Bankruptcy and Zeal The Republican Dialectic

...The fragmentation is nothing new...

...THE SPITEFULNESS Of the cultural right is matched by the increasingly far-fetched ideas proffered by the other major wing of the Republican party, the economic conservatives...

...DISSENT / Summer 1999 31 Yet in the immediate aftermath of the impeachment struggle, it looked as if the GOP's research-and-promotion efforts had succumbed to the law of diminishing returns...

...In the 1980s, among the harshest critics of the so-called religious right were the fundamentalist leaders of institutions such as Bob Jones University, who insisted that involvement in politics would do far more damage to the word of God than the word of God could ever do to redeem politics...

...Likewise for the journalist P.J...

...Dependable liberal battle cries—for state-stimulated full employment, advancing racial integration, and more—grew fainter by the year...

...Never give in," Dobson has proclaimed, waxing Churchillian...

...We've largely won the battle of ideas," Kate O'Beirne, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, recently boasted...

...so do the Republicans, though they would channel much more to defense and much less to education...

...Ronald Reagan's sunny "It's Morning in America" has given way to fear and loathing on the right...

...And the proposals themselves, although neatly packaged as economic lifesavers for the average American, are more obviously than ever windfalls for the rich...

...And by pursuing impeachment as zealously as they did, they compounded that bankruptcy by alienating millions of voters...

...To be sure, impeachment and its aftermath has created far more authentic solidarity in Democratic ranks than has been seen in many years...

...If all else fails, the GOP still has some old chestnuts in its pantry, including tort reform, school vouchers, and renewed attacks on affirmative action...

...They're shaking their heads: what is the problem...

...Pat Buchanan is once more agitating the "lock and load" constituency...

...SEAN WILENTz teaches history at Princeton University...

...No wonder the Republican Establishment is looking elsewhere for a candidate—above all, to reliable members of the Establishment family who are unburdened with much intellectual baggage of any kind...

...Religious conservatives, no matter how well organized, can't save America," they write...

...By referring to the plan simply as a 10 percent tax cut (an elision dutifully repeated in the press), Republicans made it sound as if all Americans would benefit equally...

...They just don't understand it...

...Yet today, poll after poll shows that the public is fed up with the right-wing moralizers, has no particular interest in tax cuts, and fears that the Republicans will undermine popular universal entitlements...

...Lamar Alexander has centered his campaign on the "character" issue...

...In her response to the president's State of the Union address last January, for example, Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn stated that a typical two-earner household pays nearly 40 percent of its income in taxes, a figure extrapoDISSENT / Summer 1999 33 lated from computations that more than 25 percent of that income goes to federal taxes— "the highest percentage of income ever paid in taxes by American families...

...Shortly thereafter, Cal Thomas (the syndicated columnist and former Moral Majority spokesman) and the Reverend Ed Dobson (a former Falwell aide) went even further, claiming in a new book, Blinded by Might, that the Moral Majority, indeed the entire effort to elevate moralism through politics, had been wrongheaded from the start...

...Republican panaceas, from the supply-side Laffer curve to the "just-say-no" anti-drug policy, did not exactly work their magic, but neither did their failure seem to discredit the Republicans' working assumptions, fiercely libertarian with respect to economic policy and fiercely moralistic with respect to social policy...

...Yet it remains far easier to say what the Democrats stand against than what they stand for...

...To be sure, it appears that the federal government has been collecting more taxes in recent years, as a percentage of the gross domestic product...

...For nearly two decades, Republicans and their allied think tanks and policy packaging firms had seemingly swept aside most traces of oppositional thinking...

...Using the CBO's methods, the actual average family federal tax burden comes to 18.9 percent in 1999, substantially less than Congresswoman Dunn suggests...

...and Steve Forbes, having learned a few lessons from his failed bid in 1996, has enthusiastically courted the religious right while pushing his own regressive economic panacea, the flat tax— thereby combining two streams of thought that have nearly dried up...

...Conservatives, he has remarked, are "an upset people...

...The tax burdens of most Americans have been unaffected...

...Yet as Iris J. Lay has reported for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these findings are based on arbitrary statistical methods that, among other things, set median two-earner family income at nearly $55,000—far above the Congressional Budget Office's median figure of $39,000...

