By Angelo Codevilla
On January 1, 2013 one third of Republican
congressmen, following their leaders, joined with nearly all Democrats to
legislate higher taxes and more subsidies for Democratic constituencies. Two
thirds voted no, following the people who had elected them. For generations, the
Republican Party had presented itself as the political vehicle for Americans
whose opposition to ever-bigger government financed by ever-higher taxes makes
them a “country class.” Yet modern Republican leaders, with the
exception of the Reagan Administration, have been partners in the expansion of
government, indeed in the growth of a government-based “ruling class.” They
have relished that role despite their voters. Thus these leaders gradually
solidified their choice to no longer represent what had been their
constituency, but to openly adopt the identity of junior partners in that
ruling class. By repeatedly passing bills that contradict the identity of
Republican voters and of the majority of Republican elected
representatives, the
Republican leadership has made political orphans of millions of Americans. In
short, at the outset of 2013 a substantial portion of America finds itself
un-represented, while Republican leaders increasingly represent only themselves.
By the law of supply and demand, millions of
Americans, (arguably a majority) cannot remain without representation.
Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude
and demand submission as did the royal courts of old. This marks these
political orphans as a “country class.” In 1776 America’s country class
responded to lack of representation by uniting under the concept: “all men are
created equal.” In our time, its disparate sectors’ common sentiment is more
like: “who the hell do they think they are?”
The ever-growing U.S.
government has an edgy social, ethical, and political character. It is
distasteful to a majority of persons who vote Republican and to independent
voters, as well as to perhaps one fifth of those who vote Democrat. The
Republican leadership’s kinship with the socio-political class that runs modern
government is deep. Country class Americans have but to glance at the Media to
hear themselves insulted from on high as greedy, racist, violent, ignorant
extremists. Yet far has it been from the Republican leadership to defend them.
Whenever possible, the Republican Establishment has chosen candidates for
office – especially the Presidency – who have ignored, soft-pedaled or given
mere lip service to their voters’ identities and concerns.
Thus public opinion polls
confirm that some two thirds of Americans feel that government is “them” not
“us,” that government has been taking the country in the wrong direction, and
that such sentiments largely parallel partisan identification: While a majority
of Democrats feel that officials who bear that label represent them well, only
about a fourth of Republican voters and an even smaller proportion of
independents trust Republican officials to be on their side. Again: While the
ruling class is well represented by the Democratic Party, the country class is
not represented politically – by the Republican Party or by any other. Well or
badly, its demand for representation will be met.
Representation is the
distinguishing feature of democratic government. To be represented, to trust
that one’s own identity and interests are secure and advocated in high places,
is to be part of the polity. In practice, any democratic government’s claim to
the obedience of citizens depends on the extent to which voters feel they are
party to the polity. No one doubts that the absence, loss, or perversion of
that function divides the polity sharply between rulers and ruled.
Representation can be
perverted. Some regimes (formerly the Communists, and currently the Islamists)
allow dissent from the ruling class to be represented only by parties approved
by the ruling class. Also, in today’s European Union the ruling class’ wide
spread and homogeneity leaves those who do not like how their country is run
with no one to represent them. Though America’s ruling class is neither as
narrow as that of Communist regimes nor as broadly preclusive as that of the
European Union, the Republican leadership’s preference for acting as part of
the ruling class rather than as representatives of voters who feel set upon has
begun to produce the sort of soft pre-emption of opposition and bitterness between rulers and ruled that
occurs necessarily wherever representation is mocked.
To see how America’ country
class can be represented, let us glance at how the current division of American
politics into a ruling class and a country class came about and why it is
inherently unstable.
Ins and
Outs
Those who attribute the
polarization of American politics to the partisan drawing of congressional
districts at the state level have a point: The Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr (1962)
inadvertedly legalized gerrymandering by setting “one man one vote” as the sole
basis of legitimacy for drawing legislative districts. Subsequent judicial
interpretations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act demanded that districts be
drawn to produce Congressmen with specific features. No surprise then that
Democratic and Republican legislatures and governors, thus empowered, have
drawn the vast majority of America’s Congressional districts to be safe for
Democrats or Republicans respectively. Such districts naturally produce
Congressmen who represent their own party more than the general population.
This helped the parties themselves to grow in importance. But the U.S. Senate
and state governments also have polarized because public opinion in general
has.
