselves that "a lot of Hispanics oppose illegal immigration too," there's simply no way the GOP can act on the issue without unleashing the bigotry that will cost them even those Hispanic votes), and puts them on the wrong side of majority opinion. I can't see how any sensible conservative could possibly imagine that it would make a useful issue for a Movement 2.0.

Labels: conservative futures, immigration, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:23 AM 1 comments

  On Movement-Building and Politician-Hatred

More on the conversation about "Conservatism 2.0"... I should point out that in this analysis, the new movement is meant to be an upgrade over the first generation of the "online right" (e.g. Drudge, Free Republic, Instapundit, etc.) -- in other words, the "1.0" implied here is not necessarily the whole post-Goldwater conservative movement per se. My own analysis, though, is that that whole movement is in fact at a crossroads, and that the challenge facing next generation activists like Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton is not just to redeem the movement of the 1990s, but to find a new logic for a coalition that was in fact assembled beginning in the 1950s. This means the problem goes considerably beyond issues of technology -- though Ruffini and Dayton seem to understand that.

Ruffini asks, "when does Movement 2.0 get started?" Do conservatives have to wait for Hillary Clinton to galvanize them? If so, why hasn't that begun to happen already? And just what is the conservative relationship to the Republican party these days? Dayton points out that, just as the online left is about "basic politics, constituencies, etc., rather than technology," so the new new right will need an organizing principle -- and he reviews a few possibilities. Ruffini responds with some agenda ideas of his own.

I want to comment on a few aspects of this exchange; I'll break up my thoughts into two or three posts. As with the Ruffini-Dayton discussion of a couple months ago, there are very real implications here as to what may become of our conservative political opponents over the next decade or two.

My first thought is on the question of whether Hillary Clinton can serve as an organizing catalyst for a movement -- whether any person can really do so -- and on how much significance lies in the difference between a catalyst and a principle. Ruffini writes that "opposition galvanizes political movements, and not just online" -- and I don't disagree. On the other hand, as he acknowledges, there hasn't been much galvanizing going on so far:

But a lot of folks also hoped that we’d be at least partly there by now. With Hillary looking good on the Democratic side, and Republicans in the opposition (and on offense) in Congress, have things gotten any better? Is there any evidence that the Stop Her Now stuff that was so effective in 2000 is working this time around? I haven’t gotten as many direct mail letters or fundraising e-mails with Hillary front and center as I would have expected by now.

The other side of this coin is Dayton's assumption (shared with most of his conservative compatriots) that "opposition to Bush," or, in a more common phrasing, "Bush-hating," has worked as an "organizing principle" for the progressive netroots. As Dayton himself notes, such a "principle" is not the same thing as an actual idea.

By now the endless harping about "Bush-hatred" (the subtext is always: "irrational Bush-hatred") has grown stale enough that it's hardly worth the exercise of trying to parse and explain how liberals actually feel about the man and his administration. I'm content enough to reply that "Bush-hatred" is in fact a rational thing. Beyond that, the notions that people tend to personalize politics, and that "opposition galvanizes political movements," are basically truisms. It would be silly to claim that intense anger at George W. Bush hasn't helped fuel the growth of the new progressive movement -- both online and off (movements, plural, if you prefer).

I don't think I'm saying anything with which Ruffini or Dayton would disagree (other than the part about Bush-hatred being rational), and they seem to recognize that progressives have been working to lay far more durable foundations for our movement. Opposition can galvanize a movement, but it does not make a movement. Progressives are in fairly broad agreement on a number of policy fronts, among them the need for universal health care, for an end to the war in Iraq and a rational, multilateral foreign policy, for serious efforts to address the climate change crisis, for the protection of social security, for the preservation of the balance of powers and a more transparent, ethical government, and so on. Devotion to those ideas is precisely what fuels "Bush-hatred." Contrary to caricature, we don't all loathe the Bush administration because Dubya is a bumbling fake cowboy. We loathe it because it tramples on our principles and in so doing, in our estimation, seriously harms America.

