Or how the repugican cabal lost its mind
by Kim Messick
In a recent article, I
argued that
the repugican cabal has been captured by a faction whose political
psychology makes it highly intransigent and uninterested in compromise.
That article focused on the roots of this psychology and how it shapes
the tea party’s view of its place in American politics. It did not
pursue the question of exactly how this capture took place — of how a
major political cabal came
to be so dependent on a narrow range of strident voices. This is the
question I propose to explore below.
In doing so, we should keep
in mind three terms from political science (and much political
journalism) — “realignment,” “polarization” and “gridlock.” These
concepts are often bandied about as if their connections are obvious,
even intuitive. Sometimes, indeed, a writer leaves the impression that
they are virtually synonymous. I think this is mistaken, and that it
keeps us from appreciating just how strange our present political moment
really is.
“Realignment,” for instance, refers to a systematic
shift in the patterns of electoral support for a political party. The
most spectacular recent example of this is the movement of white
Southerners from the Democratic Party to the repugican cabal after the
passage of major civil rights laws in the mid-1960s. Not coincidentally,
this event was critically important for the evolution of today’s repugican cabal.
After the War Between the States and the collapse of
Reconstruction in the 1870s, the identification of white Southerners as
Democrats was so stubborn and pervasive as to make the region into the
“solid South” –
solidly Democratic, that is. Despite this well-known fact, there is
reason to suspect that the South’s Democratic alliance was always a bit
uneasy. As the Gilded Age gave way to the first decades of the 20th
century, the electoral identities of the Democratic Party and the repugican cabal began to firm
up. Outside the South, the Democrats were the party of the cities, with
their polyglot populations and unionized workforces. The repugicans
drew most of their support from the rural Midwest and the small towns of
the North. The Democrats’ appeal was populist, while repugicans
extolled the virtues of an ascendant business class: self-sufficiency,
propriety, personal responsibility.
It will be immediately
evident that the repugican cabal was in many ways a more natural fit
for the South, which at the time was largely rural and whose white
citizens were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The South’s class
structure, less fluid than that of the industrial and urban North, would
have chimed with the more hierarchical strains of repugican politics,
and Southern elites had ample reason to prefer the “small government”
preached by repugican doctrine. But the legacy of Lincoln’s repugicanism was hard to overcome, and the first serious stirrings of
disillusion with the Democratic Party had to wait until 1948. That year,
South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, enraged by President Truman’s
support for some early civil rights measures, led a walkout of 35
Southern delegates from the Democratic Convention. Thurmond went on to
become the presidential nominee of a Southern splinter group, the
States’ Rights Democratic Party (better known as
“Dixiecrats”), and won four states in the deep South.
The first repugican successes in the South came in the
elections of 1952 and 1956,
when Dwight Eisenhower won five and eight states, respectively*. These
victories, however, were only marginally related to racial politics;
Eisenhower’s stature as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War
II had a much larger role, as did his cabal’s virulent anti-communism.
Nixon held only five of these states in 1960.
The real turning
point came in 1964. After passage of the Civil Rights Act, Barry
Goldwater’s campaign, with its emphasis on limited
government and states’ rights, carried five Southern states, four of
which had not been won by a repugican in the 20th century. No
Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of Southern states
since, with the single exception of former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter’s
1976 campaign. The South is now the
most reliably repugican region of the country, and supplies the party with most of its Electoral College support.
The
South’s realignment explains a lot about our politics. But it doesn’t,
in itself, explain one very important fact: why the post-civil rights repugican cabal went on to become the monolithically wingnut cabal
we have today. We can put this point as a question: Why didn’t the repugican cabal end up looking more like the pre-realignment Democrats,
with a coalition of Northern moderates and liberals yoked to wingnuts? (And the Midwest along for the ride.) In
effect, we’re asking how realignment is related to “polarization” — the
ideological sorting out that has led to our present party system, in
which nearly all moderates and liberals identify as Democrats and
all wingnuts as repugicans.
It’s important to ask this
question for at least two reasons. First, because it highlights the fact
that realignment and polarization are analytically distinct concepts — a
point often passed over in discussions of this subject. The sudden
migration of Southern whites into repugican ranks is obviously
connected with polarization; what we need to know is exactly how and
why. Which brings us to the second reason. Because the answer we’re led
to is so refreshingly old-fashioned and therefore, in today’s
intellectual culture, completely counterintuitive: They are connected
through the agency of political actors.
In
“Rule and Ruin,” his
wonderful history of the collapse of repugican moderation, the
historian Geoffrey Kabaservice documents the process by which
conservative activists remade the repugican cabal in their image. (If I
could recommend only one book this year to students of American
history, it would be this one.) Filling a broad canvas with an enormous
wealth of detail, Kabaservice shows us that wingnuts always thought
of themselves as engaged on two fronts: Moderate repugicans were as
much the enemy as liberal Democrats. William Rusher, Bill Buckley’s
colleague at National Review, remarked revealingly that the modern wingnut movement formed itself “in opposition to the Eisenhower
administration.”
One can’t help but admire the tenacity, focus and
creativity that conservative activists brought to their task. They
transformed the repugican cabal at every level: from the grass roots,
where they assumed control of local bodies such as city councils,
caucuses and county commissions, to the state and national party
machinery. They also built a
network of institutions designed
to cultivate and publicize wingnut ideas. These ranged from
relatively sophisticated periodicals and think tanks (National Review,
the early Heritage Foundation) to rawer, more demotic facsimiles (the
American Spectator, the Cato Institute). Groups such as the Moral
Majority arose, especially among the religio-wingnuts, and new media
technologies allowed for the consolidation of wingnut voices on
talk radio and cable television.
