Conservatism's Grave
by Dick Polman
NOVEMBER 10, 2008 TAGS:
Bush-Rove conservatism was dealt a fatal blow on election night, and was summarily interred by the voting majority, the 65 million Americans who could no longer abide its tone and content.
The surviving acolytes, condemned now to ponder the gravesite, are not likely to chart a rebirth without first understanding why their particular brand of ideology wound up alienating so many of their fellow citizens in every corner of the nation. Perhaps they might consider reading this sentiment-free eulogy.
It’s actually a misnomer to tag their brand as “Bush-Rove,” because the conservative style of the past eight years was actually incubated 40 Novembers ago, with the election of Richard Nixon. He’s the Republican who first introduced so many of the ideological elements that have come to dominate our politics – the use of fear as a voter motivation tool; the stoking of populist anger and resentment, pitting “ordinary” Americans against media and cultural “elitists”; the polarization of the electorate along racial lines; the equation of patriotism with Republicanism.
Nixon was a master at these maneuvers, exploiting people’s anxieties about the ’60s, implying in his TV ads and speeches that crime and antiwar protests and cultural upheaval were all threats to “the silent majority” – a term he deemed to be synonymous with real Americans. On several occasions, he also dispatched his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to assail the Eastern media (especially CBS and The New York Times) as “this small and unelected elite” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
With respect to race, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was designed to capture the white Southerners fleeing the Democratic party in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights laws. Nixon drew these voters by tapping into their anger at the “liberals” in Washington. As one of Nixon’s campaign aides, Pat Buchanan, recalled recently, Nixon saw the opportunity after whipping a roomful of Southern white guys into a frenzy; he turned to Buchanan and said, “This is the future of this party, right here in the South.”
After Ronald Reagan – whose brand of conservatism was sunny and upbeat by comparison – the Nixon model was tweaked during the 1988 presidential campaign by Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who employed the dark arts in his successful bid to take down Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. As Atwater promised early in that campaign, “I’m gonna tear the bark off the little bastard.”
He painted Dukakis as a wimpy liberal Eastern elitist who was both soft on crime (Dukakis had presided over a prison furlough program that had freed a convict who then committed a murder; as a pandering bonus, the convict was black), and soft on patriotism (as governor, on advice of counsel, Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance). Dukakis was also mocked for his name and Greek heritage, which to many voters made him seem less “American” than his well-bred opponent, George H.W. Bush.
Bush’s son, under the tutelage of chief strategist Karl Rove (whom Atwater tutored), employed most of these templates during his contests with Al Gore and John Kerry. Kerry, in particular, was tagged as an effete elitist whose vacation hobby (wind-surfing) was deemed to be out of the mainstream, and whose patriotism was deemed suspect because, in the words of one Bush adviser, he looked “French.”
But as the younger Bush’s administration wore on, a growing number of Americans began to look askance at contemporary conservatism. The Nixon model had been refined, to its fatal detriment. The angry populism was still there – legal scholar and former Reagan official Douglas Kmiec says the GOP has become “the party of fear and damnation” – but now there were new, increasingly controversial elements:
A messianic streak that envisioned the spread of democracy abroad, even at the point of a gun (Iraq); a moralistic streak at home, mandating federal government intrusion into Americans’ personal lives (the Terri Schiavo case); and, perhaps most important, an inherent contempt for government itself, for the idea that Washington should be run effectively for the common good.
This last element is arguably the prime impetus for the demise of Bush-Rove conservatism. John McCain was ultimately buried beneath Bush baggage not just because voters were fed up with the divisive tactics of conservative campaigning, but because the Bush record of managerial incompetence weighed too heavily.
Most Americans entrust the debate about “bigger government” or “smaller government” to the policy wonks; they want the government, at whatever size, to function properly. As former New Jersey governor and former Bush official Christie Todd Whitman remarked a few days ago, the 2008 election “was about the hope that we can and should expect more out of our government – an area where Republicans have disappointed.”