I often get the sense that conservatives talking about "Bush-hatred" are projecting based on their own experience of Clinton-hatred during the 1990s -- making it all the more ironic that some of them seem to be waiting with bated breath for a chance to experience the hate all over again. But Clinton-hatred, I think, was a symptom of a decadent and confused conservativism. Some of it was no doubt fueled by rage at the Clenis (despite, or perhaps because of, the sick hypocrisy of so many of the president's prominent critics). But it really took off after the GOP's defeat in the 1995 budget showdown, and culminated in impeachment -- its purest and most impotent expression. Clinton-hatred was what the conservative movement turned to when it abandoned political philosophy. It amazes me that serious conservatives are nostalgic for it today.

One could defend conservatives, arguing that Clinton-hatred derived from the very sort of frustration I described liberals as experiencing -- that it was the product of a movement frustrated by its inability to legislate according to its own principles. Let's say we express all these frustrations affirmatively, as political ideas. What causes were lost to the conservatives, that drove them over the edge? Were they causes with which the majority of Americans would identify?

If politician-hatred is ultimately a manifestation of frustration over thwarted principles, perhaps it's better to lay our principles on the table. Again, progressives have health care, an end to the Iraq war, etc. What do conservatives have? Are they politically viable ideas? This is where Ruffini and Dayton turn next. In the meantime, I'd suggest that anyone looking to Clinton-hatred to kickstart Conservatism 2.0 isn't addressing the root challenge facing the right.

Labels: conservative futures, George Bush, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:50 AM 0 comments

  Conservatism 2.0?

This is a few days old, but I wanted to bring it up anyway: Patrick Ruffini has some very interesting thoughts on Yearly Kos and its relation to the conservative movement -- past and present. Ruffini points out that, while conservatives wonder "where's our Yearly Kos?", YK itself arose out of the question among progressives: "where's our CPAC?" Any progressive will admit -- will explain at length -- that our movement was largely modeled on the one built by conservatives beginning with the Goldwater campaign (though of course we've come up with innovations of our own).

The point is pretty basic: when you're locked out of the market, you're forced to innovate. That's what conservatives did beginning in the 1950s, and it's what progressives have been doing over the last few years. However, political technologies are like any other kind, in that early adopters risk finding themselves over-invested in models that can quickly become obsolete. Ruffini is concerned about precisely such a dilemma:

The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Ruffini goes on to describe how poorly the conservative web -- Drudge, Free Republic, the right blogosphere, et al -- is aging (it's worth reading the post for the digs at Freepers alone). Are conservatives locked into outdated technologies?

It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.

Ruffini and Soren Dayton follow on this post with a pretty good exchange, about which more later. But I think there's absolutely something to this -- after all, social institutions rely on accumulated legitimacy, which can hold them back when it's time for those institutions to reinvent themselves. This is a lesson for the left as much as for the right.

The more immediate question for A&S purposes is this: When (it's when, not if) the conservatives do manage to reinvent themselves as a "2.0" movement, what will that mean? How would such a movement look? How different might its policy preoccupations, rhetoric, and internal cohesion requirements be? Is Conservatism 2.0 in the works already?

You might say those questions are what Alien & Sedition, ultimately, is all about.

Labels: conservative futures, conservatives, movement building, Patrick Ruffini

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:12 PM 1 comments

  The Enduring Appeal of the Reactionaries

Last seen proposing a grand alliance between liberals and libertarians (I explained why I think that would be a bad idea here), Cato's Brink Lindsey resurfaced last week to try his hand with the conservatives, taking to the pages of the National Review to offer advice from a "well-wishing outsider." It won't shock you that Lindsey's advice to the right is much like his appeal to the left: an invitation to think like libertarians do.

Lindsey proposes that conservatives set aside their "traditionalist" objections to things like gay marriage and Mexican immigration, commenting that "much of what has defined modern social conservatism — namely, political resistance to the incessant cultural change engendered by economic development — is not authentically conservative at all. It is reactionary." Social conservatism assumes a fragility to American culture that is not borne out by the evidence; more importantly, it's on the wrong side of history, in a sort of historical-materialist sense.

Naturally we progressives will be more enamored of his arguments when he is directing them against the assumptions of social conservatism, though Lindsey is careful to frame his case in a way that flatters the traditionalist preoccupations of decades past -- even as he rightly condemns the right's record of getting it wrong on things like civil rights and the entry of women into the workforce. He puts it this way:

The culture wars are over, and capitalism won. The question now is: Will the Left or the Right be the first to figure this out? The answer may well determine the future balance of political power.