...Schlafly still believes that a majority of Americans share her ultraconservative moral values, but criticizes the Republican Congress for being too "defensive" in vindicating those values—a most ungrateful complaint, it would seem, coming after Monicagate...

...Dunn's inflated figures, however, served a larger purpose, which was to win support for congressional Republican leaders' first grand new proposal of the post-impeachment era— an across-the-board 10 percent cut in tax rates...

...These ideas, however, are far less attractive than they once were, given the public perception of looming crises in Social Security and Medicare...

...The prospects were especially grim for the party's social-conservative wing...

...For Thomas, the problems besetting the religious right have, in part, to do with their own cultural style...

...they actually improved...

...But those efforts achieved little more than to show how the party divisions had deepened during the impeachment drive...

...Soon after the Republicans announced their plan, Citizens for Tax Justice reported that more than 60 percent of the benefits would go to the ten percent of taxpayers with the highest incomes...

...The White House proposes to increase spending on defense and education...

...With Clinton acquitted, 32 DISSENT / Summer 1999 presumably, the end is ever more nigh...

...We're always looking for an enemy—just as the left is—to play on people's fears, which increases cynicism...

...And so, they conclude, conservative Christians should go back to their churches and convert the world the old-fashioned way, one sinner at a time...

...Efforts in that direction, under the broad heading of "the Third Way," have been sporadic and ambiguous, sometimes registering with the public as old-fashioned moderate Republicanism, sometimes as revamped social democracy, and sometimes as a renunciation of any ideas or goals beyond small-bore policy initiatives...

...Since 1978, when the activist Paul Weyrich and his allies invented the Moral Majority, Republicans had built an invaluable new base among politicized conservative evangelicals...

...Other cultural warriors have suggested that it may be too late even for that...

...Still, there is something comforting in the fact that all the money in the world doesn't seem to be able to guarantee credible political thinking...

...But those increases are due largely to an extraordinary rise in capital gains income received by wealthier Americans as the stock market has boomed...

...Add to that the conceit, heard everywhere in the mainstream as well as the conservative press during the impeachment hearings, that the booming economy has corrupted our collective sense of moral virtue, and you have the sort of condemnation of America that one has gotten used to hearing mainly from young suburban malcontents and Left Bank leftists...

...But it took little economic expertise to see that, under our system, a cut in tax rates is far more regressive than a simple cut in taxes...

...THE WORST thing that the Democrats could decide, under these circumstances, is that ideas don't really matter in politics...

...The death of the GOP 10 percent plan did not, to be sure, mark the utter extinction of Republican thinking...

...With American capitalism booming, the Dow bouncing well above 10,000, unemployment down, the federal budget in surplus, and the welfare bogeyman seemingly scotched—all under a Democratic administration —it is hard for the economic conservatives to gain much political traction...

...The turnabout is astonishing...

...And all of the GOP's would-be kings, and all of their horses and all of their men, seem, for once, clueless...

...Even when public displeasure at the GOP televangelists mounted late in the Reagan years, and even after the Moral Majority disbanded, a more secular version of moral majoritarianism gained vast exposure and considerable momentum, thanks to publicists like William Bennett and operations like the Free Congress Foundation...

...And at least some of the old reliable Republican ideas—opposing gun control, for example—may now cost more political support than they gain...

...We don't like being happy...

...The inequities were so blatant that the Democrats did not need to put up much of a fight: faced with grumbling from their moderate members, the Republican leaders shelved their grand new proposal shortly after they announced it...

...Vice President Al Gore will face no serious challenge from his left for his party's nomination, and unless he stumbles badly, or unless the Kosovo mess becomes an unmitigated political disaster, he ought to gain the nod over Bill Bradley with a minimum of the traditional Democratic blood-letting...

...Part of the economic conservatives' packaging involves overstating the federal tax burden currently borne by middle-class families...

...Now that the dust has started to settle, it's time to assess why the congressional Republicans, in the face of overwhelmingly hostile public opinion, pursued the impeachment of President Clinton to the bitter end...

...If the Republicans are intellectually bankrupt, the Democrats have barely begun to invest in their intellectual future, even though they have managed to gain a popular majority in a national election only once in the last thirty-five years...

...I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," Paul Weyrich, now head of the Free Congress Foundation, told his fellow conservative leaders after the impeachment trial...

...But what is truly striking is how, along with their more secular and more hopeful erstwhile allies, the cultural warriors gaze with utter horror on how most Americans think and live...

