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“It’s going to be hard to change the Republican party”: E.J. Dionne explains how the right went wrong — and helped create Donald Trump and Ted Cruz
“It’s going to be hard to change the Republican party”: E.J. Dionne explains how the right went wrong — and helped create Donald Trump and Ted Cruz
E.J. Dionne explains why Republicans must moderate themselves -- or doom any hope of a functional government
E.J. Dionne’s work has had a consistent theme over three decades: We deserve better than the un-serious politics we get. In his masterful 1991 book “Why Americans Hate Politics,” Dionne argued that “there are more ideas that unite us than divide us, but politics doesn’t reflect that.” We hated politics then, he explained, because it had become a selection of false choices, presented by “conservatives who failed to represent their interests and liberals (who) have lost touch with their values.”
Twenty-five years later, our politics remains divided, dysfunctional and no more serious. The Republican primary field dominated by an authoritarian carnival barker and a senator so unyielding that even the deeply stubborn conservative men who run the chamber find him too intransigent. And Dionne has a crucial new book that explains this dangerous moment with passion, clarity and erudition.
In “Why The Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond,” Dionne argues that since 1964, in election after election, Republicans have made promises that they are either unwilling or unable to deliver upon. The result: An endless cycle of disillusion and betrayal amongst the conservative faithful that has driven the party ever-rightward — and into an irresponsible permanent party of extremism and obstruction.
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, two George Bushes — none of them could make real the rhetoric conservatives used to rally the like-minded. “In response,” Dionne writes, “movement conservatives advanced an ever purer ideology, certain that doing so would eventually bring them the triumphs that had eluded them.” It not only hasn’t happened, but Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Gerrymandering and the inherent red-state bias of the Senate has created a near-eternal divided government, with a Republican Party that’s “committed, on principle, to preventing its adversaries from governing successfully.”
If we hate politics in 2016, it’s because Republicans have embraced a “reactionary radicalism” that’s taken the entire democracy hostage. Conservatives either heal themselves, or render the country ungovernable and unsafe at a crucial juncture. Dionne’s an earnest and erudite progressive, so this diagnosis may not seem surprising. What makes this book so compelling and necessary is not only his historical analysis, but the depth of the research and reporting and the clarity with which he lays out this most complicated and thorny dilemma of our time. Pair it with Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” the month’s other must-political-read, and you’ll understand exactly how we arrived in this broken moment.
We talked to Dionne, a Washington Post columnist and NPR regular, on Friday afternoon, as he traveled Iowa in advance of this evening’s caucus. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You’re calling from Iowa, and the caucuses are Monday, so let’s start there. Your book traces conservative discontent from Barry Goldwater and 1964 forward, but it also seems to me that the Republicans created this uncontrollable Trump Frankenstein themselves with their big wins in 2010. They gerrymandered a decade-long permanent majority in the House, built districts where the only challenge could come further from the right, and created a sense within a restless base that they were about to have big victories. Those victories would never come with a Democrat in the White House. But the base looks at this and believes the party just isn’t fighting hard enough. So you get Trump and Cruz – and a plan that looked brilliant after 2010 spirals out of control…
I totally agree. The line that has been coming back to me a lot lately is one of my favorite John F. Kennedy lines from his inaugural address, where he said, “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
The Republicans did a number of things to win that created the circumstance that leads to Iowa, where the top two candidates are both candidates that large parts of the party leadership wish weren’t there. I think problem one was feeding the Tea Party and a particularly radical view of the United States and of Obama — that somehow President Obama was a Muslim, a socialist, an extremist who was going to transform the country into something Americans wouldn’t recognize. That was not true: he is not Muslim, even though it shouldn’t matter if he were. He is not a socialist, as Bernie Sanders, by contrast, is showing us. He is not someone who wants to create a strange new America. The stock market’s doing great, the economy is picking up. He probably hasn’t done enough, and I think he thinks this himself, about income inequality.
His health-care plan that Republicans are so determined to repeal and replace came out of the Heritage Foundation and, as you point out, it was probably further to the right than what Hillary and Bill tried to do in 1994.