Lindsey surveys post-war American history on a broad level, arguing that we have arrived at this juncture after mid-20th century prosperity first unleashed a tidal wave of cultural change:

As the post-war boom took off, however, the unprecedented development of technology and organization made America the first society in human history in which most people could take satisfaction of their basic material needs more or less for granted.

The story of post-war America is thus the story of adaptation to fundamentally new social realities, particularly mass affluence. Time-honored practices that had developed during the long reign of scarcity were now in need of serious revision or even wholesale abandonment. At the same time, new values and priorities began to assert themselves. Wrenching cultural conflict was unavoidable.

In Lindsey's telling, the prosperity brought by unfettered capitalism triggered cultural changes both positive -- feminism, sexual liberation, the end of legal segregation -- and negative. On the negative side, Lindsey describes "a radical assault on all traditions, all authority, and all constraints" -- a sort of general "Aquarian" madness (I wasn't around at the time, but reading the right's literature I imagine that a typical day in, say, 1971 probably involved packs of cannibalistic hippies raiding churches and boiling peyote in the hollowed-out skulls of former Mouseketeers. But I digress.). Social conservatives, he says, were right to push back against the chaos and crime thus unleashed, but now, in saner times, they have reached a crossroads:

The fundamental question for conservatives today is: What should they be seeking to conserve? The great American heritage of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets seems the only viable answer. As Peter Berkowitz has frequently and wisely noted, a truly American conservatism must have at the core of its concerns the defense and preservation of the liberal tradition. Which makes it a special kind of conservatism indeed: Its function is not to arrest change generally, or even slow it down, but rather to preserve the institutions that are both the chief source of change and the primary means through which we adapt to new conditions.

One obvious flaw in Lindsey's narrative is that he, a committed libertarian, ignores the important role of government investment and social insurance in fueling that post-war boom and widening the scope of its public benefits. But for the purposes of a debate with social conservatives, another problem stands out. Lindsey argues that they, clinging to their traditionalist views, are at odds with the march of history. Yet, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out in a rebuttal, Linsdey has also said that traditionalists were right to resist that march in certain ways at certain times. In that case, each social conservative argument must be judged on its merits; you can't simply dismiss them all with the proposition that, if we take care of capitalism, capitalism will take care of the rest. Ponnuru, in a sur-reply, writes:

[A]nyone who has taken up a social-conservative cause or two, or declines to sign on to all of Lindsey’s arguments, is supposed to don sackcloth and ashes and take historical responsibility for other conservatives’ having been segregationists. (Speaking for myself: No thanks.) The demand makes sense if all social conservative causes are the same, impermissibly reactionary thing, except when they happen to further “the logic of social development under capitalism,” whatever that means.

Ponnuru acknowledges, and I agree, that Lindsey is correct in pointing out that material forces, not just ideas, move history. As Ponnuru puts it, "Feminism didn’t happen when it did just because Betty Friedan wrote a book, which is why anti-feminist books can’t undo it."

Lest I sound too much like a defender of the traditionalists, let me add that we needn't simply let Ponnuru and his compatriots wiggle out from under the historical burden of social conservatives' many serious mistakes -- nor should we allow them to pretend that their arguments really do always resonate on their philosophical merits, when we all know perfectly well that naked bigotry provides much of their constituency. Whether or not Ponnuru wants to accept it, when we judge social conservative arguments on gay marriage, we can and must consider the precedents and legacy of their positions on civil rights and the role of women in society. For that matter, the record shows that a considerable number of the very same social conservatives leading the reactionary charge today still haven't abandoned the racism and sexism of the previous era. Ponnuru doesn't have to wear the sackcloth, but that doesn't mean his movement won't be judged by its own historical sins.

Ultimately, the negotations break down, with Ponnuru dismissing Lindsey's views as marginal -- just as Jonathan Chait did from a liberal perspective. The debate will be between the Ponnurus and the Chaits. I do believe that the traditionalists will continue to lose -- as they always do -- and they will lose in part because capitalism and other large-scale forces will continue to undermine the appeal of their prejudices. But I don't think they'll disappear, or that the right will limit itself to a simple defense of "classical liberalism." The social disruption and insecurity wrought by capitalism's "creative destruction" (to use a favorite libertarian term) mitigate against such reductionist politics. Social conservatism may be reactionary -- a misguided response to those dislocations -- but it's not going away.

