By Henry Olsen
Monday, November 20, 2017
A year is an eternity in politics, the saying goes. If
that’s true, then two years is an eon. And it seems an eon ago that the common
wisdom held that the GOP was entering its “libertarian moment,” when the heirs
of Barry Goldwater would finally come into their inheritance and retake the
party they had long believed was their one true home.
That faction today suffers from PTSD, political-trauma
shock disorder. Its champions, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, were decisively routed
in the 2016 Republican primaries. The winner, Donald Trump, is about as
diametrically opposed to Goldwaterism as is possible in the GOP, a man who
seemingly has no political conscience, much less that of a conservative. The
question one hears in any D.C. watering hole is also on the lips of millions of
Republicans nationwide: “What has happened to my party?”
Senator Jeff Flake, once a leader of liberty-minded
Republicans, said that this departure from past orthodoxy was merely temporary
as he announced he was not running for reelection. “This spell will eventually
break,” he told his Senate colleagues. And so it shall, if by that he means the
current movement to define Republican loyalty as unquestioning loyalty to
presidential whims. But the truth he overlooked is that the GOP long ago stopped
sacrificing at the altar of small government.
Now it is true that the Republican party is
overwhelmingly conservative and that most conservatives oppose high taxes and
government direction of society. Polls have shown for decades that Republicans
of all stripes believe that the government is doing too much that would be
better left to business or voluntary charity. But being opposed to passing
something new does not necessarily mean you are also in favor of repealing or
modifying something old. And it is when you examine the depth of that sentiment
that you find how shallow the commitment to small government is among GOP
voters.
In our book The
Four Faces of the Republican Party (2016), University of New Hampshire
professor Dante Scala and I looked at 20 years of exit-poll data to discern
what Republicans believed. We found that at most one in six could be called
liberty-minded conservatives, people who wanted both smaller government and
lower taxes and made that their
principal priority. These voters, whom we called “very conservative seculars,”
were the smallest of the GOP’s four factions and had been since at least 1996,
when our data series began. Their favorites for the nomination, candidates such
as Steve Forbes and Fred Thompson, always lost, and usually quite early, as the
favorites of the other GOP factions trounced them in the early states, where
momentum is built.
Steve Forbes crashed and burned in 1996 and 2000, and
Fred Thompson met an early end in 2008. Mitt Romney, whom many would never have
said was a spokesman for liberty-minded conservatives, emerged as their
favorite in 2008, but he, too, failed to finish as high as even second place
when the primary season was over, as social conservative Mike Huckabee soundly
defeated him in a host of contests in conservative states on Super Tuesday. In
2012, it was social conservative Rick Santorum who became the only serious
challenger to Mitt Romney, who had already moved to the left in an attempt to
capture the GOP nomination.
Candidates who have run as modern Goldwaters have long
been an afterthought in presidential politics. This is often obscured by the
degree to which hardline conservatives win primaries for lower offices. One
must note how they win those races — almost always as avatars of social
conservatism, foes of abortion and supporters of religious liberty and
tradition. Our research showed that it is these appeals, not the invocations of
economic liberty, that move the vast majority of movement-conservative voters.
Very conservative Evangelicals are the second-largest
faction of the Republican party and easily the largest throughout a host of
largely rural southern and midwestern states. In presidential primaries,
candidates who express their worldview, which is focused on God and a defense
of Christian culture, easily outpoll economic conservatives. Pat Buchanan, Mike
Huckabee, and Rick Santorum have all been favorites of this group, and each at
one time emerged as the strongest challenger to the eventual Republican
nominee.
***
This fact explains why Ted Cruz moved from being an
apostle for the Tea Party when he was elected to the Senate in 2012 to being a
disciple of social conservatism in his 2016 presidential race. He became adept
at using the words and adopting the priorities of Evangelical conservatives and
launched his campaign at Evangelical-sponsored Liberty University. He also
became the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2000 to unite all wings of
movement conservatives behind his candidacy. His failure to capture the nomination,
however, points to the real reason liberty-minded conservatives are in serious
decline: Other conservatives don’t share their small-government convictions.
The largest faction of the GOP are those who tell
pollsters they are “somewhat conservative,” and their priorities are quite
different from those of liberty conservatives. They like people who do not
share the overt religiosity of the very conservative Evangelicals even if they
themselves are religious. They always back the very person whom liberty
conservatives come to view as the epitome of the “establishment.” In 2000, for
example, their support sustained Bush through the early primaries: The two
groups of movement conservatives threw their backing behind W. only when the
alternative was the much more moderate McCain. So it is that less conservative
Republicans are the only party faction who always back the winner.
