The Zombie Reaganism Trap

By Peter Spiliakos

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

 

Zombie Reaganism is a trap for the Republican Party. Even many Republican politicians who want out of the trap end up walking back in. This is a problem because Zombie Reaganism causes Republican politicians to focus on the wrong things, and costs conservatives the trust of many Americans.

 

Zombie Reaganism is the application of a distorted version of 1980s Republican politics to a very different time. It might be understood through several examples.

 

Zombie Politics

First, there is the Republican Party’s outdated relationship with the tax issue. Modern Republican tax policy was born in the tax revolt of the late 1970s. The “revolutionaries” then were middle-class homeowners who faced both rising property taxes and inflation that forced them into higher income-tax brackets even as their purchasing power declined.

 

For the average American, Reaganism largely solved this problem at the federal level by indexing income-tax rates to inflation and by multiple rounds of tax cuts. During and shortly after this, Republican presidents won three straight presidential elections with wide pluralities of the popular vote (they have done so once — narrowly — in the last 32 years). Thus, tax cuts became part of the mythology of this supposedly golden age of Republican politics: They enabled the GOP to win elections and they supercharged the economy.

 

Even after this golden age, Republican politicians still wanted to cut taxes — partly because that’s what they thought was necessary to win, partly because they believed it was the key to economic growth, partly because they thought it was what their primary voters wanted, and partly out of what had become generations of habit. The problem was that, after rounds of tax cuts under Reagan and then George W. Bush, there weren’t very many income taxes left to cut on most Americans.

 

This left Republican politicians trying to cut income taxes (which now fell mostly on high-earners) and investment taxes (who also fell primarily on high-earners.) The politics of tax cuts had changed. Instead of offering tax relief to the masses, Republican politicians were making the more difficult argument that taxes cuts for high-earners would primarily benefit the people not getting the tax cuts via economic growth.

 

Republican politicians told themselves and everybody else that they were pursuing Reaganite politics. Instead, they were pursuing a zombie politics in which the body went on with the familiar motions, but with barely any memory or awareness of what they were for.

 

This would have been difficult enough. But, almost simultaneously, post–George W. Bush Republicans and conservatives advocated cutting Social Security and Medicare. With good reason: As the elderly population grew, the size of these promised benefits to older Americans ballooned. Conservatives were not wrong to argue that some of these promises to the elderly would have to be pared back to save money for other priorities.

 

This was never going to be popular (though neither would the tax increases required to pay for no entitlement cuts).  What turned it into Zombie Reaganism was the combination of proposing entitlement cuts while also proposing tax cuts that went almost entirely to high-earners.  And cutting taxes on the rich wasn’t particularly popular even with Republican voters.

 

Together, the policies of cutting taxes on high earners while seeking entitlement cuts was toxic.  That many of these same conservatives seemed willing to vote and pay for deficit-busting wars even as they claimed America was too broke to pay for promised retirement benefits was bad optics as well.

 

Republicans tried to explain that these were all different things. Cutting entitlements was about addressing the debt. Tax cuts for high-earners were about growth and opportunity. Invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan was about a strong America.

 

And, in a sense, these conservatives were right. Given sufficiently deep cuts to entitlements, there would be more fiscal space for tax cuts for high-earners and wars of choice. But voters — including key swing voters who were skeptical of both entitlement cuts and business — could reasonably ask if it might be better to have somewhat smaller entitlement cuts, no tax cuts on high-earners, and smaller and fewer wars of choice.

 

This compartmentalization that Zombie Reaganites were demanding was too obviously self-serving. Most people pay limited attention to politics, but they tend to notice when you do the comical turning your pants pockets inside out thing when you are talking about their Social Security, and then turn around and explain why it is important to cut the taxes of their boss.

 

In the 2012 presidential exit poll, only 34 percent of voters answered that Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s policies would primarily benefit the middle class. A majority answered that Romney’s policies would primarily benefit the rich.

 

One could attribute this to Romney’s business experience, his wealth, and his personal style. This — and Romney’s opposition to amnesty — is the preferred interpretation of the Republican establishment in its post-election. You need the right messenger. The policies were sound and should be popular. All you needed was a politician with the right background (preferably working-class), or the right style, or the right surname, or the right skin tone, or the right genitalia, and the people will see that the Zombie Reaganite policies are right and good.

 

What establishment Republican politicians can’t accept is that the public wasn’t fooled. Rather, the public has made a judgement on a policy agenda that combines high-earner tax cuts, entitlement cuts, and more wars of choice: They don’t want Zombie Reaganism, and you probably can’t fool them into wanting it.