Labels: Brink Lindsey, conservative futures, libertarians, Ramesh Ponnuru, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:24 AM 4 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 5)

I'm determined to finish this thing, because it gets more interesting as it goes on...

Soren Dayton observes that conservatism is subject to redefinition -- just as Reagan redefined it around the notion of cutting taxes, so his inheritors can redefine it according to the imperatives of the present day. Reihan Salam makes the case that the "Sam's Club Republicanism" he and Ross Douthat advocate represents just such a path to revitalization.

But Patrick Ruffini is not convinced. And he makes a valid point: you can't redefine the movement if the base won't come with you. The conservative base, as Ruffini sees it, cares deeply about three main things right now:

1. Winning in Iraq


2. Stopping the spending


3. Border enforcement.

Ruffini is the kind of Reaganite neo-traditionalist who dismisses compassionate conservatism and Sam's Club Republicanism as so many exercises in "big government conservatism," dreamily positing "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. [...]

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.

It's intriguing, of course, that Ruffini applies the "country club Republicanism" tag to the one kind of conservatism that claims to make the social and economic well-being of the working classes its central concern. But this, to Ruffini and the neo-traditionalists, is a decadent conservatism, perverted and confused. It's the Republicanism of the feckless northeastern aristocrats who made their peace with organized labor, government regulation, and internationalism after the Second World War. It's a conservatism without the clarity or the courage to actually be conservative. Compassionate conservatism and Sam's Club Republicanism are simply latter-day outbreaks of the same heresies Goldwater aimed to correct. In Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater -- through his ghostwriter Brent Bozell -- had declared:

I have litle interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.

By contradicting the core message of the modern conservative prophet, "big government conservatism" discourages the base, muddles the message, and undermines the right's brand. It weakens the movement. Conversely, "when the movement is strong, the GOP becomes more conservative and government gets smaller." For Ruffini, then, conservatism is the movement, and Goldwater's disciples are its base.

Ruffini argues that Reagan's redefinition of conservatism worked only because it kept true to the core principles of Goldwater Republicanism. In a sense, it was hardly a "redefinition" at all -- Reagan simply recognized new policy avenues for the movement to pursue. If Goldwaterism was concerned above all with liberty, cutting taxes was clearly in keeping with its spirit. "Reagan's changes," says Ruffini, "had buy-in from the base" -- because they didn't change the core brand around which the base was ideologically constituted. Reagan redefined conservatism, but on the movement's terms.

Salam offers the obvious rebuttal: that may be so, but "the movement is aging and dying." Pointing to this Pew Poll chart, which shows Americans under 30 skewing sharply toward the Democrats, Salam warns:

The "Movement" is old. The salience of "Movement" concerns is declining. So if Ruffini defines the Movement as those preoccupied by these particular issues, some of which I consider very important, he's not talking about a constituency that will be vitally important in twenty years time.

So while he is more than welcome to consider the fate of this group, it is no longer the fulcrum of American politics. Conservatism is a situational doctrine that has always been attuned to new threats -- to security, to economic freedom. As Soren rightly points out, the old threats aren't always and inevitably the same as the new threats.

The movement's base may want what it wants, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to translate the base's priorities into a majoritarian politics.

Arguably, the conservative base is not, in any case, what many conservative elites tend to think it is. Consider Pew's 2005 Political Typology: of the three groups Pew identified as constituting "the right," only one -- "Enterprisers," accounting for just 11% of registered American voters -- held to the standard fiscal conservative ideological line. The others ("Social Conservatives" and "Pro-Government" conservatives) favored government intervention in the economy well beyond what any self-respecting AEI fellow would be willing to tolerate. It's true that neutrally-posited ideological questions produce different results than well-crafted campaign rhetoric -- "lower taxes" is a pretty effective slogan -- but there's pretty good evidence that the conservative movement's base is not nearly so committed to fiscal conservative orthodoxy as the movement's leaders presume.

