New Yorker: The Fall of Conservatism-Have the Republicans run out of ideas?

[babylonsister]

The Fall of Conservatism
Have the Republicans run out of ideas?
by George Packer May 26, 2008


McCain must negotiate the legacies of (from top left) Goldwater, Nixon, Gingrich, Reagan, and Buckley.


The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.”

Nixon and Buchanan visited thirty-five states that fall, and in November the Republicans won a midterm landslide. It was the end of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the beginning of his fall from power. In order to seize the Presidency in 1968, Nixon had to live down his history of nasty politicking, and he ran that year as a uniter. But his Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

This strategy was put into action near the end of Nixon’s first year in office, when antiwar demonstrators were becoming a disruptive presence in Washington. Buchanan recalls urging Nixon, “We’ve got to use the siege gun of the Presidency, and go right after these guys.” On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on national television to speak about the need to avoid a shameful defeat in Vietnam. Looking benignly into the camera, he concluded, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of Americans—I ask for your support.” It was the most successful speech of his Presidency. Newscasters criticized him for being divisive and for offering no new vision on Vietnam, but tens of thousands of telegrams and letters expressing approval poured into the White House. It was Nixon’s particular political genius to rouse simultaneously the contempt of the bien-pensants and the admiration of those who felt the sting of that contempt in their own lives.

Buchanan urged Nixon to enlist his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, in a battle against the press. In November, Nixon sent Agnew—despised as dull-witted by the media—on the road, where he denounced “this small and unelected élite” of editors, anchormen, and analysts. Buchanan recalls watching a broadcast of one such speech—which he had written for Agnew—on a television in his White House office. Joining him was his colleague Kevin Phillips, who had just published “The Emerging Republican Majority,” which marshalled electoral data to support a prophecy that Sun Belt conservatism—like Jacksonian Democracy, Republican industrialism, and New Deal liberalism—would dominate American politics for the next thirty-two or thirty-six years. (As it turns out, Phillips was slightly too modest.) When Agnew finished his diatribe, Phillips said two words: “Positive polarization.”

more...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/26/080526fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all

[EstimatedProphet]

1. Better question: did they ever have any ideas in the first place?

[bemildred]

2. Indeed.

Calling divisive slash-an-burn politics "ideas" is a bit much.

[Juche]

3. Conservatives fundamentally only have one idea

"use socially conservative wedge issues to get people to the polls and once they vote you in, engage in an economic platform designed to benefit the well off"

That pretty much explains 90% of what they do. They use gay marriage, abortion, race, religion, ethnicity, 'the war on christmas', 'some judge somewhere who did something I don't like', etc. to get elected then when in power start privatizing and deregulating everything while cutting taxes on wealth and capital (tax cuts on estates, top levels of federal income brackets, capital gains, dividends, corporations).

It really is their sole platform. They also try to run on national security, but they fukked that up pretty bad by using our fears and vulnerability about 9/11 to trick us into a war in Iraq.

[Warpy]

4. They were out of ideas 76 years ago!

They just had to wait until everybody who knew that had died off so they could sell them again.

Their ideas just plain don't work. They're the same old ideas, time after time, and they always have the same result: a few rich people get obscenely rich and the rest of us fall into poverty and ill health.

To hell with them. All of them. Permanently.

[Wetzelbill]

5. you will note two things

That in 1964 LBJ blew out Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. Conservatism was considered almost obsolete, there was a general consensus on policy, both foreign and domestic. The old-school who fought against FDR's New Deal either gave up, retired or went away by the time Eisenhower was in office, and Eisenhower expanded government even in his first request from Congress when he created the new cabinet department of Health, Education and Welfare. Liberal ideas were basically considered the way to go. Life wasn't perfect, but that was the basic direction the consensus tacitly agreed on. Conservatism was essentially dead as a competitor against Liberalism, and Liberal Dems were supposed to have created, if not a permanent majority, a permanent framing of the status quo.

Then in 1966, Democrats lost the midterms. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected and ever since the Right was basically framed the debate. With the rise of Movement Conservatism and the election of Ronald Reagan, they began to cement it. This further proceeded with the Gingrich Revolution and the GOP takeover of the House in 1994. Then we had the Clinton Impeachment, and finally the election of George W. Bush. Bush then presided over 9/11 and utilized it and the Iraq War to gain victories in 2002 and 2004. In 2004, pundits lauded that Karl Rove had created his permanent majority. That Conservatism effectively stomped out Liberalism. I remember when Howard Dean became DNC chair, David Brooks in the NY Times, gloatingly argued that this was extremely bad for the Democratic Party. Dems appeared on the run, hapless, like they couldn't do anything.

Then they walloped the GOP in the 2006 midterms, and now seem poised to make further gains in Congress and win the presidency.

Ok, like I said, first note that LBJ's 1964 victory was erased only two years later in the midterms. By 1968 he didn't even run for reelection. Bush also had his 2004 victory erased two years later, his surrogate McCain will almost certainly get beat in the 2008 presidential election. Each time within two years the tide was turned, and within four years the other side had practically demolished the opposition. Now Obama has to win for that to be absolutely true this time, however, even if McCain won, he'd be facing a tough go against an even more cemented Dem majority in Congress.

So in four years, these supposed majorities can be smashed.

Ok, the second thing to note is, that Movement Conservatism used the an unpopular war, Vietnam, plus a sense of unrest, like there was two Americas, the elites and then "us" to help win elections. They took that catastrophic event of Vietnam and used it to build a Movement. They were stifled briefly by Watergate, but came back with a vengeance in 1980.

Now Dems have to look that that and understand. Right now, we have an unpopular war and an unpopular president as our catastrophic event. We also are putting forth the populist idea that there are two Americas, those people who get rich off of sneaky trade deals, and golf with fat cats and lobbyists who slather them all up with money, and then "us." It's been somewhat effective. People around the country feel that pain, they look at their debt, the cost of health care, price of food, of gas and oil etc. They are hurting. Dems have tapped into that.

But to keep the momentum, we need to build a true movement. And change the debate. Change the framing of that debate. We need to take back the national consensus, so that we can talk about real economic policy and not just have some asshole throw out the words "Tax Cuts" like it's some kind of religion. It's why we get bullshit like flag lapel pins when we should be talking about how to have a sane foreign policy.

That's the test. So-called Permanent Majorities can be beaten. Movements can be put into chaos. But it's not that easy to fight against an entrenched status quo that frames politics and policy from the Right. At it's core, we need to change that.

[yurbud]

6. their problem is how to repackage the bait for ideas that few would buy if stated plainly

They want to gut public schools and any taxpayer-funded program unless they can contract it to their cronies, in which case, whether the do decent or even cost-effective work is not taken into consideration.

Their foreign policy consists entirely of advancing the business interests of their friends with only the thinnest veneer of concern for human rights or the blowback on the American people.