February 27, 2008. William F. Buckley, Jr. passes away quietly in his home. The news media and politicians mourn the loss of such an influential figure. William Kristol says of the man, "He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement." The Washington Post calls Buckley "the intellectual father of the modern American conservative movement."
Everywhere, Buckley was being hailed as the quintessential conservative intellectual. Conservative intellectual? In an environment where that two-word phrase rings with a certain oxymoronic hollowness, it is too easy for progressives to scoff at modern conservatism's rejection of everything resembling logic and reason. I did. But the reality is this: Buckley was the last living mainstream conservative thinker and that's bad news not just for Republicans, but for America. My take on how we've gotten here and what it means for the future after the jump.
Death of the Old GOP
On January 17, 1961, outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a surprisingly prescient farewell address warning of the dangers the burgeoning military-industrial complex posed to democracy in the United States. Eisenhower's eight years in the White House interrupted two decades of Democratic occupancy but would not start a revival of the Republican Party. Instead, Eisenhower represented the final sputtering gasp of the old conservative establishment, the affluent patriarchs who saw themselves as courageous protectors of the American Way at home and abroad, strong and self-reliant, yet compassionate. It was this usually misguided but genuine love for democracy and country that led Eisenhower to stress the following:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Eisenhower's words reflect the values of the GOP at the time: patriotism, democracy, and, notably, education. As the vitriol and overt fear-mongering of the McCarthy era fell out of public favor and a more tempered anti-communist sentiment settled into the country's consciousness, however, the vehicle on which Republicans had almost exclusively relied in recent years to gain and keep power broke down. Eisenhower was the last Republican president to cleave to the old traditions of the party, traditions that would become increasingly obsolete in coming years.
Political Purgatory
Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years, the Republican Party struggled internally to define itself. "Old Guard" party leaders were facing more and more pressure from a new wing of the GOP that devoted itself almost fanatically to the teachings men like William F. Buckley, Jr. and later Milton Friedman laid out in conservative journals and think tanks. The new vein of conservative ideology was unabashedly pro-business and anti-social services, so naturally the wealthy elite who had much to gain from such policies fell in love and in 1964 so many of the party's diehard supporters had adopted the new form of conservatism that they managed to nominate a candidate unlike any the country had ever seen: Barry Goldwater.
In his 1960 political treatise, The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater writes:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in 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. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. (p. 15)
For the first time in the country's history, a major political party ran a candidate for president whose primary goal was not to run government but to dismantle it. Goldwater's positions were detailed and his crusade against social programs held widespread appeal amongst the wealthy elite but average voters were turned off by Goldwater's radical far-right stances. Ultimately, Goldwater was too tough of a pill for working class Americans to swallow and he went down in flames in the general election.
Veteran Republican politicians breathed a sigh of relief; Goldwater was an aberration to them, too radical to ever hope to attain mainstream appeal. As the intellectual current inspiring conservative ideology continued to shift to the political right with Buckley and Friedman at the reins, GOP leaders wholeheartedly rejected the movement, citing Goldwater's embarrassing defeat as a reason to turn to Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, the Republican nominee against Kennedy, and all-around a staunch symbol and supporter of the old establishment. Nixon's policies, true to form, were a far cry from the purist free-market ideals of Goldwater. The wage and price control instituted by Nixon prompted an angry Friedman to call him "the most socialist of the presidents of the United States in the 20th century."
Though Nixon's decidedly Keynesian approach to economics infuriated the thinkers of the new conservative movement, his style of campaigning very much interested them. Every aspect of the campaign was carefully scripted and managed by advertisers-turned-political consultants. Vicious but subtle tactics like race-baiting proved especially effective in the South. The entire operation was built around the principle that issues do not win elections, image does. Joe McGinniss' informative book, The Selling of the President, thoroughly details the tactics used by Nixon's campaign, with particular emphasis on the strategy employed in the South:
Fred LaRue was getting bald and he smoked cigars. He was from Atlanta, Georgia. His job was to persuade people in the South not to vote for George Wallace, but he had to do it in a way that would not upset people in the rest of the country.
...
"One example of the propaganda innovations to be employed," LaRue wrote, "is a special ballad-type song in the current 'country and western' music style, by which nationally famous artists will 'sing' the message via the radio and TV. The multi-stanza ballad will allow issues to be included or excluded as the local situation indicates. The song's technical aspects will be such that 'local talent' as well as a variety of 'stars' can render it effectively..." (pp. 120-121)
The end result was that a sleek, manufactured facsimile of a politician was presented to the American people and they ate him up. While Democrats figured that Nixon won in spite of focusing very little on substantive policy positions, the Buckleys and Friedmans believed that Nixon won in large part because of such lack of substance and they longed for a golden opportunity to marry their radical ideology with a similar "image-driven," race-baiting campaign style. As Ford and Carter came and went, the new conservative movement found Ronald Reagan.
Rise of the Modern GOP
Philadelphia, Mississippi: Site of the brutal, nationally-publicized murder of three civil rights workers by white supremacists in 1964. Site of the states'-rights speech that launched Ronald Reagan's general election run for the White House in 1980.
