Jim Sleeper: Why conservatives becoming more conservative won't help (them or us)
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream grows from their 2005 essay in the Weekly Standard - at that time, a ground-breaking challenge to conservative Republicans' Four-cheers-for capitalism, Bronx-cheers-for-government approach to politics.
Douthat and Salam wrote that"Sam's Club" voters - white working-class Americans who are far from poor but stressed by rising economic and social instability -- swung to Republicans not out of any Goldwaterite love for small government, free markets, and"extremism in defense of liberty," but out of a more grounded indignation at liberal Democrats' narratives and policies on family, welfare, crime, and race. That indignation was not irrational and was often well-justified, Douthat and Salam insisted - accurately, in my view.
But the authors also had the guts to tell fellow conservatives that these voters did not want to shrink government support for health care, education, and the environment:"They wanted to keep the welfare state in place but didn't want the Democrats to run it." If Republicans were going to dismantle or wreck it - and by 2005, Republican legislative majorities seemed incapable of doing much else -no fond memories of the Gipper's sunny optimism or endless rehashings of liberals' follies by Rush Limbaugh would sustain a working-class GOP majority.
But it was one thing to urge conservative Republicans to save the American Dream, as Douthat and Salam did in the Weekly Standard; it's another to insist to a larger audience, three years later, that conservative Republicans still have answers.
Let's acknowledge, if only for the sake of argument, that liberal Democrats have often been even worse (They have!) and that some Republican chief executives -Tommy Thompson, John Engler, even Rudy Giuliani in his better moments - took the bull of welfare dependency and other Great Society Frankensteins by the horns and offered effective models of governance which Democrats wouldn't have tried.
But why not also acknowledge how little support these enlightened Republicans actually got under both the Bush presidents and Republican Congresses? Why not call for a bi-partisan, civic-republican political realignment that draws its truths openly from left as well as right (as these two authors actually do) and transcends both political parties (as the authors obviously don't)?
The book opens with a directed history of American politics since the New Deal, purporting to remind conservatives that not even Reagan, let alone most working people, really meant to slash government as much as Newt Gingrich or Phil Gramm did. But Douthat and Salam also point their history to remind liberals, as did Mickey Kaus in The End of Equality, that the New Deal supported a rather conservative social order based on traditional families and hard work, not on bureaucratic redistribution.
Douthat and Salam defend that conservative social order and white working-class anger at liberals' fantasies of liberation from it. They remind us that economic instability and family instability provoke each other increasingly as one moves down the social scale.
The authors also expand usefully, if less gracefully, on a problem Douthat portrayed in Privilege, his memoir of his Harvard undergraduate years (which I reviewed favorably for the Boston Globe): It's the increasingly cushioned upper-middle class elites, ironically, who have the luxury of staying married, while working-class people's marriages break up under economic stress even though they need family stability most of all.
This truth spurs the authors not to phony denunciations of supposedly"liberal" elites but to acknowledgements of real liberal wisdom about the economic causes of social instability: They note, for example, that in social-democratic Sweden the high proportion of adolescents who still live with both parents (and are hence less prone to crime and poverty) should prompt American conservatives"to acknowledge that generous benefits for mothers and children have not everywhere and always led to family breakdown."
Interesting proposals do follow; I'll leave it to experts to second guess them, although I think that their preference for more highways over mass transit is nuts, and I had to laugh when they dismissed the French health care system - which works well partly because its doctors are paid 30% less on average than American doctors - by claiming that"American doctors will never accept French salaries." What's wrong with lower salaries? Isn't that the American way these days, at least for Sam's Club members? Maybe conservatives could call them"freedom salaries" instead of"French salaries."
A few such polemical lapses aside, the book seems to lose the argument of its subtitle as its proposals unfold in the final chapters. Somehow, we're not hearing so much by then about a conservative-Republican deliverance. Undoubtedly the authors knew what most conservative Republicans really thought of their ideas. To judge from the media appearances I've seen, though, Douthat isn't ready to give up on his dedication to his vision of a renewed - but, this time, more decent -- conservative Republican majority.