It was during Katrina when most Americans first became aware of the incompetence; FEMA director Mike Brown (“heckuva job, Brownie”) had previously honed his disaster-management experience while heading up the International Arabian Horse Association. But Brown was merely the most visible manifestation of a philosophy that treated government not as a magnet for skilled public servants, but as a dumping ground for ill-qualified political apparatchiks.
Which is why (among many examples) Brown’s deputy FEMA director was considered qualified based on his previous work as a Bush campaign advance man; and why a former Bush campaign worker with no science background got a top science job at NASA; and why a Bush confidante who had penned a total of three legal articles, but who had handled the legal paperwork on Bush’s fishing cabin, wound up being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Eight years of incompetence and cronyism, coupled with a war launched on the basis of nonexistent evidence, soured most Americans on the conservative brand. The familiar Nixon-era campaign tactics were employed – tagging Barack Obama as exotic, foreign, pejoratively liberal, insufficiently American – but this time the electorate tuned them out. This time, by a margin of eight million voters, conservatism as currently constituted was judged dead on arrival.
And conservative commentator Rich Lowry dryly warns that conservatism will stay dead until its devotees learn how to connect with the everyday lives of average voters, with the “middle-class pocketbook and quality of life issues … concerns such as congestion and college tuition that have traditionally been beneath conservative notice.”
In other words, as Lowry colleague Kathleen Parker argues, conservatives need to quit parading their “know-nothingness” as a “badge of honor,” and stop acting as if they can politically afford to exclude from their ranks huge swatches of the population: moderate suburban women, “elitists,” Hispanics, “intellectuals,” anyone they deem smarter than Joe the Plumber, indeed anyone who doesn’t reside in what Sarah Palin calls “the pro-America areas of this great nation.”
Until they learn these lessons, Democrats will be dancing on their graves.
--
Also by Dick Polman
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"Senator No"
by Dick Polman
Jesse Helms dedicated his life to salting the fundamental American wound, leveraging the racial divide and harvesting white fears for political gain. Unfortunately, his tactics paid off.
The surviving acolytes, condemned now to ponder the gravesite, are not likely to chart a rebirth without first understanding why their particular brand of ideology wound up alienating so many of their fellow citizens in every corner of the nation. Perhaps they might consider reading this sentiment-free eulogy.It’s actually a misnomer to tag their brand as “Bush-Rove,” because the conservative style of the past eight years was actually incubated 40 Novembers ago, with the election of Richard Nixon. He’s the Republican who first introduced so many of the ideological elements that have come to dominate our politics – the use of fear as a voter motivation tool; the stoking of populist anger and resentment, pitting “ordinary” Americans against media and cultural “elitists”; the polarization of the electorate along racial lines; the equation of patriotism with Republicanism.
Nixon was a master at these maneuvers, exploiting people’s anxieties about the ’60s, implying in his TV ads and speeches that crime and antiwar protests and cultural upheaval were all threats to “the silent majority” – a term he deemed to be synonymous with real Americans. On several occasions, he also dispatched his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to assail the Eastern media (especially CBS and The New York Times) as “this small and unelected elite” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
With respect to race, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was designed to capture the white Southerners fleeing the Democratic party in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights laws. Nixon drew these voters by tapping into their anger at the “liberals” in Washington. As one of Nixon’s campaign aides, Pat Buchanan, recalled recently, Nixon saw the opportunity after whipping a roomful of Southern white guys into a frenzy; he turned to Buchanan and said, “This is the future of this party, right here in the South.”
After Ronald Reagan – whose brand of conservatism was sunny and upbeat by comparison – the Nixon model was tweaked during the 1988 presidential campaign by Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who employed the dark arts in his successful bid to take down Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. As Atwater promised early in that campaign, “I’m gonna tear the bark off the little bastard.”
He painted Dukakis as a wimpy liberal Eastern elitist who was both soft on crime (Dukakis had presided over a prison furlough program that had freed a convict who then committed a murder; as a pandering bonus, the convict was black), and soft on patriotism (as governor, on advice of counsel, Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance). Dukakis was also mocked for his name and Greek heritage, which to many voters made him seem less “American” than his well-bred opponent, George H.W. Bush.
