Have Free Markets Replaced Free Love?
David Paul KuhnIn the era of George W. Bush, fiscal conservatism became more oxymoron than principle. The tax day protests on Wednesday exposed the intraparty conflict over that loss of principle. It hinted at the Grand Old Party’s confused identity crisis. As Republican strategist Chris Lacivita said, “When a party starts losing its identity on the very issues it’s founded on, you are going to have a reckoning.”
A desire to reckon with principle inspired tens of thousands of conservatives to dress in colonial costume and hold up signs reading, “stop the war on capitalism.” Conservatives are riled over the fight against promiscuous government spending. Yet spendthrift may prove the shallower jihad of conservatism. In terms of identity, the deeper inner-conservative fight may regard promiscuity itself--not in terms of culture but economy.
The Republican base is often portrayed as a three-legged stool, supported by fiscal, social and national security conservatives. But as many social conservatives attend church weekly as have a gun in the home. Conservatives who believe in an aggressive foreign policy tend to also lean rightward on social issues like gay marriage.
The rhetorical theme beneath the rise and decline of the modern Republican Party is fundamentally simpler: a call for order. From “acid, amnesty and abortion” to “God, guns and gays,” the GOP framed itself as a disciplinarian’s response to permissive Democrats.
In time, as Saul Anuzis said, the party that claimed to stand for “responsibility, smaller deficits and ethics voted for the bridge to nowhere and had Abramoff.” The former head of the Michigan Republican Party, Anuzis added, fresh from a tea party in Lansing, that “over the last 6 to 8 years we had lost our credibility to voters.”
Credibility is always easier to lose than win. And Republicans realize they’ve lost it. When asked which political party can do a “better job” leading the country out of the recession, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, Democrats are favored by more than 2-to-1 ratio. The two parties were at par on the same question during the early 1990s recession.
“If you are raising taxes and pushing giant bills through and a year later you turnaround and say you are against that stuff, it’s a bit disingenuous,” Lacivita said. “That’s why the Republicans coming into office have a bigger responsibility to be consistent.”
Most Republicans believe the majority was lost when they lost their principles. As a result, near unanimous Republican opposition to Barack Obama’s budget and bailout.
Few issues better expose the partisan fault line than questions of bigger or smaller government. When Gallup asked voters their opinion on the “expansion of government’s role in this economy in response to the financial crisis,” 78 percent of Democrats and blue-leaning independents “approve” of it. Yet 72 percent of Republicans and red-leaning independents said they “disapprove.”
It’s worth noting that anxiety over taxes has tracked with the rise and decline of Republicans. Gallup has asked for decades whether voters consider their federal income taxes “too high, about right or too low.” The gap between “too high” and “about right” was widest in 1969, with 69 percent saying “too high” and only 25 percent saying “about right.” That gap remained wide until the late 90s. By the time George W. Bush was in office, like the dusk of the FDR majority in the early 60s, there was no gap.
This is why fiscal conservatives argue that tax policy is vital to Republican success. But the saliency of the tax issues has dulled. Only twice since 1956 have more voters said their tax burden was “about right” rather than “too much,” once in 2003 and again this year. The impact of the tax issue has lessoned in part because Republicans met their aim and lowered the tax burden. To the extent taxes remain a potent issue, it’s the Democratic president now promising tax cuts for most Americans.
Yet the chief economic issue today is not taxes but an economy in crisis. And the public views Democrats as the authority most able to bring order to that crisis. A CBS News/New York Times poll recently asked, echoing several other surveys, who is “more likely to make the right decisions about the nation's economy: Barack Obama or the Republicans in Congress?” Voters said Obama by a 3-to-1 ratio.
These are sobering days for Republicans. The recent CBS/Times poll found the least favorable public view of Republicans in a quarter century. Yet the more difficult Republican reckoning may regard less core principles than the recession testing conflicts lurking within those principles.
“When you burn down your house you’ve got a foundation to rebuild,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist.
“We are supposed to be the party of order and discipline,” as Castellanos ruefully put it.
The recession has evoked a more profound call for order, of not simply disciplined spending but disciplining the economy. This is the greater identity crisis conservatism has yet to confront.
Ironically, after the last splash of corporate libertines, it was a Republican president who backed “the most far-reaching reforms of American business” since Roosevelt. Those were George W. Bush’s words describing his signature on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Yet that effort to enforce order has been wrongly welded with Bush the spendthrift. Only the latter is anathema to conservatism.
“Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits,” Russell Kirk once wrote.
It was conservatives who understood that free love came with costs. And in that period of cultural and urban upheaval Republicans’ won voters with calls for “law and order.” Today, during a similar period of economic upheaval, it’s Democrats calling for order and stricter enforcement. Meanwhile, as during the Great Depression, Republicans sound more the permissive than the disciplinarian. Free markets seem to have replaced free love.
