DOES RONALD REAGAN HAVE A CONSERVATIVE HEIR?

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 marked the beginning of an extraordinary change in American politics, made evident by sharper ideological differences between the leadership of the major parties than had been seen since before the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The one-sidedness of the 1932 Democratic triumph ushered in a era of one-party dominance that resulted in rheir control of the House of Representatives for fifty-eight and of the Senate for fifty-two of the next sixty-two years and five consecutive presidential victories before losing to an unbeatable war hero.

This was achieved initially as a result of the Democratic Party’s remarkable ability to hold together the most disparate interests. Southern white supremacists were there because they had been there since Lincoln “freed the slaves.” Twentieth-century working-class immigrants were there because there was no congenial home for them in a Republican Party whose leaders represented capitalist power and a laissez-faire philosophy epitomized in Calvin Coolidge’s observation that the business of government is business. Black Americans were there because they were ignored by the party that had ended slavery and they responded to the New Deal’s egalitarianism.

Republicans recognized that they had to make a broader appeal and, in choosing presidential nominees, they reached beyond conservative ideologues to nominate New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey (twice) and former Democrat Wendell Willkie before winning the presidency with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose domestic political leanings were largely unknown. Eisenhower was the candidate of the liberal internationalist wing of the party, barely and bitterly winning the nomination in 1952 against Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, an authentic and beloved conservative widely known as Mr. Republican.

This shift toward more moderate Republican presidential candidates was reflected in efforts to broaden the party base, in order to make it more cross-sectional and multi-factional. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party remained more liberal, despite the power of conservative southerners who chaired most of the major congressional committees, and the Republican Party remained more conservative, despite the presence of eastern internationalists and middle-western LaFollette populists. The Democrats did a better job of keeping their coalition than the Republicans did of creating theirs, as was evident in the civil rights controversies, when both the leading advocates and leading opponents of racial equality were in the Democratic Party.

After Vice President Richard Nixon’s close defeat in 1960, conservatives captured enough Republican Party state organizations to nominate Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who, true to his promise to offer “a choice, not an echo,” championed the reduced size of government, repeal of the graduated income tax, an end to federal aid to education, and voluntary Social Security. Goldwater had written The Conscience of a Conservative, and he became the embodiment of that conscience.

In retrospect, Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat (equaled only by Democrat George McGovern’s loss eight years later) can be seen as the birth pangs of a new conservative alliance. Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona and the five southern states with the greatest proportion of black citizens, the states in which the issue of race was most important. The Solid South of a century after the Civil War was solid no more. The change begun by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated public education was accelerated by passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The political landscape was decisively altered by school busing, forced school integration, affirmative action in higher education and hiring, white flight, race riots, and the perception of increased street crime. The enduring political consequence has been that no Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 has received a majority of white votes.

Despite the existence of laws inspired by religious beliefs (Sunday closing laws, prohibiting the mailing of immoral material, criminalization of birth control information and devices, and the insertion of “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance), religious political influence abated after the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a young science teacher was convicted for teaching evolutionary theory. It was a pyrrhic victory for religious orthodoxy because the public reaction was a political defeat for the public teaching of religious doctrine.
Religious moral conviction reemerged as a political force in 1965 when the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of married couples to obtain contraceptives. In 1973 in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court went further in recognizing a woman’s right to an abortion, inspiring a powerful grass-roots movement that has ever since aspired to reverse this decision by the selection of Supreme Court Justices who are likely to vote to overturn Roe or, short of that, limit the permissible period or methods of abortions.

The new mobilization of religious and racial conservatism became allied with the economic conservatism of business protectionism, laissez-faire government, and fiscal conservatism to reshape the Republican Party. It needed a candidate who would articulate this new conservative coalition, and it found him in Ronald Reagan. Reagan was identified with opposition to abortion, obscenity and pornography; respect for the flag and support for school prayer, and certain and severe punishment for violent crimes. Reagan’s presidency accompanied – and perhaps inspired – the revival of religious fundamentalism and equating American patriotism with Republican conservatism.

It is only peripherally relevant to this alliance symbolized by Reagan that his behavior was not nearly as conservative as his rhetoric. He frequently invoked God, but was not a churchgoer. He had been a populist before he became a conservative and, as president, he supported raising Social Security taxes rather than cutting benefits. In 1964, he characterized Medicare as socialized medicine, but Medicare spending increased by more than ten percent in each year of his presidency. He promised to decrease the size of government; it increased. He promised to cut the budget; it grew larger. He promised to decrease entitlements; in office, he supported vast increases. He promised to abolish two Cabinet departments; they were retained and another was created. He promised to outlaw abortion; nothing happened. Nevertheless, the symbolic reality was that Reagan made most Americans feel good about themselves and their country, and conservatives believed that they had an ally in the White House.

The conservative coalition could not feel a similar comradeship with Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush, who was defeated after one term, in part because of the bitterness of economic conservatives at his betrayal of his pledge of “no new taxes.” But they had captured the party machinery and, aided by Democratic President Bill Clinton’s political ineptitude and neglect of the party organization, succeeded in winning control of Congress in 1994, holding it for the last six years of the Clinton presidency and the first six of George W. Bush, the truest conservative to occupy the White House in the lifetime of anyone now living.

Even in victory, insecurity was apparent in the now-powerful conservative coalition. Where earlier conventions featured major addresses by staunch conservatives, in 2004 the most prominent speakers included John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudolph Giuliani. It can be dismissed as window-dressing, but it was clearly designed to entice more customers into the store. The reason was that the existence of a new conservative majority had not yet been established.

Al Gore outpolled Bush in 2000 and the party vote that year for the House was almost a dead heat, with little more than one vote in every thousand separating them. Four years later, the Republican margin of victory for House candidates was less than three votes in every thousand votes cast. Democrats received more votes than Republicans in the one hundred Senate races from 2000 to 2004 or 2002 to 2006. Republican control of Congress was due more to gerrymandering in the House and its dominance in the rural, less populous states than to greater popular support.

Is the confidence of the conservative coalition in the rightness (take it either way) of their cause diminishing? Their three leading aspirants for the 2008 presidential nomination are a former Governor of ultra-liberal Massachusetts, a former Mayor of New York City (neither of which any Republican can hope to win), and a distinguished Senator whose complex public record ranges from excoriating President Bush to embracing his most controversial policies. Fred Thompson has finally announced his candidacy as the savior of the conservative cause. Better known as a television and movie actor than as an eight-year Senator, his conservative credentials are modest compared with the records of many past and present Governors and members of Congress.

In order to win the nomination, each of these four leading candidates must now vow that he is the most authentic heir to Reagan Republicanism without identifying himself to closely with the current president, and then, to win the election, he must radically moderate his positions to win the support of a much broader electorate. Reagan could preach in 1980 that it was “morning in America.” Is it possible that it is now much later in the day – perhaps too late for his conservatism?


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