I am surprised at how good Ramesh Ponnuru’s advice column for Republicans is considering that I have always seen him as half an idiot. It’s long, but it’s worth a read. A lot goes unmentioned, but that probably makes the column more effective in communicating with its target audience. Distraught Republicans don’t want to be lectured about the wisdom of trying to pass Voter ID laws or impose trans-vaginal probes on unwilling women or referring to Latinos as “illegals” and promising to make them so miserable that they’ll “self-deport.” Mr. Ponnuru doesn’t focus on the myriad ways in which the modern GOP chooses to alienate people. He focuses on what the GOP is offering to people. And the answer comes back: “not much.”
Ponnuru takes the long view, and his retelling of history is surprisingly fair and balanced. His column would be stronger if he used a bit of my historical analysis about the development of the modern conservative movement in an environment of near-total minority status. Ponnuru talks about how the GOP developed a strategy that worked well in national elections but less well in state elections and not well at all in district-level elections. He attributes this to the party’s strength (developed early in the Cold War) on foreign policy and military issues and their weakness in talking to the middle class. I think that is accurate, but it doesn’t explain why the Republicans don’t resonate with middle-class voters.
The answer is that a variety of factors led conservatives to view the Federal Government with hostility. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1933-1949, 1951-1953, and 1955-1995. They controlled the Senate from 1933-1949, 1951-1953, 1955-1981, and 1987-1995. Or, to put it another way, in the 62 years between the elections of 1932 and 1994, the GOP controlled the House for two two-year terms and the Senate for a total of 10 years.
That is a long period of time to have very little say in how the government spends its money. There were only four years in that 62 year span when the Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, and Harry Truman was president for two of them. In both cases, the voters immediately handed power back to the Democrats in both chambers.
Under those circumstances, it isn’t any surprise that Republicans grew increasingly unhappy with how the government allocates its resources. Yet, at the outset, the conservatives had enough power within the Democratic Party to keep a check on the government’s power. That changed when the Warren Court began chipping away at the Jim Crow laws and asserting more separation of church and state. When Southern Democrats began to abandon the party they lost their powerful hold on the congressional committees, and that was basically the last straw in turning conservatives against Washington.
The result was the consolidation of conservative sentiment in a Republican Party that was already hostile to spending on the middle class. Country Club Republicans didn’t like taxes and social spending. Southerners didn’t like anything being produced by the Supreme Court or the Feds’ role in enforcing those rulings. Conservative members of Congress were less supportive of spending that they could no longer direct.
All of this combined to create the Reagan Revolution which came in with the motto that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Yet, Reagan and Poppy Bush never had a unified Republican Congress. When the unified Republican Congress came, in 1995, it had to deal with President Bill Clinton. It didn’t know how to run the government with a Democratic president because it didn’t think the government should be doing most of the things it did. Two government shutdowns followed immediately after the Gingrich Revolution.
Setting aside the impeachment of Bill Clinton during his second term, the congressional Republicans did eventually learn how to pass appropriation bills and keep the government’s doors open. They discovered that it wasn’t feasible or desirable to close down the Department of Education. They began to learn how to legislate, however unwillingly.
When their moment finally came with the (s)election of George W. Bush, their conservative overreach caused the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont and the loss of control of the Senate. When the September 11 attacks led to strong Republican gains in 2002 and 2004, the Republicans turned Washington over to Jack Abramoff and his gang of thieves. Rather than downsizing government, they launched a looting operation. Regulations and oversight were relaxed. Wall Street went nuts. The economy tanked.
I retell this history because it complements Mr. Ponnuru’s history and helps explain why the modern GOP has nothing to offer the middle class but tax cuts. The Tea Party was inflated with corporate money and media but it had its kernel in something called consistency. The Republicans didn’t spend all that time out of power arguing that what Washington needed was to be looted. They argued that the federal government should do nothing. They argued that it should be starved of funds and reduced in size until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. George W. Bush and Tom DeLay didn’t do that when they had the chance.
It should not startle anyone that a political party that developed as a permanent minority party implacably opposed to the Federal Government would not be very good at running the Federal Government. They don’t have a positive agenda for what the government should do. They often argue that policy should be set at the state and local level, but they aren’t developing any activist government agenda on those levels, either. In any case, when something happens like a hurricane or a recession or college and health care become unaffordable, the modern GOP has no answers. They belong in the minority because they only know how to oppose. They don’t know how to legislate and they don’t want to legislate.
That’s why they have nothing to say to the middle class.