Political partisanship became
a more important feature of American life over the past half-century largely because
the Democratic Party, which has been paramount within the U.S. government since
1932, entrenched itself as America’s ruler, and its leaders became a ruling
class. This caused a Newtonian “opposite reaction,” which continues to gather
force.
In our time, the Democratic
Party gave up the diversity that had characterized it since Jeffersonian times.
Giving up the South, which had been its main bastion since the Civil War as
well as the working classes that had been the heart of its big city machines from Boston to San Diego, it came to consist almost exclusively of
constituencies that make up government itself or benefit from government. Big
business, increasingly dependent on government contracts and regulation, became
a virtual adjunct of the contracting agents and regulators. Democrats’
traditional labor union auxiliaries shifted from private employees to public.
Administrators of government programs of all kinds, notably public assistance,
recruited their clientele of dependents into the Party’s base. Democrats,
formerly the party of slavery and segregation, secured the allegiance of racial
minorities by unrelenting assertions that the rest of American society is
racist. Administrators and teachers at all levels of education taught two
generations that they are brighter and better educated than the rest of
Americans, whose objections to the schools’ (and the Party’s) prescriptions
need not be taken seriously.
It is impossible to overstate
the importance of American education’s centralization, intellectual
homogenization and partisanship in the formation of the ruling class’
leadership. Many have noted the increasing stratification of American society
and that, unlike in decades past, entry into its top levels now depends largely
on graduation from elite universities. As Charles Murray has noted, their graduates tend to marry one another,
perpetuating what they like to call a “meritocracy.” But this is rule not by
the meritorious, rather by the merely credentialed – because the credentials
are suspect. As Ron Unz has shown, nowadays entry into the ivied
gateways to power is by co-option, not merit. Moreover, the amount of study
required at these universities leaves their products with more pretense than
knowledge or skill. The results of their management– debt, decreased household
net worth, increased social strife – show that America has been practicing negative
selection of elites.
Nevertheless as the Democratic
Party has grown its constituent parts into a massive complex of patronage, its
near monopoly of education has endowed its leaders ever more firmly with the
conviction that they are as entitled to deference and perquisites as they are
to ruling. The host of its non-governmental but government-financed entities,
such as Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, argue
for government funding by stating, correctly, that they are pursuing the public
interest as government itself defines it.
Thus by the turn of the twenty
first century America had a bona fide ruling class that transcends government
and sees itself at once as distinct
from the rest of society – and as the only element thereof that may act on its
behalf. It rules – to use New York Times columnist David Brooks’ characterization of Barack Obama – “as a visitor from a morally superior civilization.”
The civilization of the ruling class does not concede that those who resist it
have any moral or intellectual right, and only reluctantly any civil right, to
do so. Resistance is illegitimate because it can come only from low motives.
President Obama’s statement that Republican legislators – and hence the people
who elect them – don’t care whether “seniors have decent health care…children
have enough to eat” is typical.
Republican leaders neither
parry the insults nor vilify their Democratic counterparts in comparable terms
because they do not want to beat the ruling class, but to join it in solving the
nation’s problems. How did they come to cut such pathetic figures?
The Republican Party never
fully adapted itself to the fact that modern big government is an interest
group in and of itself, inherently at odds with the rest of society, that it
creates a demand for representation by those it alienates, and hence that
politicians must choose whether to represent the rulers or the ruled. The
Republican Party had been the party of government between the Civil War and
1932. But government then was smaller in size, scope, and pretense. The
Rockefellers of New York and Lodges of Massachusetts – much less the Tafts of Ohio – did not aspire to
shape the lives of the ruled, as does modern government. Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal largely shut these Republicans out of the patronage and power of
modern government.
By the late 1930s, being out
of power had begun to make the Republicans the default refuge of voters who did
not like what the new, big government was doing. Some Republican leaders – the
Taft wing of the Party – adopted this role. The Rockefeller wing did not.
Though the latter were never entirely comfortable with the emerging Democratic
ruling class, their big business constituency pressed them to be their advocate
to it. A few such Republicans (e.g. Kevin Philips The Emerging Republican Majority) even dreamed during the Nixon-Ford Administration of
the 1970s that they might replace Democrats at the head of the ruling class.