...What is plain is that, although Bennett's books and others' may still soar to the top of the bestseller lists, there is now despair on the cultural right, not just about their political strategy but about their very conception of the nation...

...By setting their sights on removing an already besmirched Bill Clinton, Republicans unwittingly exposed their party's intellectual bankruptcy, especially at the national level...

...Other influential conservatives, however, have admitted to their confusion after impeachment and have called for, at the very least, a reappraisal of their culture war assumptions...

...A large portion of low- and moderate-income families would receive no cut at all...

...The 34 DISSENT / Summer 1999 GOP's early lineup of presidential hopefuls is indicative of the party's plight...

...Indeed, some commentators claim that that Republican thinking infected the Democrats as well, especially inside the Clinton White House—though this reasoning makes it difficult to understand why so many Republicans, and virtually all hard-line conservatives, hate Clinton so deeply...

...and they could be measured by the breakdown of fundamental social institutions, above all the family...

...By attracting increased contributions from the corporate sector, and by tightening their connections with political operatives (in Washington and the states) as well as with grassroots activists, this conglomeration of organizations has turned policy advocacy on the right into something like a permanent, well-coordinated, national political campaign...

...The Reverend Jerry Falwell agrees, as do the Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer (who is running against what he calls "the virtue deficit") and James Dobson of Focus on the Family...

...DISSENT / Summer 1999 35...

...All of which might point to deep and lasting trouble ahead for the GOP were the Democrats and their liberal allies in better intellectual shape than they are...

...Yet Robertson still insists that if religious voters would rally to elect "an evangelical, born again president" and a like-minded Congress, "we could roll back many of the bad things that have been done in government...

...Insofar as Weyrich, Thomas, and Dobson (Ed, not James) reflect religious conservative opinion in general—which is not self-evident—their abdication may mark a resurgence of the antipolitical stance that had traditionally dominated conservative American evangelicalism...

...The much-lamented tendency of liberal and left philanthropies to spread their funding thin, along with the lack of anything resembling a robust and well-coordinated party intelligentsia, connected with the party's base, still places the Democrats at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to shaping public perceptions...

...More to the point, he and Dobson contend that politics was never their proper arena...

...Indeed, faith in what Irving Kristol once referred to as the inverted Gramscianism of the modern GOP— that is, control the prevailing view of reality and you control politics—has only deepened during the Clinton years...

...It is a remarkable fact that in every presidential year save one since 1952, the Republican national ticket has included either a Nixon, a Dole, or a Bush...

...But one of the dirty secrets of impeachment may be that the Republicans had nothing better to do...

...Yet although the Democrats may be vulnerable here and there on these matters, it is hard to believe that the Republicans can successfully jerry-build an entire electoral program out of them, as they did in 1994...

...Overwrought idealism was partly responsible, as was the intimidation of more moderate members by the hard-line party leadership, as were the whims of fortune...

...A lot of people are angry that [Clinton] got off," Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum, remarked last February...

...By contrast, the top 10 percent of the income distribution would get, on average, nearly $4,000 a year, while the top 1 percent would get, on average, more than $20,000 per year...

...All that has happened in national affairs over the last thirty years proves just the opposite...

...The Republicans may be exhausted— but until now their inverted Gramscianism has proven enormously effective in shaping the terms of public debate...

...Shortly after the Senate acquitted Clinton, several of these moderates, most notably New York's Governor George Pataki, tried to round up support around the country for taking the party in a less moralistic direction...

...Bill Clinton has outmaneuvered them—but Democrats in general cannot count on fancy political footwork and co-optation to fulfill the function of a political creed...

...And when push came to shove in the impeachment trial, the cultural right, although capable of overawing the House Republican caucus, could not make a convincing constitutional argument that Clinton's misdeeds warranted his removal from office...

...About all they are left with, in the realm of ideas, are proposals for tax cuts...

...During the presidency of the despised baby-boomer Clinton, the right wing's key statistical markers of the nation's cultural breakdown—violent crime, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, drunk driving, expanding welfare rolls—not only failed to worsen...

...In his last-ditch arguments during the Senate impeachment trial, Representative Henry Hyde sounded an apocalyptic chord: "I wonder if, after this culture war is over that we are engaged in," Hyde declared, "an America will survive that will be worth fighting to defend...

