BOOK EXCERPT : NOW WHAT? : A Chronicle of the Republican Revolution and Its Ever-Changing Aftermath
Steven Spielberg at Spago’s on Oscar night would not have generated more of a stir than Newt Gingrich did when he slipped through the door into Grover Norquist’s crowded Capitol Hill townhouse precisely at 11 o’clock on the evening of April 7, 1995. From the living room to the small backyard to the rooftop patio that looked over the Capitol conservatives now claimed as their own, the house was filled with the best and the rightest--the cream of baby-boom and Generation X conservatives, sipping beers, puffing on cigars and slapping backs in expressions of congratulation.
The party marked the exclamation point to a day of celebrations for Republicans. Earlier that morning, under bright sunshine that carried the hint of spring, the House Republicans had reassembled on the Capitol steps, where they introduced the Contract With America almost seven months earlier to cheer its completion: They had passed nine of the 10 items (only term limits had failed) in six days fewer than the 100 Gingrich had promised. Never mind that the contract had already begun to languish in the Senate: In the exuberant din at Norquist’s home that night, the sense of triumph was intoxicating. The room floated on self-assurance: the unshakable belief among these ambitious young men and women that their time had come. Norquist, a young conservative networker and strategist, a man who viewed politics as the conduct of war by other means, caught the mood with the cover to his invitation. He reprinted a quote not from the contract but from the movie “Conan the Barbarian” in which the warrior is asked what is best in life, and he replies: “To crush enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Many influences had shaped the political sensibility of the young conservatives who assembled that evening to commemorate the keening of the Democrats. Ronald Reagan had inspired them; Rush Limbaugh and P.J. O’Rourke had given them their cultural vocabulary--a jaunty anti-establishment impertinence that disdained liberalism as not only wrongheaded but uncool as well. But their view of the world was shaped above all by the man who stood alone in the doorway at 11 p.m., looking vaguely uncomfortable as the room surged toward him chanting, “Newt, Newt, Newt.”
The gathering at Norquist’s home was very much Gingrich’s party. In a much larger sense, the GOP itself is also becoming Gingrich’s party. After the emotional high point of April 7, the House revolutionaries and their allies in the conservative populist movement suffered many frustrations through 1995 as the Senate rejected or diluted several key items in their Contract With America, and President Clinton vetoed several other of their priorities. But most of them understood that within the Republican party, each passing election was likely to strengthen the position of the conservative voices. “Every freshman class,” marveled House Majority Leader Dick Armey, “seems to be more conservative.”
These impatient young conservatives express an expansive vision. Like Reagan, who dreamed of defeating, not containing, the “evil empire” of Communism, the Gingrich conservatives and their Senate allies dream not of limiting but humbling what former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander calls “the arrogant empire” in Washington. Revolution is an overused term in politics, promiscuously applied to almost every new president. But the goals of the dynamic forces in the GOP--represented by names like Gingrich and Armey, John Kasich and Bill Kristol, Phil Gramm and Tommy Thompson, Ralph Reed and Bill Bennett--justify the term.
To fulfill their policy ambitions--or even anything approximating them--the Republicans must first change the equation of contemporary electoral politics. Since 1968, America has settled into a pattern of fragmented political authority--with control of the White House and Congress routinely divided between the parties--incompatible with the extent of change that Gingrich and his allies envision. To transform the government, the Republicans must first transform that pattern. They must construct a stable electoral majority that will provide them sustained control of both the White House and Congress.
History suggests it is almost impossible for a party to redirect the government fundamentally without simultaneous control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. It took the Democrats the generation from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 to Lyndon B. Johnson’s final year in 1968 (they simultaneously controlled the executive and legislative branches for 26 of those 36 years) to embed their vision of an activist government into American society. Even that project built on the outpouring of progressive legislation that Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Congress laid down during his first term. Today’s ascendant Republicans cannot reverse the century-long Democratic expansion of federal power in a single congressional session, or for that matter, over the four-year term that a Republican president will serve if the party can win back the White House in 1996. Only with sustained, unified control of government can these Republicans come close to inscribing their vision into law.
Spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect--so, it was reported, counseled White House advisor Harry Hopkins as the Roosevelt Democrats assembled the sturdy New Deal political coalition. Republicans talk of their own durable electoral majority united by reductions in spending, regulation and taxes. Certainly that logic binds together the activist gun owners, small business proprietors, conservative Christians and property-rights activists who constitute the grass-roots anti-government network. But these activists alone do not constitute an absolute electoral majority. And though the breadth and depth of the voter revolt in 1994 carried all the intensity of a realigning election--with results that underscored the intractability of the problems confronting the Democrats--the full meaning of 1994 will not be clear until the Republicans demonstrate whether they can solidify their gains in 1996 and beyond.
That potential clearly exists. In some respects the most dramatic aspect of the GOP success in 1994 was that it required no dramatic shifts in voter loyalties. One way of looking at the 1994 Republican landslide was that the GOP did nothing more than finally recreate at the congressional level the voter coalition that drove the party’s five presidential victories from 1968 through 1988. In fact, the GOP captured Congress with an electoral performance that matched only a lower peak on that 20-year range: George Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republicans used different issues in 1994 than 1988 to frame the differences between the parties, intensifying their anti-government and anti-Washington message in the most recent race. Yet in both campaigns, the GOP established an ideological division that separated the electorate in a remarkably similar fashion. Whether measured by race, gender, income, ideology or education, exit polls show that the overall Republican share of the congressional vote in 1994 usually fell within a few percentage points of Bush’s showing. In both cases, the GOP managed little support among minorities but attracted almost three of every five white voters--including clear majorities of the white working class that once constituted the cornerstone of the Democratic political coalition.
What is most significant about these parallels is that they underscore the potential of the 1994 Republican voter coalition to dominate national elections and provide the GOP unified control of the executive and legislative branch into the next century. Both races show the potential for Republicans to align an insurmountable majority of white Americans behind a broadly conservative message on social values, taxes and the role of government. With the 1994 results, Republicans demonstrated the existence of an ideologically coherent, demographically identifiable coalition that can produce a partisan majority in both congressional and presidential races--something Democrats simply cannot say.
But assembling such a coalition for one election is not the same as maintaining it while translating that broad ideological message into a specific policy agenda. Even Bush, whose own policy goals were minimal, proved unable to hold together his coalition in 1992 under pressure from a declining economy and internal divisions that set moderate voters against his activist conservative base. In seeking far more dramatic changes in policy, at a time when voters invest little confidence in politicians from either party, the current Republican leadership is imposing much greater stress on the fault lines in the GOP vote, a point underscored by the declining poll ratings for the Republican Congress through late 1995.
Every successful political coalition in American history has divided on some issues. The real question is not whether a political coalition can achieve unanimity but whether it can subsume its divisions beneath a unifying idea. The Republican Party now has such a potential unifying idea: reduction in the size and responsibilities of the federal government. If Republicans can maintain voter support for this central goal, their other divisions (with the possible exception of a Supreme Court or congressional vote eliminating the legal right to abortion) are unlikely to rupture their coalition. That reality frames one central question now facing the GOP: Will voters support the reduction of the government as much in the specific as they do in the abstract?
On the subject of government, American public opinion is not so much divided as contradictory. Large percentages distrust government, oppose regulation and want to balance the budget. But there is also overwhelming support for Medicare, environmental protection, spending on education and an instinct to look toward government when things go wrong in society. Washington is blamed for doing too much and then for not doing enough when planes crash or rivers choke on sludge. President Clinton faced one side of this paradox: Though his election clearly signaled a public desire for greater attention to domestic problems, in office he collided with mountainous skepticism that the expansion of government was the route to progress. Republicans now face the opposite risk: that general public support for less government will not translate into endorsement of their specific reductions in spending, taxes and regulation.