But the die had been cast long since: Corporations, finance, and the entitled
high and low – America’s “ins” – gravitated to the Democrats’ permanent power,
while the “outs” fled into the Republican fold. Thus after WWII the Republican
Party came to consist of office holders most of who yearned to be “ins,” and of
voters who were mostly “outs.”
This internal contradiction
was unsustainable. The Republican leadership, regarding its natural
constituency as embarrassing to its pursuit of a larger role in government,
limited its appeal to it. Thus it gradually cut itself off from the only root
of the power by which it might gain that role. Thus the Republicans
proved to be “the stupid party.”
In 1960 Barry Goldwater began the revolt of the
Republican Party’s constituent “outsider” or “country class,” by calling for a
grass-roots takeover of the Party. This led to Goldwater’s nomination for
President in 1964. The Republican Establishment maligned him more vigorously
than did the Democrats. But the Goldwater movement switched to Ronald Reagan,
who overcame the Republican Establishment and the ruling class to win the
Presidency by two landslide elections. Yet the question: “who or what
does the Republican Party represent” continued to sharpen because the Reagan
interlude was brief, because it never transformed the Party, and hence because
the Bush (pere et fils)
dynasty plus Congressional leadership (Newt Gingrich was a rebel against it and
treated a such) behaved increasingly indistinguishably from Democrats. Government grew more rapidly under these
Republican Administrations than under Democratic ones.
In sum, the closer one gets to
the Republican Party’s voters, the more the Party looks like Goldwater and
Reagan. The closer one gets to its top, the more it looks like the ghost of
Rockefeller. Consider 2012: the party chose for President someone preferred by
only one fourth of its voters – Mitt Romney, whose first youthful venture in
politics had been to take part in the political blackballing of Barry
Goldwater.
One reason for the Republican
Party’s bipolarity is the centripetal attraction of the ruling class: In the
absence of forces to the contrary, smaller bodies tend to become satellites of
larger ones. Modern America’s homogenizing educational Establishment and the
ruling class’ near monopoly on credentials, advancement, publicity, and money
draws ambitious Republicans into the Democrats’ orbit. That is why for example
a majority of the Republican Establishment, including The Wall Street Journal and
the post-W.F. BuckleyNational Review supported
the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and its premise that big,
well-connected enterprises are “too big to fail” - which three fourths of
the American people opposed vociferously. For these Republican cognoscenti vox populi is not vox dei, but the voice of
idiots. Accordingly, after the 2010 elections produced a large contingent of
Senators and Congressmen pledged to oppose measures such as the TARP, former
Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott expressed confidence that
Washington would soon break the new members to its ways, that pledges to voters
would count for little against the approval or disapproval of prestigious
personages, against the profit to be made by going along with the ruling class
and the trouble that comes from opposing it.
That trouble is daunting. Whoever chooses to represent
the country class might have right and reason on their side. Nevertheless they
can be certain that the ruling class media will not engage those reasons but
vilify the persons who voice them as ignorant, irresponsible, etc. Asserting
moral-intellectual superiority, chastising and intimidating rather than
persuading opponents is by no means the least of the ruling class’ powers.
“It’s the contempt, stupid!” But the Republican leadership has proved stupid
enough to deal with the contempt as the Pharisee in the Temple dealt with sin:
“I thank thee Lord that I am not like other Republicans…”
Some Democrats seem to believe
that taking these Republicans unto themselves while deeming the remainder
“unworthy,” withdrawing “tolerance toward [their] regressive opinions,” will
crush serious opposition. Maybe. Surely however, incorporating the Republican
Establishment into the ruling class leaves the dissidents free coherently to
pursue their own vision, and with a monopoly of
opposition. In two-party systems, the opposition eventually wins.
Considering that, according to a 2013 Pew poll, 53% of Americans view the
government as a threat to their welfare and liberties (up from 36% in 1995 and
that a third of those who feel that way are Democrats); considering that
government’s very legitimacy decreases as government grows in size, that
victory may come sooner rather than later.
To
Represent
Because of the aforementioned,
the political representation of America’s country class is fragmentary. But the
uniformity of the ruling class’ pressure on the fragments is pressing them
toward similar responses and perhaps unity.
