The Right’s Big Crackup Over McCain vs. Bush

The Republican right is cracking up. Pat Robertson has declared that conservatives may flee the GOP if Arizona Sen. John McCain becomes its presidential nominee. Paul M. Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, has gone even farther: McCain, he suggests, may be a new “Manchurian Candidate”--a communist dupe out to subvert American democracy. In contrast, their rival for leadership of the religious right, Gary L. Bauer, has just endorsed McCain and condemned the “moneybags democracy” represented by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, which has been providing the intellectual firepower for the McCain insurgency, gleefully declared after New Hampshire that “leaderless, rudderless and issueless, the conservative movement, which accomplished great things over the past quarter-century, is finished.” In response, Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, declared that conservatives, at times, are “so eager to bury their own that they might as well be writing editorials for the Nation.”

But Kristol is right about the right. After scoring some big successes in the early 1990s, conservatives have become an embattled minority devoting more energy to attacking each other than Democrats. The impeachment of President Bill Clinton briefly papered over conservative conflicts, but once it failed, the simmering antagonisms over domestic and foreign-policy issues reemerged. With the McCain candidacy, they have emerged full-blown. Far from being a mere tactical struggle, the battle between McCain and Bush is over the party’s core values. That conservatives suddenly support Bush doesn’t display their strength. It underscores their weakness.

The conservative splits began with Bush’s father. After President George Bush approved the 1990 budget deal, which included a tax hike of $140 billion, conservatives turned on him, depicting him as a traitor to the Reagan legacy.

But now conservatives have become discombobulated when it comes to economic issues. Following in the footsteps of Patrick J. Buchanan, Bauer has begun to embrace populist economics. He has attacked corporations for greed and denounced country-club Republicans for ignoring the issue of wage inequality. While McCain has sensibly called for limited tax reductions, George W.’s flogging of the GOP’s traditional winning issue of radically lowering taxes has gone nowhere. The economic boom has made tax cuts seem like an issue of marginal importance; polls indicate voters are more interested in continuing to reduce the national debt and increasing spending on education. By rejecting budget reduction in favor of tax cuts, the GOP right is endorsing something close to old-fashioned Keynesian pump-priming of the economy--except that it’s targeted toward the wealthy.

In an effort to restore the sense of vigor that conservatism enjoyed during the Cold War, the right wing turned to social issues. The Christian Coalition tried to become a major political force, but it’s faded as prosperity has blunted outrage over the country’s supposed moral decline. Conservative evangelicals like James C. Dobson even invoked Nazi Germany to claim that the failure to stop abortion meant that the U.S. government was becoming illegitimate; perhaps resistance to the “American regime” was justified.

In Congress, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and other GOP stalwarts have battered away at Clinton’s immorality, gay rights and abortion. But in their zeal to embarrass the Clinton administration, the House managers only ended up embarrassing themselves. Indeed, the House Republicans have ignored such key issues as improving schools and Medicare reform in favor of focusing on crackpot issues. For example, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), head of the government reform and oversight committee, has recently been holding hearings to debunk childhood vaccinations.

The conservative record on foreign policy has been no less dismal. One sign of the GOP’s incoherence appeared during the air war against Yugoslavia last summer. On the one hand, congressional Republicans called for major increases in the Pentagon’s budget; on the other, they decried intervention in the Balkans, with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) pleading with Clinton to “give peace a chance.” The rise of isolationism in the GOP has mirrored the Democrats’ drift in foreign affairs of the 1970s.

China is another issue giving the Republicans fits. The business wing of the GOP, represented by the Bush camp, maintains that increased trade will inevitably lead to liberalization inside China. Isolating Beijing, it argues, will only backfire, turning a potential friend into an enemy. But religious conservatives see it differently. For Bauer and company, China is another Soviet Union, a totalitarian country whose arms buildup and suppression of religious freedoms make a mockery of engagement. They see a sellout by both the business lobby and the Clinton administration over China.

The antagonism in the GOP on foreign policy was on display in the debate between McCain and Bush in Columbia, S.C., on Tuesday. Bush declared he would authorize the use of force only when it is in “our national strategic interest.” This is the banker’s view of foreign policy: U.S. power is to be hoarded, used only when America is directly threatened. McCain countered with a blunt appeal to the crusading America spirit for democracy and human rights: “There are times when our principles and our values are so offended that we have to do what we can to resolve a terrible situation.” In both domestic and foreign-affairs issues, McCain’s emphasis on values sums up his approach.

As the GOP right scrambles to ensure Bush’s victory, fights inside its ranks will continue. Bush’s sharp move to the right after his sharp defeat in New Hampshire does not contradict the collapse of the right; it confirms it. Unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush stands for no core conservative principles, flitting from compassionate to hard-core conservatism.

Now, McCain has emerged with a platform that relies on the call for a Theodore Roosevelt-like “national greatness,” a program sketched out by Kristol, whose own astonishing transformation shows how thoroughly the right is changing. Though it remains rather vague, “national greatness” seems to consist of curbing the influence of K Street lobbyists on the GOP and creating a new civic pride and participation in government, ranging from a robust military to public libraries to railroads.

McCain’s embrace of reform in both domestic and foreign policy has created nothing less than a civil war inside the party. As John B. Judis shows in his brilliant new book “The Paradox of American Democracy,” for the past decade, a revolt has been brewing against the excessive influence of lobbying organizations and special-interest groups who are betraying the public interest. McCain may or may not be able to ride this to the GOP nomination. But as the Republican establishment desperately tries to stamp McCain and his supporters as liberals, it is fighting a losing battle. Whether McCain or Bush triumphs, the conservative movement is on a life-support system, and fading fast. *