Salam defines Douthat and himself as social conservatives. "Pretty straightforward," he says. This means, in part, that "while I think we're both concerned with defending a free enterprise system, we're also keenly aware of another kind of economic freedom." He defends the notion of using the state to redistribute income -- though by "conservative" means, like the negative income tax or the Earned Income Tax Credit:

Hayek, for instance, defended a basic minimum on the grounds that expanding the "choice set of the poor" will contribute to the defense of economic freedom. Some would argue that this "choice set" is an essential part of economic freedom rightly understood, and that some trade-offs are necessary.

Our goals are familiar -- thriving families -- and our means are familiar -- competitive markets. The fact that our tax code punishes, for example, stay-at-home mothers and other conservative constituencies means that a certain kind of government activism is needed to counteract these effects. [...]

One can imagine a "Movement" that would expand rather than contract the choice set, and speak to the interests of small-scale entrepreneurs and aspirational blue-collar workers: key parts of past Republican electoral success.

The burden Salam and his fellow "conservative reformists" are forced to bear is the failed Bush presidency, particularly since the influential neo-traditionalists in the conservative movement tend to blame that failure on the administration's attempt to pursue the very same goals by the same sorts of means. Salam's only defense in this post is that Bush merely "gestured in the direction of the white working class," that he failed in the event to actually "deliver policies." The basis of Reagan's success, like FDR's, was that he delivered on his promises (taken for the sake of argument). Bush II has failed to do so.

The question for Salam, then, is why did he fail? Was he really just insufficiently committed to the policy agenda? Or were there structural reasons for the failure of compassionate conservatism? And if there were, what's to say that "Sam's Club" conservatism would fare any better? The neo-traditionalist conservatives have their own set of answers to those questions. I won't suggest my own until I take the time to engage the substance of the "Sam's Club" argument myself. In the meantime, we'll finish this particular thread tomorrow, with a postscript on some of the implications for Democrats.

Labels: conservative futures, Patrick Ruffini, Reihan Salam, social conservatives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:57 AM 0 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 4)

Patrick Ruffini argues that compassionate conservatism was a form of Republican triangulation, undermining the party's core brand and opening up space for a new conservative movement to reject the Bush administration's domestic legacy and move the party back toward the right, by which he means back to a pure "smaller government" ideology.

Could that be the basis for a majority coalition? I think it's structurally and politically impossible -- if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know why I think that, though I'll take a deeper look at it in future posts.

But does that mean there's no future for conservatism in America? Not necessarily. In his next response to Ruffini, Soren Dayton reminds us that conservatism is mutable -- it can be redefined. For instance, as Dayton points out, Reagan's supply-side policies represented a notable break with what had traditionally been considered "conservative" economic doctrine, which had focused on the importance of balanced budgets, low inflation, and truly "small" government. Indeed, it's worth keeping in mind that Reagan embraced supply-side in part because it promised to allow him to cut taxes and fight inflation without shrinking government, thus offering him the best of both political worlds. As Dayton puts it:

[The Reagan administration] found a "conservative" rationale for a politically attractive policy that had been "liberal" and redefined conservatism in the process. They found a new conservative principle that was in conflict with the old one.

Similarly, Dayton suggests, Bush has tried to redefine conservatism -- for instance, by making "accountability" rather than "small government" the key conservative principle as applied to education policy.

Now, if Dayton's right -- and I don't think he's entirely wrong -- then it's notable that, while both Reagan and Bush the Lesser tried to redefine conservatism along principles other than "small government," the promise of smaller government still persists as the definitively "conservative" ideal. Of course, both Reagan and Dubya claimed to be out to shrink government -- it's just that those claims had little bearing on reality.

At any rate, Dayton posits a couple of alternative ways to define conservatism:

There are a number of principles that we could change. "Competition" could replace "lassez faire." (for example markets based on complicated kinds of regulatory property like emissions trading, water or mineral rights separate from property rights, or IPR) "Accountability" could replace "small government." (like NCLB) Clearly, in many cases, "federalism" means more "bureaucracy," (more AFSCME socialism) when you are talking about 50 different state regulatory regimes of cable, credit cards, insurance, etc.

The upshot is that there are lots and lots of places for the party to go. Many of them do not lie on the left-right axis.