...The cultural conservatives have fielded Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes...

...The five best-known institutions on the NCRP's list (the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute, and Free Congress Research and Education Foundation) accounted for about half of the total in 1996...

...Unless the Democrats start making those investments, the Republicans' current intellectual breakdown may well prove a squandered opportunity...

...The Reverend Pat Robertson made headlines late in the impeachment drama when he conceded tactical defeat—prematurely, in the eyes of some of his followers...

...On average, the tax reduction for the lower 60 percent of all taxpayers—those with incomes below $38,000—would amount to $99...

...never, never, never...

...Congressman John Kasich has jumped in as an updated Reaganomist...

...O'Rourke, who is more of a dandy than a doomsday man, the mere sight of ordinary Americans is nauseating: "masses waddling into airports, business offices and churches dressed in drooping sweats or fuschia warm-up suits or mainsail-sized Bermuda shorts, each with a mobile phone in one ear and a Walkman in the other and sucking Diet Pepsi through a straw...

...The Republicans' intellectual crisis cannot be blamed on complacency...

...After all these years, behind the veneer of Reagan's uplifting patriotism and (for a time) Gingrich's "opportunity society" bombast, modern Republicanism turns out to be little more than a set of intellectual atavisms, intolerance linked with attempts to further enrich the already rich...

...Dan Quayle is hoping his graying temples will lend his candidacy credibility...

...Shocked at what he has called, with his characteristic modesty, the first divergence ever between his own point of view and that of the American majority, Bennett now demands a tragic consideration of what he has labeled "the death of outrage...

...For Weyrich, the "ever-wider sewer" that is America is "caught up in a collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics...

...Some veterans of the lost cause have put on a brave face and vowed to soldier on...

...Only God can...

...Overtaken by failure, some generals in the GOP cultural army have even called for a dignified surrender, an Appomattox...

...Fi MBYITERED about America, reduced to promoting regressive tax cuts as their big new idea, the Republicans are suffering from the political fragmentation that normally accompanies intellectual exhaustion...

...In this version, America's chief problems were moral, not economic or political...

...According to a recent report by the left-liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), the nation's twenty leading conservative policy institutions have more than doubled their combined budgets since 1992, spending $158 million in 1996 alone—$20 million more than the Republican Party raised and spent during that election year in soft-money contributions...

...William Bennett, who reads the polls as closely as he says he reads his Aquinas, is much less confident of public backing...

...THIS IS NOT the occasion to ponder how the twists and turns of liberal politics gave intellectual hostages to the right-wing cultural warriors...

...After all their efforts, abortion remains legal and the National Endowment for the Arts exists...

...Remarkably, though, what remains consists chiefly of ideologically charged reworkings of Democratic proposals or rehashes of familiar Republican ideas...

...Looking to 2000, Republicans get to choose between yet another Bush and yet another Dole (and, quite possibly, get a Bush-Dole ticket)—a son and a wife, neither identified in the national mind with anything more profound than their congenial personalities and family crests...

...Despite Clinton's gross stupidity with Monica Lewinsky and his attempts to deceive—which many right-wing commentators reasonably considered political manna from heaven—a rock-solid majority of the public remained in the president's corner against his accusers...

...Lingering fury at the Republicans over impeachment, and promises for a more focused campaign to take back the House, look like they will galvanize recently listless Democratic constituencies to donate heavily and get out the vote...

...The very idea of activist government, outside the realm of foreign affairs, became fatal to the touch...

...the Republicans come up with their own plan, setting aside roughly the same amount of money but creating private investment accounts within the retirement system...

...The White House proposes to set aside $1.8 trillion over the next decade to strengthen Social Security, while investing a portion of the surplus in the stock market...

...We are in the implementation stage right now...

...they stemmed from the cultural relativism and permissiveness imposed by a relatively small but powerful 1960s left...

...For some years, more moderate northeastern Republicans have been trying to distance themselves from the cultural die-hards...

...the rest was lavished on smaller, tightly focused groups, each dedicated to advancing core elements of the conservative agenda...

...In place of political action, he counseled "separation" from society by promoting home schooling, the formation of private courts of justice, and removing televisions from decent homes...

...Moreover, CBO figures show that the portion of income paid in federal taxes by families in the middleincome levels in 1999 will be slightly lower than the same figure for 1977...