The Last White Election?

The House of No

If Obama augurs a further shift, inspired by Clinton, towards a charismatic presidentialism, with captive congressional supporters and little internal debate, then the Republicans have moved in the opposite direction, operating more like a parliamentary party driven by ideological conflict rather than common allegiance to a hero figure like Nixon or Reagan. As Frank Rich characterized a talk that Grover Norquist gave last year to the Conservative Political Action Committee, ‘the GOP candidate’s only function as president would be “to sign the legislation that has already been prepared” by the Republican congressional caucus, starting with the government-slashing Ryan budget.’ [85] Norquist, of course, invented the fiscal loyalty oath in the early 1990s, transforming the slogans of the late 1970s tax revolts into an unbending theology of opposition to government social spending and the taxation of wealth. More importantly, his major backers and congressional allies were willing to discipline and even unseat legislators who balked at signing the ‘Taxpayer Protection Pledge’. [86]

Although eventually all but a handful of House Republicans signed, the unification of the party around intimidating fiscal ideology, briefly achieved by the 1994 congressional ‘revolution’, was undercut by Gingrich’s disgrace and resignation as Speaker, then overshadowed by the Bush administration’s absorption in the neoconservative project of creating a free-market utopia in Iraq. Obama’s ‘impossible victory’ in 2008, which discredited the remaining Republican establishment of elder senators, academic neoconservatives and Reagan consiglieri, conversely pumped huge energy into the dogmatic Republican constituencies who believe that first principles—whether unborn life, marginal tax rates or the gold standard—should be non-negotiable.

The Tea Party, even if largely created by FreedomWorks, the Koch brothers and Fox News, tapped into a deep well of conservative nostalgia for a white-majority America ruled by fathers and bosses. It also filled a vacuum left by the decline of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and earlier rightwing alliances. Although its populism, as several recent studies have shown, has mainly been confined to country clubs and mega-churches in middle-class congressional districts with lower than average unemployment, it has still been a lightning rod for the fear that traditional white prosperity and stable family life were incompatible with the continuing advancement of minorities and immigrants. The Tea Party is Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitry looking into a mirror and seeing itself as a dying culture. [87]

The 2010 primaries were among the most vicious in Republican history. Tea Party-backed candidates—that is to say, those supported by Armey and/or the Kochs—challenged some of the biggest names in the GOP, including Bob Bennett, Trey Grayson, Mike Castle, Charlie Crist, Sue Lowden, Rick Lazio, Paul Thurmond (son of Strom) and Lisa Murkowski—although Murkowski ultimately won the general election with write-in votes. About a third of Tea Party-endorsed candidates for the House were successful. Most were first-timers, and Dick Armey set up a workshop for the freshmen on ‘how not to be coopted’ by the Republican establishment. Fifty-five became members of the official Tea Party Caucus founded by Michelle Bachman, although their overlapping membership is dwarfed by the Republican Study Committee with 170 members. (The RSC, the largest ideological bloc in Congress for the last 30 years, is organized around the ‘Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights’, and until the 2010 elections considered itself the one true church of conservative Republicanism.)

The trauma of the 2010 primary fights, repeated in 2012, has transformed the calculus of incumbency and therefore the stability of leadership within the GOP. If Norquist was a difficulty, the Tea Party are dangerous theological police. According to David Wasserman, House Editor for the respected Cook Political Report, only 6 of 234 Republicans in the new House represent Democratic-leaning districts. Regardless of the party’s national dilemmas, the ‘overwhelming share of House Republicans will have more to fear from a 2014 primary than a 2014 general election. This political reality drives congressional behaviour.’ [88] What gives the threat real teeth, of course, is the existence of groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Responsible Government who are willing and able to outspend all but the most well-heeled incumbents. ‘The ideological shift from the 111th to the 112th Congress’, write Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, ‘was extraordinary—indeed, larger than in any previous shift from one House to the next, including the change that occurred in 1994.’ Using a new methodology developed by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonita to rank the ideologies of House members and other politicians, they were stunned by the temperature of extremism they found in the Republican class of 2010: 77 per cent of the newly arriving Republicans ‘are to the right of the typical Republican in the previous Congress—and many are to the right of almost all continuing Republicans.’ They argue, like Anthony DiMaggio in his book on the Tea Party, that this great Red shift was less the result of grassroots rebellion than of shrewd investments by anti-tax ‘plutocrats’ who essentially went out and bought themselves a new ‘ground game’.

