Standoff, page 4
Since the civil rights revolution, Republicans have moved in the direction of social and cultural populism. The Democratic Party’s endorsement of the values of the educated upper-middle class—racial liberalism, feminism, gay rights—has driven away white working-class Democrats. President Reagan’s moral traditionalism, his defense of religion in the public space, and his foreign-policy toughness all had an undeniably populist appeal. A lot of white working-class voters felt comfortable with the Democrats economically but not culturally. Upper-middle-class suburbanites liked Reagan’s fiscal conservatism but were turned off by his appeal to racial backlash voters and the religious right.
The nation’s upper-middle class has been divided left and right since the 1960s. Working-class voters have also been divided left and right. In 1968 we saw a split between Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who appealed to workers’ economic interests, and Independent candidate Governor George Wallace, the leading defender of racial segregation. Both had an appeal to white working-class voters. After Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, there were indications that some of his white working-class supporters went for Wallace.1 In 2016 some white working-class voters came out for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Others rallied behind Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.
Who could heal the division? Bill Clinton tried. As president, Clinton blurred party differences on economic policy while creating a deeper division over values. Clinton made it safe for tax-sensitive suburbanites to vote Democratic. He also provoked economic progressives such as New Jersey senator Bill Bradley and Vermont representative Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist who founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to denounce Clintonism as a sellout. Take California and New Jersey, two heavily suburban, culturally liberal coastal states. Both states voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 through 1988, but both have voted for the Democrat in every election since then. At the same time, Clinton reduced the Democrats’ appeal in culturally conservative areas of the country such as West Virginia, Tennessee, and his own Arkansas.
We do have class politics in the United States, but these days, the class division is mostly inside the two parties rather than between them. Most Democratic presidential contests in recent decades have come down to a choice between a progressive and a populist. In the 1950s, it was Adlai Stevenson the progressive versus Estes Kefauver the populist. In 1968 it was Eugene McCarthy the progressive versus Robert Kennedy the populist. In 1972, George McGovern (progressive) versus Hubert Humphrey (populist). In 1984, Gary Hart (progressive) versus Walter Mondale (populist). Michael Dukakis (progressive) versus Richard Gephardt (populist) in 1988. Paul Tsongas (progressive) versus Bill Clinton (populist) in 1992. Bill Bradley (progressive) versus Al Gore (populist) in 2000.
In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Barack Obama was the progressive candidate, and Hillary Clinton was the populist. The difference? Social class. Progressives appeal to upscale Democrats: well-educated, upper-middle-class, Prius-driving liberals. Populists appeal to working-class Democrats who look to government for protection from economic adversity: single working women, racial minorities, pickup truck drivers.
Populist Democrats nodded in agreement when Walter Mondale asked Gary Hart in 1984, “Where’s the beef?” (a quote from a popular ad for a hamburger chain). And when Hillary Clinton said in 2008, “If I tell you I will fight for you, that is exactly what I intend to do.” Barack Obama’s strongest support in the 2008 Democratic primaries came from African Americans and educated upper-middle-class white voters. Hillary Clinton carried the white working-class vote in state after state. She demolished Obama in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee. When Clinton recalled her grandfather teaching her to shoot as a child in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Obama mocked her for “talking like she’s Annie Oakley.” Obama disparaged economically stressed small-town Pennsylvania voters who “cling to guns or religion.” Clinton beat Obama by 10 points in Pennsylvania.
Class differences were diminished in the 2016 Democratic primaries. Bernie Sanders was a progressive who turned out huge crowds in college towns. But his message was that of an economic populist: “We will no longer tolerate an economy to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else.”
The big differences in the 2016 Democratic primaries were by age (Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton among young voters) and partisanship (Clinton won Democrats, Sanders won Independents).2
In 1968 Hubert Humphrey proved that populists can’t win without progressives. George McGovern proved in 1972 that progressives can’t win without populists. The Democratic Party is a great cross-class coalition that wins when it sticks together: upper-middle-class progressives and working-class populists. In recent years, Democrats have been gaining ground in the first category but losing ground in the second.
The Republican Party is also a great cross-class coalition: country-club conservatives and self-described “values voters.” On the one side, Mitt Romney, whose conservative social values were always in doubt. Romney could be elected president of any country club in Greenwich, Connecticut. On the other side, Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, and John McCain’s running mate in 2008, who would probably not be admitted to any country club in Greenwich, Connecticut.
In the 2012 Republican primaries, conservatives tried to stop Romney. Values voters, the populist wing of the Republican Party, rallied behind one conservative candidate after another: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum. But social issues were not high on the agenda in 2012. As a result, we had the odd spectacle of Gingrich and Perry lobbing attacks at Romney as an economic elitist. Perry called Romney a “vulture capitalist.” Gingrich said, “Show me somebody who has consistently made money while losing money for workers, and I’ll show you someone who has undermined capitalism.”