His predicament will only get worse, because American conservatism cannot reconcile its yearning - Douthat's and Salam's yearning, which I think I understand and admire -- for an ordered, even somewhat sacred civic-republican liberty, on the one hand, with most conservative Republican politicians' slavish (or lavishly lobbied) obeisance to every whim of capital, whose global riptides are eroding national sovereignty as quickly as its consumer come-ons are corroding republican virtue communal and familial stability.
Unable to resolve its contradictions, American conservatism usually resorts to one or two default positions: Either it searches for enemies at home and abroad on whom to blame its failures, or it seeks dubious consolations of religious salvation coupled with Grand Inquisitorial musings about weaknesses of the flesh in what is, after all, a fallen world.
Douthat and Salam know that there is something wrong with this. But surely it'll take more than the better-targeted subsidies and incentives they recommend to offset the damage done by the heavily lobbied corporate socialism through which - as Jonathan Taplin noted here on July 12 -- our current president and vice-president made millions during their sojourns in what we laughingly call the private sector. Yet nowhere does this book address the powerful, tightening coils of lobbying that buys or writes legislation deregulating and subsidizing bad investments.
As David Cay Johnston put the challenge to conservative Republicans here in their own language:"If an investment is sound, the market will make it. If it is unsound, why should [the taxpayer] be forced to subsidize it?"
It isn't enough to retort that Robert Rubin and other Goldman Sachs Democrats do the same, if you mean to present a conservative Republican alternative to what they do. You have to face the fact that capital is indifferent to family and community stability, so long as workers keep showing up in their cubicles or assembly lines, and that it will even sell them decadent, after-hours escapes and palliatives that are sinful by Douthat's standards, certainly, and maybe by mine.
Why won't the authors acknowledge and address this problem of corporate capitalism's hostility to republican virtue? Why don't they give up on expecting today's capital, which is global and anomic, to care about the American nation, let alone the American republic? The Ford Motor Company no longer even calls itself an American corporation (not least because it has found that it can make cars for $1500 less in Canada thanks to that country's universal health care!)
Why not point us toward a civic-republican alternative to both the Republican and Democratic parties, one that can envision joining with other republican polities to reconfigure how corporations are chartered and enabled? The Republican Party emerged from the ruins of the Whig Party amid a growing crisis which it helped to focus and, indeed, to unleash. That had to be done. Something analagous may have to be done again, sooner than we think.
I can empathize with the authors' resistance. Early in the 1990s, in The Closest of Strangers, I, too, tried to save my political camp by sailing boldly against its then-regnant narratives about the supposedly unbending savagery of white racism, the capitalist root causes of crime, the accepted inevitability of welfare as we knew it, and the expected liberation of life in"families" as we'd never known them. Like Douthat and Salam, I foresaw my own side's electoral defeats in New York and on Capitol Hill. I tried to explain why things had come to this and to hasten a new dawn for progressive politics.
Like the authors, I wrote about white working-class citizens whose grounded virtues and travails I'd experienced every day as a columnist for the New York Daily News -- people who many other left-liberals appreciated only briefly at Ground Zero on 9/11. Like Douthat and Salam, I never accepted explanations such as Thomas Frank's that Republicans were winning"Kansas" or Archie Bunker's neighborhood in Queens only by fanning irrational fears about race, crime, and social decay. I knew that Rudy Giuliani had won the mayoralty in 1993 for other, better reasons.
My sally brought on a cold front of hostility from most on my left and some sloppy wet kisses from people on my right. (Standing in Grand Central Station one day in 1990, I returned a trans-Atlantic phone call from a total stranger named David Brooks, a Wall Street Journal writer, who rhapsodized about my book before our call was disconnected.)