But the plutocratic ‘investment model’ should not overshadow the degree to which the Republican electorate has been radicalized since 2008. Exit polling, for instance, has revealed a dramatic increase in the number of Republican voters who report ‘anger’ against Obama, from 17 per cent in 2008 to 45 per cent today. In a subculture where Rush Limbaugh is the emotional norm, Republicans relish sound and fury, no matter how demented. Thus a particular favourite of the Tea Party wing has been Florida politician Allen West, who narrowly lost his House seat last November. According to Michael Bender, ‘He’s labeled President Obama supporters “a threat to the gene pool”’, and ‘called 78 of his liberal colleagues in Congress communists’. [90] Meanwhile conspiracy theory retains its prominent traditional role in American rightwing politics. According to Public Policy Polling, 49 per cent of GOP voters nationally say they think that community organization ACORN ‘stole the [2012] election for President Obama . . . 52 per cent of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.’ [91]

In historical perspective, of course, the modern Republican Party has always had a substantial minority of far-right true-believers like the John Birch Society (now active in the Tea Party) in the 1950–60s, or the sundry virulent anti-Roosevelt groups a decade earlier who saw subversion behind every New Deal mural and public-housing project. More significant are the broader trends, such as the collapse of support amongst Republicans for a minimal social-safety net (from 62 per cent in 1987 to 40 per cent today) or the growing generational indifference about the future of younger Americans. Formerly fringe ideas are also becoming mainstream within Tea Party Republicanism, like the bizarre ‘originalist’ interpretation of the Constitution advocated by far-right Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who believes that the original intentions of 18th-century Virginia slave-owners and New England merchants are the only constitutional interpretations permissible for American governments in the 21st century. For some evangelicals, indeed, the Constitution is now like the Bible: inerrant divine word that must be understood in the most anti-modern way possible.

Unfortunately political ‘polarization’ is unidirectional. Apart from the young Latinas mentioned earlier, no important segment of Democratic opinion has moved significantly leftward in the past twenty years. In contrast, Republican opinion—at least as measured by its representation in Congress—has moved rightward every year since 1976. As gauged on a widely used seven-point ideological scale, some social scientists believe that the Republicans are now further to the right than at any time in the past century. [93] What has driven this rightward shift? A trio of political scientists—McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal—whose book Polarized America was published in 2006, make a compelling argument that the current ideological polarization in Congress tracks income polarization: the beneficiaries of inequality steadily move further to the right. Moreover the effect is enhanced by positive feedback: income inequality increases polarization while political polarization increases income inequality. [94]

To this argument might be appended the hypothesis that every move by Democrats toward centrist accommodation only encourages the Republicans—and thus the movable ‘centre’—to shift further to the right. Social conservatism and its discontents with the 21st century are obviously still brick and mortar to Republicanism. But what actually drives the party rightward and constitutes the rational core of its apparent nihilism is the determination to preserve all of the upward redistribution of wealth and power achieved over three decades since the Reagan revolution. Thomas Edsall, who argues cogently in his new book that zero-sum conflicts over state resources are inevitable concomitants of economic stagnation, makes a strong case for the rational-actor logic of Republican intransigence:

Republican leaders see the window closing on the opportunity to dismantle the liberal state. The prospect looms that the GOP will be forced to accommodate changing demographics, as proponents of big government gain traction and as an ever-growing cohort of Americans become dependent on social-welfare initiatives. These stresses create an incentive for the conservative movement to pull hard right and to pursue increasingly high-risk strategies.

This hard pull to the right is unlikely to cease. In the first place, the Tea Party wing is taking over the major Republican think-tanks with invaluable help from the ubiquitous Koch brothers. Last March, for example, the Kochs ousted Cato Institute executive Ed Crane, who immediately charged that Charles Koch was conspiring to ‘transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda’. This was followed by Armey’s failed coup at FreedomWorks, and then, in what Tea Party supporters deemed a ‘master stroke’, the surprise resignation of South Carolina’s Jim DeMint from the Senate in order to take charge of the Heritage Foundation, the premier centre of conservative policy-making. As one of the Cato directors told Business Week: ‘DeMint’s hiring is recognition by Heritage that the energy is not with the Republican establishment.’ The choice ‘shows they are moving more toward the Tea Party than the mainstream’. [96] Secondly, the Party’s base is adamantly opposed to bipartisan cooperation or a more centrist national leadership. On the contrary, Pew pollsters found that:

Republicans and Republican leaners remain of the view that the GOP leaders should move in a more conservative direction, not a more moderate one, by a 57 per cent to 35 per cent margin. Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, continue to support more moderation from their political leaders: nearly six in ten (57 per cent) want Democratic leaders to move in a moderate direction, while 33 per cent want them to move in a more liberal direction.

One-party states

A few weeks after the election, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow complained about the glaring contradiction between the national media’s depiction of a sobered-up Republican Party attempting a major ‘course correction’ and local news accounts of unyielding Republican opposition to immigration amnesty, abortion and gay rights in states where they hold power:

All over the country, if you look at state newspapers and state news bureaus covering what it is that Republicans are planning to do, where they have governing authority in the states—the contrast between that reporting and the Beltway discussion about what Republicans theoretically ought to be doing, is like news from two totally different universes.