From any poll, suspicion and hostility toward the federal government roars like a primal scream. For the groups in the anti-government coalition, that hostility is an ideological proposition, but for most Americans it is not. The principal reason government is unpopular, polls suggest, is because people consider it ineffective and wasteful, not because they believe that government should not try to improve education, clean the environment or provide a social safety net. In polling, far more people support the goal of reforming government than simply reducing it, and many specific government initiatives, such as Medicare and environmental protection, are as popular as government itself is unpopular.
Yet these sentiments are only part of the story. The collapse of faith in the federal government looms over these expressions of support for its individual functions. Support for individual regulatory initiatives can mask the extent to which voters have reached a conclusion that government is too large, overreaching and intrusive. The idea of shifting authority over social programs from Washington to state governments, as most Republicans advocate, also draws substantial support in survey after survey, and even the resistance evident in polls to cuts in individual spending programs looks different when viewed through a wider lens. Democrats are often mesmerized by poll numbers showing public support for greater spending on individual social programs. But most often the controlling dynamic is public skepticism that such programs would accomplish their intended goals.
Together, these closely balanced and contradictory opinions suggest a broad social consensus toward restraining the role of government--but with enormous differences remaining over what that means. Absent a major economic downturn that overshadows all else, those differences are likely to be the central focus of the presidential and congressional campaigns in 1996--and probably campaigns into the next century.
LINESPACE
Compared to its high tide in November, 1994, the GOP has clearly lost ground on most measures of public support over the past year. Today, it is not difficult to imagine Clinton holding the White House in 1996 in a backlash against Republicans moving too far or too fast to eliminate government programs and regulatory protections that most Americans support.
Still, the GOP’s central mission of limiting government is large enough to occupy its imagination and unify its core supporters. In contrast, continued ideological and racial divisions among the Democrats inhibit their ability to present a clear and compelling alternative to the GOP vision. While the Democrats flounder, several distinct groups of voters are clearly realigning into a lasting attachment with the GOP, most importantxamong them born-again Christians, small business owners and white southerners. Despite all of Clinton’s efforts to change his party’s image on questions of values, millions of Americans still identify Democrats with the forces of cultural dissolution and permissiveness while associating Republicans with standards, order and individual responsibility.
Meanwhile, after each Census, population shifts carry more congressional seats and electoral votes to the southern and western states, where Republicans are strongest, while diminishing the count in northeast and midwestern states, where Democrats remain most competitive. For each of these reasons, Republicans have reason to hope that 1994 marked a realigning election that will open a sustained era of conservative political control.
But building a stable political order atop the underlying current of dissatisfaction with American life may be like constructing a fortress in the sand. The persistent alienation that voters now express about the political system is a force inimical to electoral stability. In such an environment, voters may simply not trust either party enough to provide it with undivided control of government for any length of time. The long-awaited political realignment may be contingent on conditions that no longer exist: a willingness by a majority of voters to firmly identify their interests with one party. The basic trend toward political independence--which implied neutrality between the parties when it first accelerated during the 1960s--now appears to be taking on a harder edge as more Americans feel themselves affirmatively hostile to both of the established choices.
That discontent is now the greatest threat to Republican political dominance--indeed, it is the greatest threat looming over both parties. Over the short term, Republicans can attract disaffected voters just by keeping their promises to reform government programs. But if Republicans are to extend their control into a lasting realignment, those reforms ultimately must deliver tangible results that diminish the anxiety about the nation’s future.
Republicans ironically now find themselves in the same position as Democrats during the 1960s. The Great Society was a great leap of faith--that the expansion of government could solve social problems festering in American life. Though it made progress on some fronts, troubling trends in education, crime and family structure continued, and several even accelerated after the 1960s. Whether, as many conservatives argue, that was because government intervention compounded the problems or because government failed to intervene forcefully enough, government was blamed and Democrats discredited.
