“The Fix Isn’t In”: Eric Cantor And The Death Of A Movement
How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.
I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.
By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.
To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.
In return for this service, businesses and the wealthy provided both lavish financial support for right-minded (in both senses) politicians and a safety net — “wing-nut welfare” — for loyalists. In particular, there were always comfortable berths waiting for those who left office, voluntarily or otherwise. There were lobbying jobs; there were commentator spots at Fox News and elsewhere (two former Bush speechwriters are now Washington Post columnists); there were “research” positions (after losing his Senate seat, Rick Santorum became director of the “America’s Enemies” program at a think tank supported by the Koch brothers, among others).
The combination of a successful electoral strategy and the safety net made being a conservative loyalist a seemingly low-risk professional path. The cause was radical, but the people it recruited tended increasingly to be apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction.
That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.
It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.
And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry — he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street — the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.
So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.
In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 12, 2014
“A Prelude To Betrayal”: Why Republicans Hate Their Leaders, Eric Cantor Edition
There have been a lot of analyses of what Eric Cantor’s Loss Means in the last 36 hours, all of which run the risk of over-generalizing from one off-year primary election in one particular district. But as I’ve said before, the internal conflict within the Republican Party is the defining political dynamic of this period in history, and it’s as good an opportunity as any to assess its latest quivers and quakes. As a liberal, I’m at something of a disadvantage when examining this conflict, because although I can look at what conservatives do and what they say publicly, I don’t have access to the things they say when they talk to each other. So it’s always good to hear from those who do and can remind the rest of us of what conservatives are actually feeling. Sean Trende offers an important perspective:
First, analysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.
And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.
The icing on the cake for conservatives is that these moves were justified through an argument that they were necessary to continue to win elections and take issues off the table for Democrats. Instead, Bush’s presidency was followed in 2008 by the most liberal Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by sizable Democratic House and Senate majorities.
You don’t have to sympathize with this view, but if you don’t understand it, you will never understand the Tea Party.
You may read that and say, “Are they crazy?” The view those of us on the left have of the Bush years is that conservatives got just about everything they wanted. They got huge tax cuts, scaled back environmental and labor regulations, a massive increase in defense spending, a couple of wars, the appointment of a cadre of true-believer judges nurtured by the Federalist Society, and nearly anything else they asked for.
And yes, the deficit ballooned under Bush, which is what happens when you cut taxes and increase spending. But until Barack Obama took office, the goal of shrinking government was something that conservatives always paid lip service to but never actually tried to do much about, which suggests that their commitment to it didn’t go particularly far. Don’t forget that Ronald Reagan, who walked the earth without sin, increased the deficit more than his thirty-nine predecessors combined, and that hasn’t lessened the degree to which the right worships him.
But that’s a liberal’s perspective. Trende is right that, whether reasonable or not and no matter what they felt at the time, the standard view among the conservative base is now that the Bush presidency was a failure. And so they have embraced a permanent revolution, in which it’s necessary to fight not just against Democrats but against Republicans as well, since every GOP leader is little more than a traitor waiting to be revealed.
If you’re a Republican politician you can surf that tide, but it takes a lot of work. And it’s almost impossible to do the things that most politicians try to do in Washington without alienating your base. Not that Eric Cantor was ever particularly sincere about representing the Tea Party, but the very act of joining the Republican leadership is enough to make clear to them that you’re on the wrong side. People in the leadership organize things, try to master the system, and plan legislative strategy. All of that is suspect at best; the only true conservative, true conservatives will tell you, is the one pounding on the gates from the outside. As Brian Beutler wrote yesterday, “The great irony of this year’s primary season, and indeed of conservative politics going back years now, is that the two Republican leaders most responsible for the party’s insurgent-like opposition to the Obama agenda—Cantor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—are the base’s most reviled.”
As far as that activist base is concerned, every Republican politician should be nothing but an agent of chaos and destruction, or at least pretend that’s who he is. It’s not only incompatible with governing, it’s barely compatible with holding office. Anyone who actually tries to accomplish anything is quickly turned from hero to traitor, as Marco Rubio was when he attempted to devise an immigration plan; Tea Partiers who once celebrated Rubio now view him with contempt. The only kind of legislator who can stay in their good graces is one who never bothers legislating, like Ted Cruz. Writing laws is for compromisers and turncoats; what matters is that the revolution continue forever.