The second universe comprises the 24 Southern and Plains states where Republicans occupy the Governor’s mansion and control both houses of the legislature. There are currently more Republican state legislators (3,814) than at any time since 1928 and more Republican-controlled chambers in the South (19) since the peak of Reconstruction in 1870. (As late as 1993, no Southern chamber had a GOP majority.) Since 1876, moreover, there have been only three periods where Republicans held a larger percentage of the nation’s governorships: 1921–22, 1970 and 1997–99. Romney may have lost the national election but the Republicans—who took over 22 chambers in the 2008 midterms—came out ahead again in the 2012 legislative elections, consolidating their earlier gains (see Tables 9 and 10).

State government is the most eccentric and veiled architectural component of the US Federal political system. Its daily operations—secluded in places like Albany, Sacramento, Austin, Tallahassee, Harrisburg and Springfield (to name only the capitals of the most populous states)—are much more poorly reported than metropolitan or national politics, and followed intently by only an infinitesimal fraction of the ordinary electorate. Sometimes supremely controversial, state politics is also the most implacably mundane—focused on debates over crop subsidies, highway improvement, amendments to crime bills, sites for new prisons, the naming of bridges and the granting of liquor licences. Some state legislatures, Texas and Nevada for example, continue the tradition of the frugal frontier and meet only every other year, leaving powerful governors and lobbyists to consummate deals and worry about elections.

Over the last generation, however, conservative Republicans have created a series of unique and powerful linkages between state politics and national corporate lobbies. The most important is an extraordinary non-profit called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which acts as a concierge service for conservative legislators. It saves its 2,000 legislative members the trouble of having to design bills and think through legalities by letting corporate lobbyists write the legislation for them, or simply pull it off a library shelf. As the New York Times and Common Cause discovered in a recent investigation: ‘The records offer a glimpse of how special interests effectively turn ALEC’s lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signalling how they should vote and collaborating on bills affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes.’

Donations to ALEC are tax deductible and eagerly offered by companies like Reynolds America, Walmart, Bank of America, ExxonMobil, BP America and AT&T, as well as trade organizations like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson are represented on ALEC’s 24-member Private Enterprise Board. A recent model bill from the US Chamber of Commerce proposed ‘requiring that all high-school students take a class in “free enterprise” as a condition of graduation.’ According to an earlier investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek: ‘About 1,000 times a year, according to ALEC, a state legislator introduces a bill from its library of more than 800 models. About 200 times a year, one of them becomes law. The Council, in essence, makes national policy, state by state.’ Not surprisingly, the investigators also found that ‘campaign contributions often followed’. Indeed.

Republican state campaigns, to a much greater extent than the Democratic side, are also nourished by investments from national super-PACs. In 2009, Ed Gillespie—once Dick Armey’s senior advisor and more recently the campaign partner of Karl Rove—revived the decrepit Republican State Leadership Committee with huge injections of cash from American Crossroads. While the Obama campaign was looting the fundraising base of local Democrats, Gillespie was convincing major national donors like Las Vegas’s Sheldon Adelson and Dallas mega-developer Bob Perry to join with the Kochs and invest heavily in obscure campaigns by Tea Party candidates in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. According to the New York Times, when state election laws got in the way of outside money, the Republican Governors Association accepted the contribution and immediately donated a like amount to the candidate. The splendid result was the preservation of Republican power in the capitals of Midwestern states that, apart from Indiana, gave decisive majorities to Obama.

Gillespie’s success at insulating Republican majorities from presidential trends depended upon shrewd gerrymanders, the support of almost universally right-leaning local media, and—the third hallmark of a new age—ultra-conservative policy institutes and training centres focused on state politics. As Andy Kroll explained in April 2011:

Conceived by the same conservative ideologues who helped found the Heritage Foundation, the State Policy Network is a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement. Its mission is simple: to back a constellation of state-level think tanks loosely modeled after Heritage that promote free-market principles and rail against unions, regulation and tax increases.

Financed by reactionary dynasties like the Coors, the Bradleys and the Peters, there is at least one ‘freedom centre’ in each of the fifty states, usually closely imbricated with Tea Party groups and their sponsors.