These actions were all part
of the same relentless design: to purge the repugican cabal of
moderate voices and to install wingnuts in every position of
meaningful power and influence. But they had another side as well.
Because as a cabal shapes itself it also shapes its electorate. And a
party engaged in a process of purification, if it wants to continue to
win elections, needs a similarly purified electorate.
The
realignment of Southern whites must be understood in this context. When
they deserted the Democratic Party in the mid-’60s, they presented repugicans with a huge electoral windfall. The repugicans then had to
decide how to invest this unexpected capital. In doing so they had to
balance at least two things: numbers and intensity. Numbers are
important, of course — you can’t win elections without them — but it’s
an old adage in politics that an intense 51 percent is better than a
relaxed 55 percent. The repugican decision to embrace an increasingly
radical version of wingnuttery should be seen, in effect, as an attempt
to leverage the intensity and loyalty of their new Southern voters.
These qualities were expected to offset the loss of any moderate or
liberal supporters who might abandon the party as it lurched off the cliff.
It was a perfectly rational strategy, and it worked
brilliantly. Between 1968 and 1992 — 24 years, an entire generation —
Democrats won exactly one presidential election, the post-Watergate
campaign of 1976. But after ’92 the strategy began to break down on the
national level, due mainly to demographic factors: There simply weren’t
enough rural white voters anymore to win presidential elections in a
consistent way. But by then the right was fully in control of repugican
politics and uninterested in sharing power (or policy) with their
moderate brethren. They developed a narrative to counter any suggestion
that ideological rigidity was the cause of the party’s losses in
national (and, increasingly, statewide) races: the quixotic claim that
it had nominated “moderates” unable to bring out the wingnut
majorities who lurk, abandoned and bereft, in the heartland.
In
the meantime the ritual purges have continued — the immediate
denunciations, thundered from various media pulpits, whenever a repugican politician utters an unorthodox opinion; the threat (or
reality) of primary challenges to silence dissent; the invocation of
paranoid fantasies that inflame “the base” and make them ever more
agitated and vindictive.
Now, in 2013, we have the politics
that 50 years of this process have created. The Democratic Party has
fewer conservatives than it once did, but is still a broadly coalition
party with liberal and moderate elements. It controls the coasts, has
strength in the industrial Midwest, and is making inroads in the upper,
more urbanized South and in Florida. It confronts a repugican cabal
almost wholly dependent on the interior states of the old Confederacy.
(The cabal continues to win in the mountain and prairie West, but the
region is too sparsely populated to provide any real electoral heft.)
Because of its demographic weakness, it is more beholden than ever to
the intensity of its most extreme voters. This has engendered a death
spiral in which it must take increasingly radical positions to drive
these voters to the polls, positions that in turn alienate ever larger
segments of the population, making these core voters even more crucial —
and so on. We have a name these days for the electoral residue produced
by this series of increasingly rigorous purifications. We call it “the tea party.”
The cry of the hour is that our politics is
“dysfunctional”
— mired in “gridlock,” all bipartisanship lost. This is of course true,
but it must be seen as merely the latest result of the conservative
politics of purity. After all, when does a politician, in the normal
course of affairs, have a reason to do something? When he thinks it will
gain him a vote, or that
not doing it will cost him a vote. It
follows that politicians have a reason to be bipartisan — to work with
the opposition — only when doing so will increase, not decrease, their
electoral support. And this can only happen if they potentially share
voters with their opposition. But the repugican electorate is now
almost as purified as the repugican cabal. Not only is it unlikely to
support Democratic candidates, it’s virtually certain to punish any repugican politician who works with Democrats. The electoral logic of
bipartisanship has collapsed for most repugicans; they have very little
to gain, and much to lose, if they practice it. And so they don’t.
Unfortunately,
our government isn’t designed to function in these conditions. The
peculiarities of our system — a Senate, armed with the filibuster, that
gives Wyoming’s 576,000 people as much power as California’s 38,000,000;
gerrymandered districts in the House; separate selection of the
executive and the legislature; a chronically underfunded elections
process, generally in partisan hands and in desperate need of
rationalization — simply won’t permit it. What we get instead is
paralysis — or worse. The repugican cabal, particularly in the House,
has turned into the legislative equivalent of North Korea — a political
outlier so extreme it has lost the ability to achieve its objectives
through normal political means. Its only recourse is to threats
(increasingly believable) that it will blow up the system rather than
countenance this-or-that lapse from conservative dogma. This was the
strategy it pursued in the
debt ceiling debacle of
2011, and if firebrands such as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have their way it
will guide the party’s approach to the same issue this fall, and
perhaps to government funding (including “Obamacare”) as well.
Realignment and polarization have led us to gridlock and instability.
The
relentless radicalization of the repugican cabal since 1964 is the
most important single event in the political history of the United
States since the New Deal. It has significantly shaped the course of our
government and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But
this means it has also shaped the individual life of every citizen— the
complex amalgam of possibilities and opportunities available (or not) to
each of us. The wingnut visionaries of the ‘50s and ‘60s wanted a
new world. We’re all living in it now.
* The 1928 election is
something of an exception to this statement; eight Southern states,
offended by Democratic candidate Al Smith’s catholicism, voted instead
for Herbert Hoover. But it seems safe to regard this election as an
outlier; FDR won every Southern state in the next four presidential
elections.
Not
every story of exploration is epic or even successful. The ones we
aren't familiar with are quite interesting, but there's a reason we
aren't familiar with them -like utter failure. Like the time policeman
Robert Burke was sent on a mission to find a route from Victoria,
Australia, to the continent's northern coast.