Those attacks drew counterattacks from conservatives who believed, correctly, that economic populism is the preserve of the left. Republican candidate Mike Huckabee said, “It’s surprising to see so many Republicans embrace that left-wing argument against capitalism.” Romney complained that “free enterprise” was on trial. “I thought it was going to come from the president, from the Democrats on the left, but instead it’s coming from Speaker Gingrich and apparently others,” he said.
The attacks failed. Economic populism has never had much resonance on the right. What the attacks did was spare Romney from having to defend his wavering positions on social issues.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, signaled his own turn toward economic populism: “the breathtaking greed of a few” . . . “on-your-own economics” . . . “a level of inequality we haven’t seen since the Great Depression hurts us all.”3 It was a deliberate echo of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, when he, too, embraced populist economic themes.
Neither Obama nor Romney was a very convincing populist. President Obama continued to sound like a college professor speaking from a lectern (actually, a teleprompter). Mitt Romney was Mr. 1 Percent. At a time of populist outrage, populists had no authentic champion. Think of it this way: in Obama’s first term, we saw a populist eruption on the right (the Tea Party movement) and a populist eruption on the left (the Occupy movement). Neither had a strong candidate for president in 2012.
The result was the populist backlash in 2016 that produced Donald Trump. The real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity is the whole populist package. He’s conservative on many social issues (immigration), liberal on some economic issues (trade), and isolationist on foreign policy (“America First”). He is despised by the liberal cultural elite and distrusted by the conservative economic elite.
Populist Eruptions
The United States has experienced a sequence of right-wing populist surges over the past fifty years. The first came as the result of white racial backlash to civil rights in the 1960s. Racists were one of the earliest constituencies in the new Republican coalition. They were almost all Barry Goldwater had in 1964, and they were the target of the Richard Nixon–Spiro Agnew strategy to win the South in 1972. Richard Nixon’s worst state in 1968 was Mississippi (14 percent for Nixon, 64 percent for George Wallace). Nixon’s best state in 1972, when Wallace did not run, was Mississippi (78 percent for Nixon). It was a simple additive strategy: Nixon ’68 plus Wallace ’68 equaled Nixon ’72—and beyond.
But Goldwater, Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush did not have to run overtly racist campaigns in order to take advantage of racial resentment. Backlash voters are attracted to the GOP’s antigovernment agenda. They oppose an activist- and reform-minded federal government in part because they want to protect their interests against what they regard as minority encroachment.
Ronald Reagan expanded the party’s support among religious conservatives, even though he was not a particularly religious man. In his speech to an evangelical prayer breakfast at the 1984 Republican National Convention, he argued that traditionally in the United States, “the state was tolerant of religious belief, expression, and practice . . . but in the 1960s, this began to change.”4
As the president explained it, “We began to make great steps toward secularizing our nation and removing religion from its honored place. The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance, freedom, and openmindedness. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion?”
Beginning with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, Democrats and liberals came to support a wide variety of reformist social causes, including women’s rights, affirmative action, busing, gay rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, sex education, contraception, required teaching of evolution, tolerance of pornography, opposition to prayer in public schools, and legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage. Liberals defend these measures as enhancements of individual rights. Conservatives see them as enhancements of state power.
Christian conservative leader Pat Robertson once argued to me that every item on the religious right’s social agenda started as a reaction to a liberal initiative such as those just listed. Many originated in federal court cases, often in Supreme Court decisions.5 The courts are the least democratic institution of American government. That’s why the religious right sees itself as a populist force protesting government encroachments on personal morality and religious freedom.
Liberals see the religious right as culturally aggressive and themselves as culturally defensive. To conservatives such as Robertson and Ted Cruz, it’s the other way around. They see liberals trying to give official status to their “antireligious” moral and social values, while conservatives defend pluralism and tolerance. That conflict came to a head with the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.). The case pitted women’s rights against religious rights, with the court ruling that religious employers had the right to refuse to pay for insurance coverage of contraception. This time the court sided with the right. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson wrote, “My religion trumps your ‘right’ to employer-subsidized, consequence-free sex.”6
The Family Research Council, the leading political organization of the religious right, hosts a conference every year in Washington for social conservative activists and elected officials. They call it the Values Voter Summit. It is a source of irritation to liberals that social conservatives have appropriated the label “values voters.” After all, liberals contend, they have values, too. But the religious right has created a movement that rallies to the banner of traditional values, with other issues regarded as secondary.
The influence of the religious right reached a peak in the 1994 midterm election. Religious right voters were the key to the Republican takeover of Congress. Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged that fact shortly after the election, when he said, “The activity engaged in by the Christian Coalition to educate and make sure people back home knew what was happening was a vital part of why we had a revolution at the polls.” The Christian Coalition was founded by Pat Robertson in 1989, the year after he ran for the Republican nomination for president.