The conservative policy infrastructure, in other words, is fractal; the Democrats have nothing that remotely approaches such a network. In the Midwest especially there is a mini-Heritage and its rich sponsor behind each recent attack on collective bargaining. In Ohio, for instance, Governor John Kasich’s attempt to take away public-sector bargaining rights depended heavily upon the Buckeye Institute, which in 2008 had filed a RICO action against ACORN, alleging that its voter-registration efforts amounted to ‘organized crime’. In Indiana, where Governor Mitch Daniels ended recognition for public-sector unions by fiat and Republicans then outlawed the union shop, the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics was an ideological cogwheel. In Wisconsin, where Scott Walker provoked a huge populist uprising by his attack on public employees, the Republicans are under the influence of two rightwing think tanks: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute—closely tied to ALEC and the Bradley Foundation, original backers of the John Birch Society—and the MacIver Institute, allied with Americans for Prosperity.

Michigan, once home to pragmatic Republican leaders like George Romney and Gerald Ford, is a particularly ominous example of the entrenchment strategy at work. A month after Obama swept the state by 8 points, and following an unsuccessful attempt to enshrine collective bargaining in the state constitution, Governor Rick Snyder and a lame-duck Republican House majority passed a right-to-work law without legislative debate or forenotice to Democrats. Actually opposed by the big corporations represented in Business Leaders for Michigan, the initiative was forced by the West Michigan Policy Forum, representing smaller companies and family-owned firms, and a network of Tea Party groups linked to the Mackinac Center, another rightwing think tank. All are either subsidiaries or beneficiaries of the DeVos sons, Dick and Doug, heirs to the Amway fortune, headquartered in Ada, Michigan. Their father Richard DeVos was a member of the Dominionist movement that aims to end separation of church and state, in order to make the US into a Protestant theocracy. Amway, which has 180,000 global sales associates who sell cosmetics and detergents door-to-door or from stores, has been accused for decades of being a sophisticated pyramid scheme as well as an evangelical Christian cult and private political army. Its distributors were once sued for spreading rumours that Proctor & Gamble, its larger corporate rival, was actually the Church of Satan. In any event, the huge profits generated by this bizarre company helped create the unusually dense network of conservative/Tea Party power in West Michigan, a region of 1.4 million people around Grand Rapids, Holland and Muskegon, that plays a dominant role in state Republican politics.

Once upon a time, national Republican leaderships could keep such berserkers on the reservation, but no more. Too much Misean DNA has been transplanted into state-level Republicanism, and it is now coalescing into a coherent design for building small-government societies state by state, behind the Red wall of gerrymandered supermajorities. Although opposition to reproductive choice and gay rights remain at the centre of conservative morality, Republican-dominated state governments from Kansas to North Carolina are urgently focused on implementing the core economics of the Tea Party: ending state income taxes, repealing collective-bargaining rights, privatizing education and deregulating the environment.

In his official rebuttal to Obama’s second inaugural address, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, the head of the Republican Governors Association, urged conservatives to leave Babylon to build Zion. The battle over spending in Congress, he argued, was ‘a debate fought entirely on our opponents’ terms’, whereas in Baton Rouge, Oklahoma City or even in Lansing they could slash and privatize in pursuit of the low-tax, high-growth miracles that would inspire the next Republican majority: ‘We believe in planting the seeds of growth in the fertile soil of your economy . . . not in the barren concrete of Washington.’

The Governor of Louisiana seemed to be impersonating William Jennings Bryan and John C. Calhoun at the same time: it was strange, in any event, for the official opposition orator to call upon his party to evacuate the Beltway. But Jindal (as eager to lick Pennsylvania Avenue’s pavement as any other politician) was appealing to a real power that, confronted with national setbacks or defeats, only entrenches itself deeper in the school board, the city council and the general assembly. The new crusade to uproot unionism in the American Heartland, for example, doesn’t originate in Detroit or Wall Street; it slouches to power from Grand Rapids and other mythical Main Streets. Strange billionaire oil men, casino owners and detergent salesmen reign over elections and mock the majorities of presidents thanks to pious Walmart managers, realtors, retired dentists and subcontractors in pickup trucks with their radios tuned to Rush Limbaugh.

Although Obama arguably saved Wall Street and General Motors, the eastern corporate establishment, as it was once called, has consistently depreciated its debt to the Presidency and overestimated its control over the GOP. Two of the major business sectors with huge debts to the current White House—the big investment and retail banks and Silicon Valley—either sat out the election, nursing their pique over Obama’s scolding campaign rhetoric, or, like the monster egos at Goldman Sachs, knifed their saviour and supported Romney. Inured since Reagan to routine thunder and lightning from the Republican hinterlands, the globalized American ruling class has failed to grasp the Weimarian nature of the Tea Party politics. The destruction of $19 trillion of personal wealth in the United States since 2008 coupled with the fears of economic stagnation and minority ascendency have crazed the base of the Republican Party. [109] Something indeed has run amok when the merely wealthy stop obeying orders from the very rich or when the privileged 20 per cent mutinies against any concession by the peak 0.1 per cent. Tea Party Republicanism is not the future, not the majority, not even the conservative past. It’s the gangrene of imperial decline.