I learned then what some conservatives, especially neoconservatives, are still too angry at liberals to learn: Neither left nor right, nor Democrats nor Republicans as they've congealed since the 1970s, will save the republic or the American Dream. Only a much bolder, civic-republican synthesis, drawing from but transcending both sides, might do it. As self-described defenders of American exceptionalism, Douthat and Salam ought to understand that.
They have told their colleagues on the right some hard truths:"Free markets" can't give everyone a floor and an opportunity; government must do some expensive things to enable and encourage, though not force, the maintenance of traditional families, such as wage supplements for workers in low-paying jobs and pension credits that reflect household labor. They've rebuked conservatives for their out-of-control Clinton hatred (likening it aptly to liberals' rage at Nixon) and their perverse nostalgia for"old left-wing antagonists" to beat up on.
Douthat and Salam have learned, as I did in 1990, that most people in their camp aren't ready for their insights. Last Friday, on Bill Moyers' PBS show with fellow conservative Mickey Edwards, it was clear that some of Douthat's proposals go beyond what Edwards' understanding of"limited government" could accommodate. Edwards is focused on Constitutional protections of citizen independence, Douthat on renewing government's role in maintaining social provision and tradition. His religious opposition to abortion and right-to-die legislation seem to countenance policies that exceed what Edwards and many conservative champions of limited government feel comfortable with.
Perhaps to compensate a little for the chilly reception given some of their economic proposals on the right, Douthat and Salam seem to have orchestrated their book's citations, acknowledgments, blurbs, and media promotions deftly and to have muted some of their beliefs and sources, to ensure a warmer reception from liberals in their own cohort, one that will spare them total martyrdom for telling the truths they do tell against both sides.
They don't really touch race, for example, although they make a passing gesture toward class-based over race-based affirmative action. They don't say what they really think of same-sex marriage. They don't call Thomas Frank a" class-war Cassandra," as they did for the more conservative readers of the Weekly Standard. And Douthat says little of his defense, in other venues, of theo-conservative views like those of Richard John Neuhaus that go far beyond merely justifying the infusion of religious belief into political activity. The republic rests on expectations of faith without impositions of doctrine. I don't think he has that balance quite right for American politics or civil society.
The authors also take, without attribution, more than a little material on relationships between illegitimacy and crime from what most TPM readers would regard as a hard-right, even bigoted website, V-Dare.com, prompting its lead writer to joke that he's glad to have so much influence, even if so little credit. Their decision to put no footnotes in the book or its website leaves them vulnerable to more questioning along these and other lines. A book is not a blog, after all, and even blogs do link their most important sources, allowing readers to see for themselves.
I encourage Douthat and Salam to keep talking and writing, and I'll wait patiently for them to leave behind youthful dreams of conservative-Republican solidarity or deliverance. They seem to me to be close to acknowledging a central civic-republican truth: A healthy society, like a healthy individual, walks on both a left foot of social provision and a right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility and freedom.
Without the right foot, even the best-intentioned liberal social-engineering and"diversity" mongering can turn people into clients, cogs, or worse. And they are right to remind liberals of this. But without the left foot, the foot that walks in the village that raises the child, individual dignity and the moral values conservatives claim to cherish become stunted and die. They are right to remind conservatives of that.
The next step is to realize that while both left and right have credible claims on their truths, each tends to cling to its own truths so tightly that they soon become half-truths that can curdle into lies. That leaves each side right only about how the other is wrong.
At any historical moment, the truths of whichever side is underdog and insurgent one will seem the more liberating on the upswing against the other, dominant side's institutionalized carapaces and cant. But both sides do tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings and to disappoint in the end.
If Douthat and Salam cling too tightly to conservative truths and Republican partisanship, they'll wind up less effective and trustworthy than they show so much promise of being right now. They'll lose the wonderful opportunity they've almost grasped to help renew the civic-republican project of Eugene V. Debs, not only of Jane Addams, and of FDR -- who gave a rebirth to the civic-republican spirit which the capitalism of his time had blighted -- and not only of Ronald Reagan, who, we are beginning to see, administered to that spirit only a glorious euthanasia in a false American dawn.