It matters less whether two
thirds of Republican congressmen vote against their leaders as they did on
January 1, 2013 out of conviction or because their constituents demand it. Fact
is, Republican leaders become less significant with every passing year because
they have no way of reversing the intellectual trends from above or the popular
pressure from below. Recent Presidential elections have shown that contemporary
Establishment Republicans elicit scarce, unenthusiastic support even from
longtime Republican voters because they are out of synch with their flock. In
short, the Republican leadership finds itself in a position analogous to that
of Episcopal bishops: They own an august label and increasingly empty churches
because they have been chasing off the faithful priests and congregations.
This of course is what
happened to the Whig party after 1850. After it became undeniable that party
leader Henry Clay’s latest great compromise had sold the party’s principles
cheap, the most vigorous Whigs, e.g. New York governor William Seward and
national hero John C. Fremont – joined by an obscure Illinois ex-congressman
named Abraham Lincoln whose only asset was that he reasoned well – looked for
another vehicle for their cause. In 1854, together with representatives of
other groups, they founded the Republican Party. Today the majority of
Republican congressmen plus a minority of senators – dissidents from the Party
but solid with their voters – are the natural core of a new party. The name it
might bear is irrelevant. Very relevant are sectors of America’s population
increasingly represented by groups that sprang up to represent them when the
Republican leadership did not.
This representation is
happening by default. It is aided by the internet, which makes it possible to
spread ideas to which the educational Establishment gives short shrift and
which the ruling class media shun. In short, the internet helps undermine the
ruling class’ near-homogenization of American intellectual life, its closing of
the American mind. Not by reason but by bureaucratic force majeure had America’s
educational Establishment isolated persons who deviate from it, cutting access
to a sustaining flow of ideas that legitimize their way of life. But the
internet allows marginalized dissenters to reason with audiences of millions.
Ideas have consequences. No surprise then that more and more of Republican
elected officials seem to think less like their leaders and more like their
voters.
The internet also spread the
power to organize. Already in the 1970s Richard Viguerie had begun to upset the
political parties’ monopoly on organization by soliciting money from the
general public for causes and candidates through direct mail. The internet
amplified this technique’s effectiveness by orders of magnitude, making it
possible to transmit ideas and political signals while drawing financial
support from millions of likeminded people throughout the country. Thus
informed with facts and opinion, sectors of the country class have felt
represented and empowered vis a vis the ruling class. Those on the
electronic distribution list of the “Club for Growth,” for example, are at
least as well informed on economic matters as any credentialed policy maker.
The several pro-life organizations have spread enough knowledge of embryology
and moral logic to make Roe v. Wade, which
the ruling class regards as its greatest victory, a shrinking island in
American jurisprudence and society. The countless Tea Parties that have sprung
up all over have added their countless attendees to networks of information and
organization despite the ruling class’ effort to demonize them. The same goes
for evangelicals, gun owners, etc. Though such groups represent the country
class fragmentarily, country class people identify with them rather than with
the Republican Party because the groups actually stand for something, and
represent their adherents against the ruling class’ charges, insults, etc.
Since America’s
first-past-the-post electoral system produces elections between two parties, it
was natural for any and all groups who oppose the ruling class to gravitate to
the Republican Party. But the Party’s leaders, reasoning that “they have
nowhere else to go,” refused to notice that voters were lending their votes out
of allegiance to causes rather than to the Party, and that Republican
candidates increasingly sought votes through the medium of groups that advocate
these causes rather than through the Party Establishment. It was shocked when
candidates won Republican primaries by aligning themselves with such groups,
against the Party itself. The flood of votes that such groups energized in 2010
signified that the groups, not the Party, had come to represent opposition to
the ruling class. But post 2010, the Republican leadership continued to pretend
to be the county class’ representative while not actually representing it. Its
donors buried opposition to Mitt Romney in attack ads and picked its own kind
of candidates wherever it could.
After the leadership’s
electoral disaster of 2012 and its subsequent pathetic fecklessness the only
vision of a possible future in Republican ranks – the only programmatic and
organizational coherence –was among the Party’s dissident majority in the House
and dissident minority in the Senate. By 2013 it was less meaningful to ask what the leadership would do
with the dissidents than what the dissidents would do with the leadership.
The answer seemed to be: increasingly to ignore it, to go one’s own way; more
and more, to go along with conscience and with voters. By 2013 as their numbers
continued to grow without counter trend, it was difficult to imagine how the
leadership might reduce their numbers.