Things can always change, but if this sentiment endures, it’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time a Republican is elected president. Because whoever that president is, he will never be able to satisfy this base; indeed, by the very act of taking office and beginning to govern he will have assured them that betrayal is on its way. Their rage will endure. But maybe that’s just how they like it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 12, 2014
“A Very Troubled Man”: Time For Right To Let Go Of Bowe Bergdahl Political Controversy
Today, the Post published excerpts of Bowe Bergdahl’s journal, along with emails and other writings, giving us the most intimate, complex, and in many ways sad view we’ve yet had of the young man who had been held prisoner by the Taliban for five years.
What the journal ultimately shows suggests that as a partisan political issue, Bergdahl’s release is likely to fade before long. The right has gotten about as much as they can out of it, and now that we know how troubled Bergdahl was before he wandered off his base, they may just let it go.
The idea that Bergdahl wasn’t sufficiently deserving of rescue has been central to the conservative criticism of the deal to obtain his release. Even as they wildly exaggerate the danger of the five former Taliban we released (to hear Fox News tell it, you’d almost think the five not only planned and executed the September 11 attacks, they also have super-powers that will enable them to reduce our nation to ashes any day now), many on the right attacked Bergdahl and his family relentlessly, accusing him of being not just a deserter but an outright traitor. Some even mobilized a PR campaign to promote soldiers who would go in the media to criticize Bergdahl.
But his writings, which were shared with the Post by a close friend, tell a story that doesn’t fit into the kind of box that can be easily used for partisan purposes. Among other things, we now know that Bergdahl joined the Coast Guard in 2006 and was quickly discharged for psychological reasons, though he claimed to friends that he had faked mental illness in order to get released (a claim about which they were skeptical). But it’s Bergdahl’s own words that are the most revealing:
The 2006 discharge and a trove of Bergdahl’s writing — his handwritten journal along with essays, stories and e-mails provided to The Washington Post — paint a portrait of a deeply complicated and fragile young man who was by his own account struggling to maintain his mental stability from the start of basic training until the moment he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.
“I’m worried,” he wrote in one journal entry before he deployed. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.”
A few pages later, he wrote: “I will not lose this mind, this world I have deep inside. I will not lose this passion of beauty.”
At another point, using his often unorthodox spelling, he wrote: “Trying to keep my self togeather. I’m so tired of the blackness, but what will happen to me without it. Bloody hell why do I keep thinking of this over and over.”
At another point Bergdahl writes: “I want to change so much and all the time, but then my mind just locks down, as if there was some one else in my mind shutting the door in my face. . . . I want to pull my mind out and drop kick it into a deep gorge.” And then: “In a file dated a few days later, repetitions of the phrase ‘velcro or zipper/velcro or zipper/velcro or zipper’ cover nearly two pages.”
We shouldn’t be too quick to make a conclusive psychiatric diagnosis based on these words. But if you’re someone committed to painting Bergdahl as a traitor who didn’t deserve to be released — or at least, didn’t deserve to have much given up in exchange for him — what do you think when you see that? And let’s recall that until the deal for Bergdahl was actually made, many on the right were attacking the Obama administration for not getting him out sooner; for some, he’s never been anything more than a cudgel with which to beat the administration.
So maybe now they’ll decide that all the personal attacks on Bergdahl have outlived their usefulness. The administration’s opponents have every right to argue, if they choose, that those five Taliban are history’s most terrifying super-villains, and we shouldn’t have made the deal even to get back Audie Murphy. But now that we’re getting a fuller picture of what a troubled soul Bergdahl was, conservatives may decide that there isn’t much margin left in attacking him, lest they end up looking (for the umpteenth time) like they’ve overplayed their political hand and been blinded to everything, even human compassion, by their hatred of this president.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 12, 2014
“Busy Obama, Lazy Congress”: The Shiftless Good-For-Nothings In The House Often Don’t Even Show Up For Their Jobs
Since his presidency began, and as of June 14, 2014, President Barack Obama will have made 36 international trips to 47 different countries, in addition to the Vatican and the West Bank. This, in addition to his frequent visits to domestic sites such as tornado and hurricane disaster areas, not to mention such institutions as the West Point Academy, Andrews Air Force Base, the Worcester Technical High School, and local bars and restaurants, makes him the busiest president in American history.