Dayton's post is written not just in response to Ruffini's but also to a post by Reihan Salam, who weighs in on Ruffini's criticism of "big-government conservatism." First of all, Salam argues, Bush's "counterprogramming" has in some instances been extremely popular -- for instance, the prescription drug entitlement. Moreover, as Dayton observes, even controversial legislation like No Child Left Behind, while it might not have shrunk government, did incorporate recognizably conservative aims like an increase in accountability (yes, I know -- the Bush administration talking about "accountability." Please hold your laughter until the end.).

But what really concerns Salam is that the failures of the Bush administration could discredit the broader "conservative reformist argument." Karl Rove's "idiosyncratic" demographic strategies, and Bush's lack of attention to the actual policy experts behind compassionate conservatism, have unfairly tainted the project as little more than a political strategy, a "savvy" form of rhetorical triangulation, as Ruffini sees it, purchased at the cost of grossly expanded federal spending. This is what many of the administration's conservative critics mean by "big-government conservatism," and it's what they mean to counter when they talk about erasing Bush's domestic legacy and making the GOP "more conservative" again.

But Salam argues that it's just not that simple:

What exactly does "more conservative" mean? In Ruffini's case, I have to assume it means more laissez-faire. And yet what does laissez-faire mean in the context of the vexing regulatory debates surrounding intellectual property and energy and even public order that will be the key questions for the next few decades? It means a lot of different, non-obvious things. To say the GOP must become "more conservative" is a bit of a non sequitur, as the meaning of conservatism (leaving those NYT types aside) is contested, and increasingly so. Note the fast rising relevance of self-described paleocons like Daniel Larison. Surely he can make a claim to the conservative mantle, right alongside Andrew Bacevich and Bill Kristol and dozens of other true believers.

I dare say that a socially conservative politics that aims to bolster families, whether through tax cuts or even quasi-socialistic departures from laissez-faire like the G.I. Bill, might have more relevance to the future of American conservatism than an essentially libertarian politics most closely associated with the American upper-upper-middle.

Salam insists that the meaning of conservatism is at issue, that its assumptions are not safe. For Salam -- who is collaborating with Ross Douthat on a book-length version of their "Party of Sam's Club" article (about which more later) -- a majoritarian conservatism would address many of the same issues that the compassiocons have tried to tackle. It would, at its essence, be "a social conservatism based on the defense of families," a formulation meant to incorporate a more activist role for government in economic policy than what conservatives have traditionally embraced.

We'll explore the details later. In the final two installments of this little series, though, we'll look at how the exchange exemplifies the increasingly contentious struggle between those with competing definitions of conservatism, even as the old conservative coalition crumbles around them.

Labels: conservative futures, Patrick Ruffini, Reihan Salam, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:08 AM 0 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 3)

It may seem odd to give such a detailed account of an exhange between bloggers that took place a week ago, but stick with me -- these are some of the smartest conservative analysts out there, and what they're debating has major implications for the future of their movement.

We left off with a quandary: if conservatives are to revitalize the Republican party, they need a revitalized movement. And if they're to rebuild their movement, they need Big Ideas. Those Big Ideas must provide a foundation upon which conservatives can both unify their base and build a majority coalition. But this is where they're stuck. What could those foundational, majority-making ideas be?

Conservative bloggers Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton have agreed that immigration is not an issue that will provide any good Big Ideas for Republicans. But their dilemma becomes considerably more complex when they turn to a discussion of the central issue in American politics: the role and size of government. Politically speaking, conservatives have been well-served by their "limited government, low taxes" mantra. But as this blog has discussed extensively, Republicans -- even in their periods of greatest power -- have failed to shrink government appreciably. Meanwhile, polls indicate that Americans, by significant majorities, favor a much more activist approach to government than what conservatives will abide. The failure to shrink government despite the right's noisy insistence on the importance of doing so has brought frustration and discord to the ranks of the conservative coalition, and damaged the Republican brand, making them look both incompetent and, in Ruffini's words, like a party of "stingy Scrooges eager to starve grandma."

