TUESDAY, FEB 9, 2016
David Brooks has lost all control: This is how the far right stole the GOP — and they are not giving it back
For years, GOP intellectuals rationalized for the loons. Now it's too late for the men of ideas to regain authority
Chaos and carnage are upon us as American voters make war on “the establishment.” On the Republican side, the hoary National Review has declared in a dramatic purple-covered issue it is “Against Trump,” while conservative intellectual David Brooks pines for “gray men in suits” to shut down both Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. On the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders attacks former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for representing “establishment politics and establishment economics.”
Republican leaders comfort themselves with the belief that their troubles started in 2010 with the Tea Party; Democratic leaders don’t have to look back. They can blame their problems on the Sanders insurgency.
But the leaders on both sides are wrong. The rise of a new kind of political science in the 1960s has been driving a wedge between political insiders and voters ever since. By turning voters into interest groups, it stopped establishment leaders from articulating a national narrative. It opened the way for Movement Conservatives to create today’s political crisis.
The estrangement between leaders and voters came out of the political confusion of the post-World War II years. The Democratic political juggernaut that emerged from the Depression and the New Deal meant that Republicans had to scramble to figure out a way to recover their former dominance. In 1969, after Richard Nixon had cobbled together a coalition to win the 1968 election, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips wrote a groundbreaking book titled “The Emerging Republican Majority.” Arguing that Americans vote along ethnic, religious and traditional lines, Phillips proposed slicing and dicing the American electorate to keep the Republican Party in power.
Phillips was in the vanguard of those who practiced a new form of political science, often based in game theory, which turned elections into a strategy game. Insiders in both parties jumped onto this new science. They focused on hammering coalitions together by attracting voting blocs. Rather than outlining a national direction, politicians catered to those interests. They stopped talking about what America stood for and started talking about narrow constituencies. Voters became pawns to elect party leaders, rather than people whose votes helped decide the country’s direction.
Alan: Kevin Philips has repented his sins, leaving the GOP and writing a fine book on American theocracy. Having started it, he should know...
"American Theocracy," By Kevin Phillips
Conservative Norm Ornstein: The Media Ignore Republican Lunacy
But people want to matter, and they make sense of their role in the country through stories about what America means.
Into the narrative vacuum stepped political leaders who wanted to undo the New Deal consensus. These Movement Conservatives hated business regulation and the taxes necessary to pay for social welfare legislation. While politicians, pundits and journalists in the Washington bubble were paying attention to electoral percentages, Movement Conservatives were talking to voters. They attacked the government by convincing voters that regulations and social welfare legislation stole tax dollars from hardworking white people and redistributed them to lazy minorities. True Americans, they suggested, would fight back.
The Movement Conservative narrative drew on classic themes. It told of poor but hardworking individuals—outsiders– threatened by a grasping government. In their hands, the popular legislation that actually protected Americans oppressed them. They explained that an active government needed tax dollars, and tax dollars came from the little guy. In a racist and sexist twist that drew on America’s long history, Movement Conservatives harped on the idea that those tax dollars would go to minorities and women. This story gave us Nixon’s Southern Strategy promising that he would not press integration; Reagan’s lazy Welfare Queen who stole tax dollars; the Willie Horton ad dishonestly linking a convicted black rapist to Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis; and Mitt Romney’s allegation that the nation was made up of makers and takers.
This story of the little guy standing against a threatening government resonates peculiarly in America because of the legend of the American West. While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny. Translated to politics, this story gave us Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater emphasizing his grandparents’ history on the Western frontier rather than his own privileged upbringing, former Gov. Ronald Reagan trading in his English riding clothes for a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and radio host Rush Limbaugh lauding wealthy Connecticut-born George W. Bush as a “cowboy… in [a] white hat,” who knew right from wrong. Despite their privilege and power, in this story they were all outsiders taking on an Eastern Establishment. This Eastern Establishment, Goldwater supporter Phyllis Schlafly explained, liked big government because government contracts provided its members with big bucks.
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