By contrast, the 111th Congress may be the laziest political body in American history. For the past six years, it has been composed of no-accounts who collect huge sums from the government (not to mention free handouts from large corporations and wealthy businessmen) without doing any work besides campaigning for their second term. This Congressional session will break records for the number of bills it has not passed, the presidential appointments it has not approved, the political advances it has tried to reverse. No wonder Obama is now governing largely by executive order. The shiftless good-for-nothings in the House often don’t even show up for their jobs, letting their empty seats collect dust, while tooling around in federally-financed limos blaring Church music through open windows.
As for the Senate, its main activity now is filibustering. Filibuster is a term derived from the Spanish “filibustero” (or privateer, pirate, robber) — in other words, a kind of black market verbosity that substitutes for persuasive speechifying. Americans did not work all their lives to see their hard-earned tax dollars lining the pockets of political rappers, or providing free tea to the Mad Hatters on the Hill. Like a lot of law-abiding taxpayers, I don’t think these welfare cheats should be supported any longer by honest, patriotic Americans. I realize this may sound like racism, but when you compare President Obama’s dedicated example with the parasitical weakness of the 111th mostly-white Congress, you begin to wonder whether Caucasians still have the energy to tote that barge or lift that bale.
By: Robert Brustein, The Blog, The Huffington Post, June 12, 2014
“Defeat Has A Thousand Fathers”: If A Majority Leader Loses And Everyone Hears It, Who Made The Sound?
If a towering incumbent falls in the forest and no national groups were around to push him, who deserves the credit? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s stunning, historic defeat last night raises the question again of what exactly is the tea party. It’s fair to characterize Randolph-Macon College economics professor Dave Brat as a tea party candidate, but at the same time analysts, activists and lawmakers should remember that included in the universe of people who had no idea this was coming (excepting U.S. News’ Peter Roff) were the national groups that pass for the tea party movement’s establishment.
There’s a tendency to refer to the tea party movement as a homogenous, monolithic enterprise, but the fact remains that there is no “tea party.” Lest I be accused of trying to undercut the conservative insurgent movement, I will note that this is a point I made when “tea party” candidates were getting routed in the Texas and North Carolina senate primaries; movement obituaries should be tempered, I argued then, because the major tea party groups hadn’t shown up for those fights. They showed up in Kentucky in force and lost. They showed up in Mississippi and won. And I would make the same point about South Carolina, where Sen. Lindsey Graham – who is a much more vocal immigration reform supporter than Cantor – cruised to an easy victory last night: Don’t draw too many conclusions from races where one or both sides in the fight declined to engage. “The tea party” isn’t dead because Lindsey Graham is alive any more than it is resurgent because Eric Cantor went down.
Which brings us back to the national groups, which were apparently as oblivious as the rest of us to what was happening in the Richmond area leading up to yesterday’s election. The Washington Post’s Matea Gold made this point last night, noting that the major tea party groups spent a grand total of nothing on Brat’s behalf:
But it’s worth noting that many of the national tea party groups that have been the most pugilistic about this year’s intra-party fights have not invested much money into helping the candidates on the ground. As we reported earlier this year, organizations such as Tea Party Patriots and the Madison Project are spending huge sums on fundraising, salaries and consultants, while just putting a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars they have raised into political expenditures.
The fact that Brat took off without the help of those organizations now makes it harder for them to claim his victory as their own.
And National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher made the same observation last night, including this damning anecdote about Jenny Beth Martin, the chief of the aforementioned Tea Party Patriots:
In an extensive interview with National Journal earlier Tuesday, Martin did not mention the Cantor race as among the tea party’s top opportunities in 2014. Hours after his defeat, however, Martin issued a triumphant statement congratulating Brat and “the local tea-party activists who helped propel him over the top.”
Certainly the local tea party activists deserve some measure of congratulations. But what remains honestly unclear – whether you’re sympathetic to the GOP establishment or to the tea party insurgency – is what it means nationally. And what does that say about the national party movement and groups like Tea Party Patriots? Tea Party Express strategist Sal Russo told National Journal’s Goldmacher that Cantor’s defeat was a sign of the movement’s strength: “They can strike anywhere. It’s not dependent on a top-down direction.” So where does that leave the top end of that equation? Leading from behind?
To flip the old JFK aphorism around, Eric Cantor’s defeat may have a thousand fathers (and mothers). Political observers would be wise to discern which ones are actually legitimate.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 11, 2014
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