Trump, as unorthodox as he was in many ways, was simply
the latest beneficiary of this fact. He lost both groups of movement conservatives
to Cruz in state after state throughout the primary season. He won most states,
however, because he was the favorite of the somewhat conservatives and crushed
Cruz among the 20 percent of GOP voters who still call themselves “moderates.”
(John Kasich was Trump’s biggest rival for these voters.) When Cruz appealed to
establishment types, as he did in his home state and in Wisconsin, where House
speaker Paul Ryan and Governor Scott Walker endorsed him, he won. But his years
of antagonizing their leaders meant that he lacked their support when he needed
it most. Cruz carried movement-conservative voters in his final primary in
Indiana, but he nevertheless got annihilated, by nearly 17 percentage points,
because Trump beat him by 21 percentage points among somewhat conservatives and
by a whopping 36 percentage points among moderates and liberals.
Liberty conservatives themselves have changed over the
years as well, moving from an emphasis on controlling expenditures to an
emphasis on cutting taxes. The now-forgotten 1996 primary fight between Forbes
and Senator Phil Gramm of Texas was the turning point. Gramm was a tax-cut
backer, but he had earned his political pedigree and fame as an advocate of
spending cuts. With Representative Delbert Latta (R., Ohio), he was a
co-sponsor of the 1981 Reagan spending-cut proposal. He continued his quest
throughout the 1980s, co-authoring the 1985 Gramm-Hollings-Rudman Act, which
slowed the rate of federal spending growth. Despite his 15 years of proven
small-government conservatism, however, Gramm’s presidential bid never got off
the ground.
Social conservatives in ’96 backed Pat Buchanan,
delivering a shocking blow to the presumed co–front runner by winning the
caucuses in Gramm’s neighboring state of Louisiana. Gramm dropped out after
Iowa, where he finished fifth, barely ahead of social-conservative gadfly Alan
Keyes. Forbes propelled himself to victory in Delaware and Arizona, and to
respectable showings in other states, by presenting a flat-tax plan but not a
major spending-cut proposal. Eventually he faded under attack, but he retained the
loyalty of liberty conservatives throughout the race until withdrawing after
the March Super Tuesday contests, in which he finished behind Pat Buchanan in
every state except Connecticut.
Forbes’s run that year changed liberty-conservative
politics over the long term. In the 2000 primaries, Bush rose to become the
second choice of liberty conservatives because he advocated a supply-side tax
cut. It is almost the only domestic policy he pushed through that they still
support. Liberty conservatives since then have wooed voters with similar plans,
almost never providing details about spending cuts. When House Freedom Caucus
leader Representative Mark Meadows (R., N.C.) recently admitted that his group
would support the Trump-backed tax cut without insisting on a dime of
offsetting spending cuts to help pay for it, he merely demonstrated what has
been true for a long time: No serious constituency of the GOP makes spending
cuts its top priority.
Even free trade and a welcoming attitude toward
immigration, longtime liberty-conservative staples, are under assault in
today’s GOP. The Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins recently published a paper, “The
Five Types of Trump Voters,” describing the groups that coalesced behind the
president in the general election. Only 25 percent were what she labeled “free
marketeers” — people opposed to higher taxes and bigger government but
supportive of free trade and immigration. A larger number were “staunch
conservatives,” and this group opposed illegal immigration overwhelmingly, loved
the president’s proposed Muslim ban, and had grown much less supportive of free
trade since 2012. A third group, “American preservationists,” nearly a fifth of
Trump voters, were even more intensely opposed to immigration and free trade.
Steve Bannon is attempting to unite these latter groups against the free
marketeers in party primaries.
Every poll conducted before Flake’s announcement showed
him badly trailing his announced primary challenger, state senator Kelli Ward.
His approval rating among Republicans was extremely low. His case starkly
illustrates that if liberty conservatives want to remain relevant in the GOP,
they need to adapt. They also need to think seriously about how reductions in
spending can be accomplished through a party whose voters are averse to it.
After the Goldwater debacle, longtime National Review
editor Frank Meyer argued that traditionalists, anti-Communists, and liberty
conservatives should unite, forming a “fusion” of their movements and ideas.
That is what happened, but the past 20 years show that the liberty wing is much
weaker than it imagined itself to be. It can reinvigorate itself only if it
finds a way to make itself relevant to a new conservative fusion.
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