The symbolism and the messaging were unmistakable. Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights ... I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." Reagan was no stranger to such dirty tactics, however. As Paul Krugman puts it in his excellent book, The Conscience of a Liberal:
Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, showed the way. His 1964 speech "A Time for Choosing," which launched his political career, and the speeches he gave during his successful 1966 campaign for governor of California foreshadowed political strategies that would work for him and other movement conservatives for the next forty years. Latter-day biographies have portrayed Reagan as a high-minded paragon of conservative principles, but he was nothing of the sort. His early political successes were based on appeals to cultural and sexual anxieties, playing on the fear of communism, and, above all, tacit exploitation of the white backlash against the civil rights movement and its consequences. (p. 11)
All manner of fears relating to social issues were taken advantage of, from trepidation about communists to homophobic sentiment arising from the explosion in AIDS cases around the world. Reagan was appealing not just to racists, but to the uneducated and the religious as well. Beyond that, his demonization of unions, "welfare queens," and peace activists signaled to the country's elite that Reagan was serious about ravaging the social safety net for private profit and keeping the military-industrial complex alive and well. With Reagan's victories, the new conservative movement had successfully taken over the party and found the perfect formula for retaining power. They had found a way to sell economic policies that benefit a few at the expense of many by spreading fear and playing on people's ignorance. Goldwater married Nixon and begot Reagan while America's biggest corporations counted their blessings.
The modern Republican Party is little more than an arm of powerful corporate interests hellbent on increasing profits. Wealthy business tycoons like Cheney and Rumsfeld who care only about their own self-interest dominate the party's leadership. The foundation of the extremist economic philosophy promoted by conservative titans like Friedman is, after all, the idea that the pursuit of nothing but your own self-interest is not only allowable, but desirable. The modern GOP is the most rational of rational actors: to stay in power while the party patriarchs enrich themselves at public expense, Republican politicians are expected to, outwardly at least, be very religious and concerned with social issues that effectively distract and energize the base. In addition, public education was targeted for destruction and with cuts to education spending and general neglect of sound education policy, the quality of general schooling has gone way down, producing many of the uneducated, anti-intellectual voters the modern GOP relies on as base voters. As the coup de grâce, an unintelligent, highly religious person is often elevated to a powerful, public position to ensure widespread support from Republican base voters. Dan Quayle was one of the first. George W. Bush was next. Sarah Palin followed, but the Republican Party has made a potentially fatal error.
Teabaggers and the Huge Populist Revolt
Mirroring the de-emphasis on public education was an equally disastrous shift by mainstream news media toward more sensationalistic, less substantive coverage of political issues, fueled by the desire for profits on the part of the increasingly small number of powerful media corporations in the United States. Fox News in particular caters to the anti-intellectual crowd, for obvious reasons. Jon Stewart picked up on a prime example of Fox's deliberate dumbing down of the news. The plan seems to be that if people are accustomed to an extremely low level of intellectual discourse surrounding political issues, they can be more easily manipulated into believing whatever the leaders of the GOP want them to believe. That is to say, if people have no political ideology but rather just a haphazard collection of opinions on various issues with no underlying philosophy guiding them, people can be potentially persuaded into holding contradictory views. It's no mystery, then, why Republicans have driven all the intellectuals out of the party. The likes of Buckley have been replaced by Limbaughs and Becks and Hannitys, entertainers who likely are too intelligent and educated to believe everything they say but who serve a vital role for the Republican Party.
When the banks started collapsing, the Republican establishment under George W. Bush acted perfectly rationally. They are beholden to themselves and their friends, namely, wealthy elites, many of whom are from the financial sector. There was no question that a bailout would be in order and party leaders must have been confident that the base of the party could be persuaded into supporting this kind of corporate welfare even though it clashed with the free-market ideology they espoused before. Thus, the transfer of large amounts of public wealth directly into the hands of private wheel-and-dealers was conducted right out in the open, the first time in the country's history such a huge transfer of money went directly from government coffers to private pockets in such a short period of time. But when GOP leaders tried to offer a satisfactory explanation to placate the base, the whole effort exploded in their faces.
An enormous, nominally right-wing populist backlash seemed to sprout up almost overnight. To party leaders' horror, however, the base directed much of its fury against Republicans. Soon, health insurance and petroleum corporations that were fearful of the coming Obama presidency signed aboard and began financially supporting the "teabaggers" in the hopes that they would be able to pressure Democrats to not pass any kind of meaningful health care or energy reform legislation. Many Republican politicians have also allied themselves with the movement in a bid to become more electable. Beck, Hannity, et. al. even became enthusiastic teabaggers themselves. For a while, it seemed like the Republican Party had been thrown for a loop but its leaders would be able to harness the tremendous grassroots energy of the teabaggers to their own advantage.
But it's just not so. The teabaggers have no coherent ideology. They and the entire Republican Party along with them have adopted "common sense" as a replacement for political philosophy. Glenn Beck co-opted Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense as a symbol for the new movement. Now the GOP is always stressing "common sense" health care reform and apparently politicians with common sense oppose any kind of government spending unless it happens to go to the military or to corporations. "Common sense" is not and cannot be a suitable replacement for political ideology or for policy proposals, which is precisely why it is borderline impossible to have an intellectual discussion about issues with teabaggers.
As hard as the GOP tries to cater to the new movement, however, the teabaggers have rebelled over and over and over. Now as Sarah Palin, a tremendously popular true believer of teabaggerism, refuses to rule out the possibility of creating her own political party, and ruthlessly attacks McCain's campaign, there is no telling what will happen in the future. The teabaggers have the capability to take over the party or form their own if they so desire, but regardless, they are much more frightening than the current leaders of the party; at least Cheney and McConnell are aware that their policies hurt the vast majority of people and are incredibly profitable only for a very small segment of the population (people like them). Now we are left with a huge number of uninformed, violent, radical grassroots activists with whom our political disagreements cannot even be debated on an intellectual level. The diabolical puppet masters of the GOP have lost control of the very people they had dumbed down in order to manipulate. Today's Republican Party has been reduced to a headless chicken flailing about wildly and unfortunately we're all in its path.