Ruffini notes, as I have, that compassionate conservatism as embraced by George W. Bush and his advisors was meant as a way out of this dilemma (though he addresses it primarily as a communications device, a "a savvy tactical response to Republicans constantly getting cut up by the rhetorical meatgrinder of the Clinton presidency," while I think it was also meant to address underlying structural problems with the Republican coalition). But he figures it for a kind of triangulation, with the same serious drawback progressives ascribe to Bill Clinton's practice of the same:

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.

Ruffini points out that it was the vacuum created on the left by Clinton's triangulation that led to the rise of the progressive netroots. If compassionate conservatism is a form of triangulation-from-the-right, might we expect to see a revitalized conservative grassroots in the next few years? As Ruffini puts it:

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.

Liberals are adamant that the right not be allowed to wash its hands of the Bush legacy -- Dubya was, after all, the inheritor of decades of conservative movement-building, and to liberal eyes he looks like probably the most right-wing president in American history. Yet conservatives insist that, on the core issue of the role and size of government in the domestic sphere, Bush has plainly abandoned them. If this is the case, there may well be space on the right for a new conservative movement. But would a movement based on traditional conservative hostility to "big government" have any chance of building a majority coalition?

Labels: conservative futures

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:28 AM 5 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 2)

The exchange between Patrick Ruffini and Soren Dayton begins with the question of whether the GOP needs a new conservative movement equivalent to the post-Dean campaign grassroots mobilization on the left. Dayton suggests it does.

Ruffini agrees, arguing that the once-formidable conservative precinct operation has atrophied:

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.

Ruffini's pessimistic picture is interesting, given how in 2004 Republicans ran proverbial circles around the Democrats when it came to precinct-level organizing in key states like Ohio.

But as I've suggested, organizing technologies and strategies, while important, do not constitute a movement. And Ruffini understands that something's missing:

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.

Ruffini understands how "needs unmet by the establishment" can be the catalyst that turns a potential constituency into a true movement. He also recognizes that, from a conservative perspective, those unmet needs are a solution to the immigration question and, at long last, real limits (even cuts) in government spending.

But whey are these not "Big Ideas?" Why can't they be about something more than "chest-thumping?" Ruffini doesn't say, but let me offer my own exegesis: they're not Big Ideas because they don't transcend the shrinking conservative base. That's not to say that they aren't issues that concern most Americans, but immigration only divides the Republican coalition and the traditional conservative anti-spending line seems both structurally untenable and unlikely to appeal to constituencies beyond the rather narrow fiscal conservative base. Ruffini himself might not agree, at least consciously, but he seems to sense it. Immigration and spending might represent needs unmet by the establishment, but when it comes to building a majority coalition -- or even a unified conservative movement -- from them, Republicans just can't make the math work.

Soren Dayton agrees that immigration won't be a majority-making issue for conservatives. In his analysis, progressives have had room to rebuild their coalition at a rapid clip by "adding and activating ... middle and upper-middle class 'liberals.'" Republicans, on the other hand, find themselves in a strange position: having consolidated their own conservative coalition in 2004, they now find it splintering under the pressure. And the lack of internal consensus is likely to make things very interesting for conservatives over the next couple of years:

If there is no consensus on where the party goes, then this will probably be decided by a series of experiments involving primaries, national elections, and evolving coalitions in Congress. One upshot of the Goldwater/Reagan model was that the party agreed where to go from there. That’s what Reagan running in 1968, 1976, and 1980 did.

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 agree with pretty much every word Dayton writes here. I've suggested that the breakdown of authority among the right's party and movement institutions could make the 2008 GOP primary election a genuine battle over ideas -- though I was skeptical that the decay was actually so advanced yet. I'm beginning to change my mind on this last point. But what Dayton says about Thompson is notable: it would be a candidacy based on masking the turmoil within the right.

Still, while the various ideas Dayton mentions might offer ways forward for conservatives and their party, I've yet to see much sign that any of the candidates are prepared to take them up. If the election is going to be an experiment, then we have to know the hypothesis. So far, all we're seeing is a lot of vacuous chest-thumping.*

What is particularly being avoided is any substantive re-examination of the post-Goldwater conservative assumptions about the role of government. But I'm happy to report that this particular discussion will take a turn in that direction.


*One exception: The Giuliani Hypothesis, which is that there are now circumstances that could permit a candidate to win the Republican nomination even while rejecting the core principles of the religious right.