The current GOP agenda represents at least as great a leap of faith. This time the gamble is that removing government will solve problems left unsolved by government’s intervention. Like the liberals who devised the Great Society, Gingrich and his allies today may be seeding disappointment by promising more changes than they can deliver. “The mistake of the Democratic majority was believing it could create the good society by merely building government up,” argues Don E. Eberly, president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The danger for the Republican majority may be believing it can recreate the good society by merely tearing government down.”
In the sweep of their ambitions, Republicans now find themselves colliding with one of their most penetrating critiques of liberalism. If the conservative criticism of the Great Society provides any overriding lesson, it is the law of unanticipated consequences--the maxim that any change in policy usually carries with it unintended and unpredictable side effects. For the past quarter century, keen-eyed conservatives have shown how the law of unintended consequences defeated liberal hopes of solving problems by expanding government. Now the law of unintended consequences looms over conservative hopes. There is no reason to believe it is easier to predict the consequences of retrenching government than enlarging it.
Consider social policy. Republican have blamed the welfare system for crime, family breakdown and urban chaos. But there’s no guarantee that limiting welfare will improve any of those conditions; it could easily cause further deterioration of each. When the five-year time limit on welfare in the GOP welfare-reform plan is fully phased in, as much as 40% of the welfare caseload--some two million families--will be cut off. Who can say with certainty what will happen when so many welfare recipients, many of them without high school degrees or meaningful experience in the workplace, flood the low-wage labor market?
The same can be said for the breakdown in the family. Conservative social theorist Charles Murray’s argument that welfare makes it easier for women to bear children outside of marriage is difficult to refute. But in many inner-city neighborhoods, illegitimacy has become such a commanding social norm that merely reducing welfare benefits may not be powerful enough to reverse it. In fact, no program from any point along the ideological spectrum has been found to significantly discourage out-of-wedlock births.
Economic issues pose similar questions. It is possible, as conservatives suggest, that cutting taxes, reducing regulation and balancing the federal budget will spur a new era of growth and productivity that reignites a rise in living standards. But it is by no means certain.
Even if a balanced budget improves long-term growth, that won’t necessarily solve the income problems of average families. More growth is better than less. But without changes in the forces that are depressing incomes for less well-educated workers, even more robust growth could simply channel greater gains to upper-income families without lifting the pressure on those closer to the middle. By themselves, reductions in the size of government may not be enough to overcome the other forces that economists indict for this sluggish progress in living standards, particularly technological advances and international competition that have diminished the value of less-skilled labor.
The largest trends roiling American life--income stagnation, family breakup and crime--are powerful forces beyond the reach of any government to command. These problems, in fact, are now common to all major nations across the industrialized world, driven by basic changes in technology and the global economy and the loosening of traditional moral strictures on behavior. These conditions need not be permanent. But dramatic progress, if it comes at all, will almost certainly come as a result of large social and economic changes--such as a moral revival comparable to that experienced by Victorian England in the 19th century--that government might modestly encourage but cannot hope to summon or direct. For the foreseeable future, government will be stretched merely to prevent further deterioration in family structure, crime and economic security for the less-educated. Whether that will be enough progress to satisfy the public may be the largest question in American politics today.
LINESPACE
In this era of widespread anxiety about the nation’s direction, the last elections of the 20th century find the two great national parties engaged in two competitions. One pits them against each other; the second finds them jointly struggling against the gusts of discontent that are billowing the demands for new political alternatives.
The rules of the first contest now require the Democrats and Republicans to maximize their differences: to raise almost every issue into a confrontation between incompatible world views, darkness and light. It is a battle in which Newt Gingrich spends a decade portraying the Democratic-controlled House as corrupt and then is cudgeled by Democratic attacks on his own ethics the moment he takes power; where talk-radio hosts systematically work to dehumanize their opponents and collapse the middle ground; where Republican Senate filibusters block Clinton’s initiatives and Democratic Senate filibusters entangle the Republican revolution; in which both sides resist the clamor for true political reform because they believe they can manipulate the existing system to their advantage; where interest groups in both parties equate compromise with betrayal. It is democracy at 20 paces.
