Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 47

Many people, indeed most of us, might find it difficult to identify ourselves as simply “liberal” or “conservative,” because we consider ourselves liberal on some issues, conservative on others. Others of us have more pronounced views. The framework in Figure 1.5 allows us to see how major groups in society might line up if we distinguish between economic and social-moral values. We can see, for instance, the real spatial distances that lie among (1) the religious right, who are very conservative on political and moral issues but who were once part of the coalition of southern blue-collar workers who supported Roosevelt on the New Deal; (2) traditional Republicans, who are very conservative on economic issues but often more libertarian on political and moral issues, wanting government to guarantee procedural fairness and keep the peace, but otherwise to leave them alone; and (3) moderate Republicans, who are far less conservative economically and morally. As recent politics has shown, it can be difficult or impossible for a Republican candidate on the national stage to hold together such an unwieldy coalition.

In the summer of 2009, with the nation in economic crisis and the new African American president struggling to pass his signature health care reform in Washington, a wave of populist anger swept the nation. The so-called Tea Party movement (named after the Boston Tea Party rebellion against taxation in 1773) crafted a narrative that was pro-American, anticorporation, and antigovernment (except for programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit the Tea Partiers, who tended to be older Americans). Mostly it was angry, fed by emotional appeals of conservative talk show hosts and others, whose narratives took political debate out of the range of logic and analysis and into the world of emotional drama and angry invective. A New York Times poll found that Americans who identified as Tea Party supporters were more likely to be Republican, white, married, male, and over forty-five, and to hold views that were more conservative than Republicans generally.¹⁷ In fact, they succeeded in shaking up the Republican Party from 2010 onward, as they supported primary challenges to officeholders who did not share their antigovernment ideology, culminating in the rejection of the party establishment in 2016. The election that year signaled a moment of reckoning for a party that had been teetering on the edge of crisis for more than a decade. As establishment candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Ohio governor John Kasich fell in the primaries, so too did Tea Party favorites like Florida senator Marco Rubio and Texas senator Ted Cruz. The split in the party left an opening for the very unconventional candidacy of Donald Trump, which—much to the dismay of party leaders like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—proved to be more about Trump’s personality and the anger of his followers than it did about the Republican Party, although in the end most party members fell in line to vote for him.

The escalating anger of social conservatives who felt inadequately represented by the Republican Party’s mainstream came to a peak in the anti-establishment fury displayed in 2016. During that primary season, both Donald Trump and Texas senator Ted Cruz competed to address the anger that drove that group. They felt used and betrayed, especially by a party that had promised and failed to defeat Barack Obama, a president they viewed as illegitimate, partly because of Trump’s challenge to the president’s birth certificate. The rage of social conservatives seemed to be one of authoritarian populism, a mix of populist anger against the economic elite who profited at their expense; nativist anger at the perception that whites seemed to be falling behind while government was reaching out to help people of color; and partisan anger that, since the days of Richard Nixon, economic conservative Republicans had been promising them socially conservative accomplishments without delivering.

authoritarian populism a radical right-wing movement that appeals to popular discontent but whose underlying values are not democratic

Indeed, social scientists trying to understand the surprising phenomenon of the Trump vote found that one particular characteristic predicted it: a commitment to “authoritarian values.”¹⁸ These social scientists have found that some social conservatives, when they feel that the proper order and power hierarchy are threatened, either physically or existentially, are attracted to authoritarian narratives that seek to secure the old order by excluding the perceived danger. In the words of one scholar who studies this, the response is, “In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.”¹⁹ Those who score higher on the authoritarianism scale hold the kind of ideas one would expect from social conservatives seeking to keep faith with a familiar and traditional order—antigay sentiment, anti-immigration views, even white supremacy and overt racism. Interestingly, authoritarianism has been found most recently to correspond to narratives that reject the idea of political correctness, a reaction to the sense that expressing fear and anger about perceived threats is not socially acceptable.²⁰

Although there have been major splits in the Democratic coalition in the past, their current divisions are minor, even after an election season when a self-avowed democratic socialist who was not even a party member challenged a more moderate liberal. The Democrats have to satisfy the party’s economic liberals, who are very procedural on most political and moral issues (barring affirmative action) but relatively (for Americans) substantive on economic concerns; the social liberals, substantive on both economic and social issues; and the more middle-of-the-road Democratic groups that are fairly procedural on political and moral issues but not very substantive on economic matters at all. In the late 1960s, the party almost shattered under the weight of anti–Vietnam War sentiment, and in 1972 it moved sharply left, putting it out of the American mainstream. It was President Bill Clinton, as a founder of the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), who in the 1990s helped move his party closer to the mainstream from a position that, as we can see in Figure 1.5, is clearly out of alignment with the position taken by most Americans. Whereas Al Gore, himself a DLC-er, faced a threat from the more extreme segments on the left in 2000, in the 2004 and 2008 presidential races, dislike of George W. Bush united Democrats across their party’s ideological spectrum, and recent Democratic contenders for the presidency have not had to deal with serious interparty conflict. Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidency in 2016 has caused the party to do some soul-searching about where it goes post-Obama.