 

The Trap

But even recognizing that Zombie Reaganite policy is unpopular is not, in itself, a solution. Whether among social conservatives, or Republican lobbyists, or Tea Partiers, Zombie Reaganism has formed the framework for thinking about politics for so many years that a comprehensive rethink of the party’s agenda and priorities seems unimaginable. The result is that even Republicans who recognize that Zombie Reaganism is insufficient end up adopting a strategy of Zombie Reaganism Plus. They take traditional Zombie Reaganism, add one or two things, and call it something new. But it isn’t new.

 

In the 2012 cycle, for example, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum argued that tax cuts and balanced budgets weren’t going to suffice to win elections anymore. He anticipated the politics of the next elections cycle when he said:

 

The center point of my campaign is to be able to win the industrial heartland, get those Reagan Democrats back, talking about manufacturing, talking about building that ladder of success all the way down so people can climb all the way up.

 

He was right. That was how the next Republican presidential candidate won, but it wasn’t Santorum. Santorum was an experienced and principled politician, but one can point to particular personal weaknesses to explain his failure. He wasn’t well-funded, he could come across hot-headed, he tended to get sidetracked into pointless arguments, and his campaign was not particularly well-organized.

 

But one reason was that, unlike Donald Trump, he didn’t do enough to break from Zombie Reaganism. The centerpiece of his tax plan was eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturing in order to revive the industrial economy. His tax cuts were also broader than most of his rivals in that most Americans (and the rich) would have seen some tax relief. But since he didn’t want to cut defense spending and was committed to deficit reduction, he proposed even deeper and more immediate cuts to old-age entitlements than most other Republican candidates. What he gave with one hand, he more than took away with the other.

 

On the night Rick Santorum shocked the world with his strong performance in the Iowa Caucuses, he criticized “the Republican vision which is let’s just cut taxes, let’s just reduce spending and everyone will be fine. . . . But I also believe we as Republicans have to look at those who are not doing well in our society by just cutting taxes and balancing budgets.” The tragedy of Santorum was that he could see that Zombie Reaganism wasn’t going to work, even as he embraced a more extreme and politically self-destructive version of that same ideology. It turned that Zombie Reaganism plus favoring domestic manufacturing was still mostly Zombie Reaganism.

 

Florida senator Marco Rubio also tried to revise Zombie Reaganism to make it more palatable to wage-earners and swing voters. His tax plan included vast cuts to business taxes, but also an expanded child tax credit for working parents and a wage subsidy to encourage and reward work for the lowest-earning Americans. His criticism by the Wall Street Journal editorial board proved he wasn’t just about the rich.

 

But, like Santorum, Rubio didn’t make it. Also like Santorum, Rubio’s failure could be put down to factors particular to Rubio himself. He had repeatedly and spectacularly flip-flopped on upfront legalization of unauthorized immigrants. He was the target of attack ads from a well-funded Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush. He had a bad debate performance just before the New Hampshire primary.

 

But, also like Santorum, Rubio failed to break sufficiently from Zombie Reaganism. Some populists criticize mid-2010s reform conservatism as just an expanded child tax credit. That’s an unfair criticism of reform conservatism. But it is a somewhat fairer (but still not entirely fair) criticism of Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Rubio’s policy revisions were fine. Some versions of an expanded child tax credit have plurality support. But it is not, in itself, an agenda or sufficient to save an otherwise unpopular agenda. Zombie Reaganism plus a child tax credit and wage subsidy is still mostly Zombie Reaganism.

 

The answer to Zombie Reaganism can’t be just one or two things because the world has changed too much from the 1980s for even authentic Reaganism to have many of the answers. We have new problems: the collapse of family formation and fertility among Americans in their twenties and thirties; the ruinous costs of a college education; the declining employment prospects of those who don’t manage to graduate from college; the ability of a small number of tech companies to effectively lock out the opposition from public debate. These are our problems.

 

Rubio and Santorum deserve credit. Even if they didn’t go far enough, they recognized that the Republican agenda requires substantive revision. For a decade now, most Republican politicians have approached the unpopularity of their agenda like the proprietors of those scammy websites that would get people to click by promising to solve their problems with one weird trick. One weird trick to get out of debt. One weird trick to find a sex partner. One weird trick to lose weight. One weird trick to make people forget they don’t want Zombie Reaganism.

 

There is no one weird trick. There aren’t two weird tricks. America is a country with many problems. Those problems will require lots of answers — and most of them won’t come from looking at the 1980 GOP platform.