Honey, We Built the Party

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

On December 2, 1991, National Review published a cover with the headline “Honey, We Shrunk the Party.” It featured “The Two Bobs” — the Senate’s Dole and the House’s Michel — examining a dwarf elephant under a magnifying glass. Inside were four pages lamenting “The GOP’s Good Losers.” In the wings waited Newt Gingrich, who had risen to prominence hammering not only the Democrats but also the GOP leadership in Congress, a familiar litany: insufficient conservatism, insufficient steel, excessive generosity in compromise, moral and political sloth.

The more things change . . .

Gingrich would go on to become speaker and to instill in congressional Republicans a more vigorous and confrontational attitude that for better and for worse (mainly better) survives to this day. After a series of frustrating failures, he eventually beat Bill Clinton into submission on welfare reform and won a great deal in a series of compromises that more or less balanced the budget.

Dole and Michel are still with us (both are 92 years old) and Dole has made an ill-advised sortie out of retirement to inveigh against Senator Ted Cruz. The old bulls of the Senate revere the institution itself and its courtly habits, and they detect in Senator Cruz a certain contempt for its traditions, particularly its tradition of collegiality. If Republican senators hate Senator Cruz, well, he hated them first.

But Senator Cruz, the ardent constitutionalist, has performed in office precisely the duty for which senators are empowered and distinguished from the members of the House. The House of Representatives is a steering wheel; the presidency is an accelerator; the Senate is a brake. Shutdowns, gridlock, obstruction, mulish foot-stamping opposition to the president’s agenda: These are not defects in our system of government — they are why we have a Senate. Ted Cruz may have rubbed many of his colleagues the wrong way, and some of them resent that he started running for president about eleven seconds after he was sworn in to the Senate. (Presumably, Senator Paul and Senator Rubio will forgo that line of criticism.) If you care a great deal about who sits at which table in the Senate cafeteria, that matters a great deal. Ted Cruz, well aware that he is nobody’s ray of senatorial sunshine, has wisely declared that while he may not be the guy you want to have a beer with, he’s your first choice in designated drivers.

For The Two Bobs a generation ago, all that high-school-cafeteria politics meant a great deal. And we still hear from boneheaded nostalgists about how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could, at the end of the day, sit down for a cocktail. (In reality, the men hated each other, intensely.) Men elected to Congress in the post-war years expected to stay there for decades, just as the men of their generation who went to work for General Motors or U.S. Steel in those years expected to spend their working lives at a single company, or maybe two. They had to live with each other.

Or so they thought. Just as no sensible person getting out of school today expects to spend his entire career at a single firm, even at a giant and complex one such as Alphabet (just now the world’s most valuable publicly traded company), ambitious young men in Congress do not expect to remain there until dotage. Impatient young Marco Rubio has been on his way out of the Senate since he first found his way in. People already are asking Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska why he hasn’t taken his youthful charm and his four Ivy League degrees out on a presidential campaign of his own. (He politely reminds them that he assumed office only 13 months ago.) In politics as in business, the pace of change has accelerated. This is more obvious on the Republican side, where the average age of the leading presidential candidates (Trump at 69 is a distant outlier over Cruz, 45, and Rubio, 44) is quite a bit less than the Democrats’ average age of 71.

The “Good Loser” GOP style lasted roughly from the end of World War II until the Contract with America. There were many reasons for that: Institutional inertia is one, and another is that managerial progressivism reached the height of its prestige and credibility during the war — it took conservatives a little while to figure out that we’d won. In 1994, Newt Gingrich was a right-wing radical; today, he’d be right in the middle of the Republican presidential pack, perhaps even reviled as a creature of the hated (ooga-booga!) Establishment. In terms of ideological rigor and commitment to conservative principle, today’s GOP is as much improved over Gingrich’s GOP as Gingrich’s was over that of The Two Bobs.

Therein lie two lessons. One is that change is possible, that conservatism can and does win. Gingrich didn’t get it all done, but what he accomplished on the budgetary side of the fight was significant. And, eventually, it was pissed away. Lesson two: “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The Democrats have been building their welfare state since 1913. If you expect a President Cruz or a President Rubio to dissolve it during his first 100 days in office, you will be disappointed. It took 25 years for conservatives to reform the Republican party in Congress.

And that much more conservative party finds itself in an electoral position — in Congress, in the state legislatures, in the governors’ mansions — that The Two Bobs would not have dared dream of.

Honey, we built the party.