For the two major parties, the struggle in the second contest demands the opposite behavior. The underlying economic and cultural trends in American life are likely to continue breeding dissatisfaction with the nation’s direction, especially among voters without college educations, the group facing the most severe strain on their living standards. Against that backdrop, rebuilding trust in the political system will not be easy. If the parties have any chance to restore public confidence and tamp down the agitation for new alternatives, it is to cultivate common ground in Washington that returns to Americans a sense that their government is conducting the public business in a reasoned and reassuring manner and responding to the demands for reform.
Here the tools are plowshares, not swords. American opinion on government is divided and inconsistent, but most Americans, beneath their conflicting impulses, recognize that neither unbounded government nor the unshackled market offers the best hope of progress. Just as the public recoiled against Democratic efforts to expand and enlarge government during Clinton’s first two years, polls showed Americans increasingly wary of Republican efforts to shrink government in 1995.
Voters may already be ahead of the political world in recognizing the need for a blend of public and private responses. In 1995, pollsters Robert Teeter and Peter Hart asked a national survey whether they placed primary responsibility with the government, businesses, community leaders or individuals to solve a lengthy list of social problems, from providing income assistance to the needy to improving education and moral values and controlling crime and pollution. A substantial number of those polled looked to government for solutions, but in only two instances did an absolute majority look to government. In most cases, a majority divided responsibility between government and the other elements of society--individuals, community groups and businesses.
That instinctively moderate response points toward the road not taken--toward a political debate that neither demonizes nor lionizes government but recognizes it as a means for Americans to work collectively against problems too large for them to master alone. Conservatives are right that, in the future, Americans will be less likely to look to Washington for answers. But liberals are surely correct that Americans will not want their federal government to simply throw up its hands and abandon the task of building a good society to the whims of the market. Both parties have acted with misplaced certitude--as if a single key could unlock these doors. But more than either side will admit, each is perplexed by the economic and cultural changes transforming American life and is groping for new directions. “We don’t have an overall, overarching, compelling thesis for the future of the country,” admits Jeffrey Eisenach, president of the Gingrich-inspired think tank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
The truth is that neither party can say it knows how to reverse the rising rate of illegitimacy, or to integrate the isolated urban poor into the economic and social mainstream, or to restore economic security for working families. The limits of their knowledge should encourage humility, compromise and a willingness to experiment with many alternatives. And yet all indications suggest that neither party is eager to find common ground. This approach exposes both parties to more risk than they appear to realize. The reflexive resistance of many Democrats to any reforms in the federal government risks entombing their party in the past. The mechanical tendency of many Republicans to blame all problems on the federal government threatens to widen the disconnect between Americans and their leaders to an extent that disables both parties.
Many of the underlying changes in political habits and attitudes point toward the Republicans as a new majority party. But these changes still lack the glue that bound together earlier majority coalitions: public faith that political change will produce a brighter, more prosperous future. Discontent is a powerful solvent. But the only proven adhesive in American politics is a vision of national progress that enlarges the circle of opportunity and reconnects Americans to their leaders. If the Republican party acquires no broader mission than retrenching government for its own sake, it has little chance of resolving the full range of economic and cultural concerns that brought it to power--and thus little chance of maintaining sustained allegiance from the swing voters who decide national elections.
Ideas matter in American politics, but results matter more. Clinton won the White House in 1992 because Americans concluded that the Bush Republicans had failed. Republicans captured Congress two years later because voters decided that the Democrats had failed. If the public concludes, either in 1996 or beyond, that the Gingrich Republicans have indulged ideological extremes while failing to renew American life, the years ahead may see an environment in which an increasingly frustrated public turns from one party to another to choices we cannot yet imagine. Since the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, Republicans have struggled without success to regain the dominant position in American politics. They are closer now than at any point in the last 60 years. But the very forces of discontent that have carried them to this high ground may yet sweep the prize from their reach.