One in five voters nationwide in 1994 were white evangelical Christians, and just over three-quarters of them voted Republican for Congress. Anger at President Clinton rallied them. They stormed the polls to repudiate the president. Four years earlier, in the 1990 midterm, Republican House candidates got just over 27.6 million votes nationwide. In 1994 the Republicans’ national vote total shot up to nearly 36.6 million—a record increase for the party from one midterm to the next.
Where did all those new Republican votes come from? They didn’t come from the Democrats. The total Democratic House vote slipped from 32.5 million in 1990 to 31.7 million in 1994. Democrats lost less than 1 million votes.
House Speaker Gingrich knew the answer. He gave it when the Christian Coalition unveiled its “Contract with the American Family” in 1995. It was an effort to put a religious spin on the “Contract with America” that many Republicans believed brought them to power in Congress in 1994. Gingrich said, “[1994] was the first time since 1934 that the vote for a party went up dramatically, and it’s well worth studying. Our vote went up by almost nine million. The Democrats lost a million votes.”
Those 9 million voters were the Republican Party’s new base. A lot of them were Christian conservatives and gun owners—the kinds of people who, in previous midterm elections, had rarely bothered to vote. In the 1994 House election, the entire country voted 52 percent Republican. The figure among gun owners, who composed a quarter of the electorate, was 69 percent. Among Christian conservatives, 76 percent. Gun owners and the religious right were more loyal to the GOP than rich people were. Voters with incomes over $100,000 a year voted 63 percent Republican.7
Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition in 1994, insisted after the election that the religious right was not threatening anybody. “We have no intention of doing to this Congress what the unions, the feminists, and the gay lobby did to Bill Clinton when he took office,” Reed said. “They made unreasonable demands, presented an extremist agenda, and forced his administration way out of the mainstream.” That’s exactly what a lot of Republicans feared the religious right would do.
Christian conservatives claimed they were not trying to impose their ideas on anybody. Just the reverse. According to their “Contract with the American Family,” “With each passing year, people of faith grow increasingly distressed by the hostility of public institutions toward religious expression.” They saw themselves not as aggressors but as defenders of religious liberty against those who wanted to eliminate religion from public life.
The 1998 midterm election was a low point for the religious right. It was the Great Impeachment Referendum. In every midterm election since 1934, the president’s party had suffered a net loss of House seats. Not in 1998. That year, an amazing 82 percent of voters said the nation’s economy was in good shape. When Clinton first got elected in 1992, only 19 percent felt that way. In 1996, when things were good enough to get both the Democratic president and the Republican Congress reelected, 55 percent thought the economy was good. The 1998 figure—82 percent—could be described only as euphoric.
The impeachment saga was a shock for social conservatives. The problem wasn’t Congress—the House of Representatives delivered impeachment. The shock was that the country wasn’t with them. It wasn’t that something was wrong with American government. It was that something was wrong with American culture if the public wanted to keep President Clinton in office.
The religious right retains a powerful influence in the Republican Party, but it does not control the party. Christian conservatives resisted the nomination of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, even though both candidates adapted their positions to match those of religious conservatives. McCain had labeled leaders of the religious right “agents of intolerance” in 2000, and Romney had supported some gay rights and abortion rights as a candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, though as governor his views “evolved,” as he put it, in a more conservative direction.
Donald Trump was not supposed to be the favorite candidate of the religious right in the 2016 Republican race. With his often coarse language, his impulsive and casually observant lifestyle, and his three marriages, Trump hardly exemplified Christian conservative values. The Christian conservative favorite was expected to be Rick Santorum, a former US senator from Pennsylvania who had come in second in the 2012 GOP primaries. After losing badly to Ted Cruz among evangelical voters in the Iowa Republican caucuses, however, Santorum dropped out. Cruz, who ultimately came in second in the 2016 Republican race, lasted until the May 3 Indiana primary. A majority of Indiana Republican primary voters were evangelicals. Yet they favored Trump over Cruz, 50 percent to 44 percent, forcing Cruz to drop out of the race.
In 2016 the religious right proved its loyalty to the Republican Party. White born-again Christians voted 80 percent for Trump.
The Tea Party
Within weeks of Barack Obama’s taking office in January 2009, a new Republican faction suddenly burst upon the scene: the Tea Party. This movement was driven by political fundamentalism, not religious fundamentalism.
Tea Party supporters and religious fundamentalists share many of the same characteristics. They do not tolerate waverers (such as former Utah senator Bob Bennett, who was denied renomination by Utah Republicans in 2010 because he, like former president George W. Bush, supported a federal bank bailout). They drive out “heretics” (like former Florida governor Charlie Crist, whose photo hugging President Obama in 2009 enraged conservatives). They punish “unbelievers” (like former Delaware senator Mike Castle, who ran in the Republican primary as a moderate who could win the general election). Tea Party conservatives believe in the total inerrancy of Scripture—for the Tea Party, that would be the United States Constitution as written in 1787. And they had an antichrist: President Obama. Their mission was to stop President Obama’s policies and reverse them wherever possible. To root out sin, as it were.