Not only that, it was further to the right than what Nixon proposed back in 1971. So they’ve created this monster of Obama and of this radical departure, which a lot of their own people believed. When they said all these things, but couldn’t deliver, they created this very angry constituency. So that’s one problem that they helped create. They kept promising and promising that they would actually do something about this “socialist onslaught” when they couldn’t really do it.
I do think some of these promises go all the way back to Goldwater. The first line of the book is, “The history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal.” Going right back to the beginning, one of the core promises of modern conservatism, that they could create a smaller government, was simply impossible. Nixon didn’t do it; in fact, he actually grew government. Reagan didn’t do it, Bush didn’t do it, Bush II didn’t do it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s because most Americans want a lot from government, including Tea Party folks who are at or over the age of 65 who will criticize all kinds of programs but also insist, “Don’t take away my Medicare or Social Security.”
Conservative president after conservative president has not delivered on that promise. If Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes don’t actually deliver smaller government, maybe conservatism is actually about using the government in the service of different and well-heeled interests.
That is certainly partially true, because obviously conservatism had no problems using government to impose a certain vision of what America should and shouldn’t be like. Obviously abortion is a good example of that, an issue that I admit is very complicated. I respect right-to-lifers, but it is an aggressive use of government.
You have all these guys — not all of them, Rand Paul is a true small government libertarian — saying we want a smaller government but we want to beef up the military. They say we want a smaller government, but by the way, we won’t cut Social Security or Medicare for anybody who now gets it or is about to. Partly because their own constituency is on the old side, which is a long-term problem that we can talk about.
So, it’s an empty promise. One of the reasons I lift up Eisenhower as the alternative to Goldwater at the time, and representing in his core beliefs something like what conservatism needs now, is that Eisenhower was certainly a budget balancer. He was certainly prudent, he was certainly pro-business, he was all these things conservatives like — but he did not pretend that you could roll back the New Deal. He did not pretend that Americans wanted nothing from government. He was willing to use government where he thought it was appropriate. He created the interstate highway system; he created the student loan program, which helped me go to college. Eisenhower was conservatism as prudence and trying broadly to preserve the American way of life, while accepting that certain things change with the times because the problems change. I still think, in the end, conservatism is going to have to go back – or forward, in a way – to being about that, and not about a series of ideological slogans that include promises they can’t keep.
Why do they keep making these promises? They understand how the system of checks and balances work; they understand what a presidential veto is. Did they ever think they would deliver? After every election that Republicans have lost for decades, the lesson learned was, “Well, that time we weren’t conservative enough, so next time we’ll move further to the right.” And here they are.
Partly it’s aspirational. If they wanted to make a case that they are somewhat less likely to regulate the market than liberals or progressives are, that’s a plausible case. Indeed, they have tried and succeeded in some cases — in some cases Bill Clinton signed the bills in deregulating the financial market and transportation, which Ted Kennedy was involved in. There is a sense in which there is a truth here that they’re espousing, but where their claim on truth breaks down is when it comes to the core functions of government. The tend to define this problem as – I talk about this problem in relation to Mitt Romney’s announcement speech – if government reaches a certain percentage of GDP, if it goes over that then suddenly we’ve lost our freedom, and that’s pretty much what Mitt Romney said in that speech. And that’s just not true; that’s never been true.
Just to go back to the original question about Trump: When Republicans decided in the House not to take up the immigration bill that passed the Senate with considerable Republican support, including for a while Marco Rubio, they started putting out all sorts of rhetoric about how people were flowing across our southern border illegally. They were saying this at a moment when net immigration from Mexico was below zero — because of the recession, people were going back. But if everything was as bad as they said it was, why shouldn’t people vote for Trump instead of the party establishment? So I think there has been this sloganeering to appeal to the angriest parts of the right to keep it mobilized, when the party leadership had no real intention of acting on what the full implications of that rhetoric were.
That’s a really dangerous game.
Yeah, and that’s where Donald Trump is picking up on them. “If things are that bad, let’s throw everybody out and send them back to Mexico and build a wall,” he says. Now of course that’s an absurd policy and it’s inhumane, but it follows logically from rhetoric that you’ve been hearing on that side.