At the same time, the groups
that represent the country class’ pieces were mounting and winning more primary
challenges to Establishment Republicans. The establishment responded with
its main asset: money. The New York Times reported a concerted effort by
the Party’s biggest donors led by longtime Bush staffer Karl Rove (yes, the
Rockefeller wing) to support Establishment candidates in the primary process.
But establishment candidates are already better funded than dissidents, usually
massively so. The establishment candidates who have survived dissident
challenges have seldom done it through sheer cash, but rather by fuzzing the
differences between themselves and the dissidents. Designating themselves
formally as “establishment,” was almost sure to hurt them. Moreover to set up
the Republican establishment as a separate caucus invites the dissidents to
unite and present themselves united as an alternative. That is the natural path
to the dissidents forming a new party while Republican leadership dissolves
into the Democratic party. In sum, the value of the label “Republican” is
problematic.
The
instrument and its use
A new party is likely to arise
because the public holds both Republicans and Democrats responsible for the
nation’s unsustainable course. Indebtedness cannot increase endlessly. Nor can
regulations pile on top of regulations while the officials who promulgate them
– and their pensions – continue to grow, without crushing those beneath. Nor
can the population’s rush to disability status and other forms of public
assistance, or the no-win wars that have resulted in “open season” on Americans
around the world, continue without catharsis. One half of the population cannot
continue passively to absorb insults without pushing back. When – sooner rather
than later – events collapse this house of cards, it will be hard to credibly
advocate a better future while bearing a label that advertises responsibility
for the present. Why trust any Republicanqua Republican?
To represent the country
class, to set about reversing the ills the ruling class imposed on America, a
party would have to confront the ruling class’ pretenses, with unity and force
comparable to that by which these were imposed. There will be no alternative to
all the country class’ various components acting jointly on measures dear to
each. For example: since the connection between government and finance, the
principle that large institutions are “too big to fail,” are dear to America’s
best-connected people who can be counted on to threaten “systemic collapse,”
breaking it will require the support of sectors of the country class for which
“corporate welfare” is less of a concern than the welfare effects of the Social Security system’s component that funds fake disability and drug
addiction – something about which macroeconomists mostly care little – and vice
versa. Similarly the entire country class has as much interest in asserting the
right of armed self-defense as does any gun owner, because the principle of
constitutional right is indivisible. Nothing will require greater unity against
greater resistance than ending government promotion of abortion and
homosexuality. Yet those whose main concerns are with financial probity cannot
afford continuing to neglect that capitalist economics presupposes a morally
upright people. All this illustrates the need for, and the meaning of, a
political party: disparate elements acting all of one and one for all.
Diversity is not a natural barrier
to pursuing common interests. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic party included
every unreconstructed segregationist in the South, as well as nearly all
Progressives in university towns like Hyde Park, Illinois and Madison,
Wisconsin – people who despised not only the segregationists but also the
Catholic Poles, Italians, and Irish from Milwaukee to Boston whose faith and
habits were as foreign to them as they were to Southerners. Yet all understood
that being mutually supportive of Democrats was the key to getting what they
wanted.
The common, unifying element
of the several country class’ sectors is the ruling class’ insistence, founded
on force rather than reason, that their concerns are illegitimate, that they are illegitimate. The
ruling class demonizes the country class piece by piece. Piece by piece it
cannot defend itself, much less can it set the country on a course of domestic
and international peace, freedom and solvency. None of the country class’
politically active elements can, by themselves, hope to achieve any of their
goals because they can be sure that the entire ruling class’ resources will be
focused on them whenever circumstances seem propitious. In 2012 for example,
the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms seemed politically safe. Then,
one disaster brought seemingly endless resources from every corner of the
ruling class to bear on its defenders. The rest of the country class’
politically active elements stood by, sympathetically, but without a vehicle
for helping. Each of these elements should have learned that none can hope for
indulgence from any part of the ruling class. They can look only to others who
are under attack as they themselves are.
Far be it from a party that
represents the country class to ape what it abhors by imposing punitive
measures through party line votes covered by barrages of insults: few in the
country class’ parts want to become a ruling class. Yet the country class, to
defend itself, to cut down the forest of subsidies and privileges that choke
America, to curb the arrogance of modern government, cannot shy away from
offending the ruling class’ intellectual and moral pretenses. Events themselves
show how dysfunctional the ruling class is. But only a political party worthy
of the name can marshal the combination of reason, brutal images, and
consistency adequately to represent America’s country class.
No comments:
Post a Comment