Bush’s son, under the tutelage of chief strategist Karl Rove (whom Atwater tutored), employed most of these templates during his contests with Al Gore and John Kerry. Kerry, in particular, was tagged as an effete elitist whose vacation hobby (wind-surfing) was deemed to be out of the mainstream, and whose patriotism was deemed suspect because, in the words of one Bush adviser, he looked “French.”But as the younger Bush’s administration wore on, a growing number of Americans began to look askance at contemporary conservatism. The Nixon model had been refined, to its fatal detriment. The angry populism was still there – legal scholar and former Reagan official Douglas Kmiec says the GOP has become “the party of fear and damnation” – but now there were new, increasingly controversial elements:
A messianic streak that envisioned the spread of democracy abroad, even at the point of a gun (Iraq); a moralistic streak at home, mandating federal government intrusion into Americans’ personal lives (the Terri Schiavo case); and, perhaps most important, an inherent contempt for government itself, for the idea that Washington should be run effectively for the common good.
This last element is arguably the prime impetus for the demise of Bush-Rove conservatism. John McCain was ultimately buried beneath Bush baggage not just because voters were fed up with the divisive tactics of conservative campaigning, but because the Bush record of managerial incompetence weighed too heavily.
Most Americans entrust the debate about “bigger government” or “smaller government” to the policy wonks; they want the government, at whatever size, to function properly. As former New Jersey governor and former Bush official Christie Todd Whitman remarked a few days ago, the 2008 election “was about the hope that we can and should expect more out of our government – an area where Republicans have disappointed.”
It was during Katrina when most Americans first became aware of the incompetence; FEMA director Mike Brown (“heckuva job, Brownie”) had previously honed his disaster-management experience while heading up the International Arabian Horse Association. But Brown was merely the most visible manifestation of a philosophy that treated government not as a magnet for skilled public servants, but as a dumping ground for ill-qualified political apparatchiks.
Which is why (among many examples) Brown’s deputy FEMA director was considered qualified based on his previous work as a Bush campaign advance man; and why a former Bush campaign worker with no science background got a top science job at NASA; and why a Bush confidante who had penned a total of three legal articles, but who had handled the legal paperwork on Bush’s fishing cabin, wound up being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court.Eight years of incompetence and cronyism, coupled with a war launched on the basis of nonexistent evidence, soured most Americans on the conservative brand. The familiar Nixon-era campaign tactics were employed – tagging Barack Obama as exotic, foreign, pejoratively liberal, insufficiently American – but this time the electorate tuned them out. This time, by a margin of eight million voters, conservatism as currently constituted was judged dead on arrival.
And conservative commentator Rich Lowry dryly warns that conservatism will stay dead until its devotees learn how to connect with the everyday lives of average voters, with the “middle-class pocketbook and quality of life issues … concerns such as congestion and college tuition that have traditionally been beneath conservative notice.”
In other words, as Lowry colleague Kathleen Parker argues, conservatives need to quit parading their “know-nothingness” as a “badge of honor,” and stop acting as if they can politically afford to exclude from their ranks huge swatches of the population: moderate suburban women, “elitists,” Hispanics, “intellectuals,” anyone they deem smarter than Joe the Plumber, indeed anyone who doesn’t reside in what Sarah Palin calls “the pro-America areas of this great nation.”
Until they learn these lessons, Democrats will be dancing on their graves.
--
Also by Dick Polman
"Senator No"by Dick Polman
Jesse Helms dedicated his life to salting the fundamental American wound, leveraging the racial divide and harvesting white fears for political gain. Unfortunately, his tactics paid off.
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Art David wrote on December 15, 2008 2:19pm
I could not believe how comprehensive the demise of Nixonian Conservatism played out this year. Mr. Polman has given a full and balanced assessment of the reasons for the decline. Looking at the mono-chromatic crowd at the Republican Presidential Convention, there is much work to be done if the Party wishes to survive. It seems clear that the politics of divisiveness is hereby, officially deceased. Thankfully. --- Gopons [Report Comment]