I think the other thing that really strikes me as the election season begins is that the older party leadership – I’m skeptical of the word establishment – the older party leadership is desperate to stop Trump and Cruz, but when they look around, the votes to stop them aren’t in the Republican party anymore. Because by pursuing this turn to the right – a lot of it rhetorical, some of it real – they have driven out all of the moderate voters. People who were good moderate Republicans, or even moderate conservatives, who voted for George H.W. Bush back in ’88, they don’t vote in Republican primaries anymore. They started shifting to being independents or even Democrats during the Clinton years, and that’s continued. When they need voters to save them, the voters are gone. I think that’s a central dynamic of what’s happening in these primaries right now.
That’s especially true in the Iowa caucuses, which tend to draw particularly ideological voters because it takes a bigger commitment to go to a caucus. But if you look up in New Hampshire, the only way Trump might be stopped up there is by independent voters who are no longer Republican. The leadership of the party doesn’t have the troops anymore inside the party to do what they need to do in primaries, for the most part.
The Fox News poll from New Hampshire a week ago, it took the support of Christie, Bush, Rubio and Kasich together to approach Trump’s number. The troops they do have remain divided – and, of course, there’s no telling that, even if the field thinned, if some of their supporters would move to Trump or Cruz as a second choice.
That’s another point I make in the book which I think is important in looking forward to these primaries. There are a lot of smart Republican strategists who make the point, fairly, that in the last two elections the more moderate conservative, compared to their opponents, prevailed: John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. But if you look carefully at both contests, the reason both McCain and Romney prevailed is that it was the conservatives splitting up their side of the vote. In 2012, Gingrich and Santorum, combined, were ahead of Romney in many states. And in 2008, McCain was very lucky because his more conservative adversaries kept knocking each other off, so that Huckabee beat Romney in Iowa, then Fred Thompson took enough votes away from Huckabee to allow McCain to win South Carolina. McCain won these early primaries with no more than a third of the vote.
So this dynamic in the Republican Party has now been there for awhile, that the staunch conservatives dominate the primaries. In the past, it was the conservatives that split the vote. Now there are enough of them to go around that Cruz and Trump can split the vote and you’ve got these four serious candidates on the other side who can’t even unite their now minority share of the party. The long purge of moderate and once-upon-a-time liberal Republicans has taken its toll and led us to this.
Why do you think Obama misread the nature of this opposition for so long? It seems like he needed to see it for six years to believe that it was true — and that it was going to stay that way, and his own powers of reason and civility wouldn’t ever bring cooler heads around.
I think Obama did what he did partly out of principle and a sense of who he is and partly, oddly perhaps, for certain political reasons. In terms of calculation, he is a reasonable person who likes to dialogue with Republicans. In the book I talk about how he became president of the Harvard Law Review because conservatives on the Law Review thought he was the more open-minded liberal. I think from that time forward, he thought he could persuade conservatives. I’ve always had the impression that Obama probably enjoys arguing with smart conservatives more than he enjoys arguing with anyone else.
So that’s partly character-ological. This is in some ways unfair, but [I think he thought], “If I could do it at the Harvard Law Review, if I could get along with these Republicans in the senate in Illinois, I can do it in Washington. I won an election promising to get rid of these divisions between red and blue America.”
And then he gets zero votes on the stimulus in February 2009. About the same cooperation on health care. The nature of the opposition seemed clear even if you’re not as smart as he is. You get his advisers to open up about this in the book.
I think he was slow to move off (looking for bipartisan cooperation) partly for political reasons. I write about this in the book and some of his own people have been candid about this. They felt that if they abandoned this too quickly voters would say, “Wait a minute, what did you campaign on?” So I think he felt a certain obligation to try to stick with it for a while. I thought it was perfectly obvious after the stimulus vote that it was going to be a problem. He got no Republicans in the House and three senators, who, by the way, forced the stimulus down in size below where it should have been given the depths of the recession. I think that was the time when he should have seen it.
There’s also a story in the book, told by David Axelrod, about tensions between Obama and Nancy Pelosi early on, where she told him, “You’ve got to stop attacking Washington abstractly. First, we are Washington now. Secondly, it’s Republicans who are getting in your way, not us.” And there was another moment when Pelosi told him in a private meeting, “Mr. President, I don’t mind you throwing us under the bus. I just object to your backing the bus up and running us over again.”
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