Labels: conservative futures, movement building, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:22 AM 0 comments

  Looking for the New New Right (Part 1)

I want to call your attention to a very interesting discussion that's been going on for the past week or two over in the conservative wonkosphere (which is a much different place than the mouth-breathing thugosphere of the Malkins and Little Green Thingies). It starts as an exchange about the difference between campaigns and movement building, and evolves into a lively debate over the future of policy and ideology in the conservative movement itself -- indeed, over whether there is such a thing as the "conservative movement" anymore. I'll break up my own play-by-play into more than one post, since there are several different things worth observing here.

GOP internet strategist Patrick Ruffini kicks it off with a response to this post by Adrienne Royer, who compares the grassroots mobilization strategies of the Dean and Bush/Cheney campaigns:

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.

Ruffini, who helped organize the GOP's 2004 grassroots efforts, responds:

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. [...]

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.

Ruffini does wish that the "volunteer community-building [had] been kept alive under the Bush brand name," since people tend to be more willing to enlist to support a particular candidate than to support a party.

The lesson, for Ruffini, is that elected officials should make stronger efforts to stay in touch with the people on their email lists after the election. But Soren Dayton, a Republican blogger and consultant, argues that Ruffini missed the point by missing a key distinction: "campaigns versus movements":

In 2005, the Dean list and community was converted into an unprecedented grassroots candidacy for DNC chair. And the Deaniacs took over state parties and county parties around the country. The Deaniacs lost the 2004 primary campaign but may yet transform their party over the long-term. That’s a movement, not one campaign. And, over the long-term, movements have a lot more power. In short, the online left is solving a different problem than the Bush campaign was. The online left is trying to change their party, not elect candidates. [...]

MoveOn and Dean for America, rebranded as Democracy for America, did continue to activate with their 3m list. And they don’t have to take orders from the party. To them, candidates are a way of effecting policy changes, not the objective in-and-of-themselves, like they are for a party committee. Whatever candidate we nominate in 2008 is going to have a different coalition. Will the Generation Joshua guys show up for a Rudy Giuliani, a John McCain, or a Mitt Romney? I kinda doubt it.

I continue to believe that the right way to understand the online left is not as a party, but as a movement. Their historical antecedent is the New Right, using direct mail, the new technology of the day, to raise money and deliver message. In essence, the new technology is being used to expand the power and size of a part of the coalition that hasn’t had a seat at the table of the Democratic Party.

Dayton's post is a remarkable indication of how the more clued-in young conservative intellectuals are beginning to feel as though the right has been leapfrogged in terms of movement-building, thanks to the efforts of the progressive netroots and grassroots since 2004. That's heartening in and of itself, but it's also a point of departure for an exploration of whether a "new new right" might be in the cards. As Dayton puts it:

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."

What are the elements of a successful political movement (as opposed to just a series of campaigns)? An alienated mass constituency (or potential constituency), for one. For Goldwater's new right, that was what you might call the Midwestern petite-bourgeoisie -- isolationist, anti-communist, and frustrated with the post-war social compact between labor and big capitalism (later on, of course, it would expand to include anti-civil rights Southern whites and anti-tax Westerners). For the current progressive movement, it has been the young white middle class: socially progressive, increasingly anti-war, and forward-looking.

Beyond that, you need ideas to appeal to that constituency, organizing technologies to spur and channel their activism (direct mail, the internet, extra-party political associations, etc.), and the ability to sustain the effort over time.

For all the talk of the progressive advantage on the internet, I think that conservatives actually have a perfectly good grasp -- in some ways, better than ours -- of how to use political technologies (though we can debate whether their base is inherently less-suited to "bottom-up" organizing styles -- personally, I think that that theory is a bit overblown). And while the right's leadership is populated with dinosaurs, they do nonetheless appear to have young intellectuals capable of developing good ideas.

What's not clear is whether, at this point, they have a mass constituency to which they can appeal. The apparent paucity of actual ideas on the right may have a lot to do with this: if you don't know who you're talking to or what they want, it can be difficult to have much to say. And this question will come into sharper focus as the exchange continues.

Labels: conservative futures, movement building, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:06 AM 0 comments