BACK IN 1970 when Richard Nixon nominated a little-known district court judge named Harold Carswell for the Supreme Court and Carswell’s opponents branded him “mediocre,’’ Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska famously rose to Carswell’s defense. Even if he were mediocre, Hruska said, “mediocre people are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?’’ With that ringing endorsement, Carswell’s appointment was soundly defeated by the Senate, but not even Hruska could have foreseen how his prescription would be adopted by our political system.
Let’s not mince words here: We now have an entire political party that is not only dedicated to the mediocre. It is dedicated to the nearly deranged.
We are long past the time when we can pretend there are two serious political parties in this country - one right of center and one left of center. That is the situation in virtually every other industrialized country. England has its Tories and Labor, France its Gaullists and its Socialists, Germany its Christian Democrats and its Social Democrats. These parties generally don’t agree on policy; they are, after all, political adversaries. But they are all serious, they all represent large constituencies and interests, and they all operate from a set of shared values, not least of which is that the other side is not treasonous or evil or ill-intentioned; it just has different prescriptions for solving problems. Typically, the differences between right and left in these countries are fairly small because in most democracies most people agree on the really big stuff. Even Tory leader David Cameron has vigorously defended England’s National Health Service.
But that is not the case here. We have one party that is severely compromised by its ties to big money, and another party that is just plain nuts. There is no other way to parse it. According to recent polls, a majority of its followers either believe that President Obama was born in Kenya or aren’t sure, believe there is no such thing as global warming, believe that the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61 percent!). The only bright side is that according to a recent Pew poll, only 23 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, which makes them not only a fringe in beliefs but also, thankfully, in numbers.
Republicans haven’t always been like this. For most of our history, America was pretty much like our European allies. We had two sensible parties with different traditions, constituencies, and orientations. The Democrats were the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Franklin Roosevelt. They saw themselves as representing the common man against larger economic interests, favoring, in the now-common characterization, equality over liberty. Republicans were the party of Hamilton, Lincoln, and McKinley. They saw themselves as representing business interests that would unleash the nation’s entrepreneurial energies, favoring liberty over equality. It was a nice balance, and it served the country surprisingly well for nearly two centuries.
Still, both of these descriptions were caricatures. In reality, the parties were large, unwieldy, and contradictory. Each was forced to include many interests in its big tent, which is why each tended to the center rather than to the extremes. Historically, Democrats were both the party of the minorities and of Southern racism. Republicans were the party of untrammeled free enterprise but also, with Theodore Roosevelt’s ascent to the presidency, of regulation that sought to limit big business and foster competition. Democrats had those Southern racists along with their Northern liberals. Republicans had their progressives along with their conservative business Brahmins. Some of the biggest political donnybrooks were intra-party, not inter-party. TR had to leave the GOP because he thought it too solicitous to big business.
The post-TR Republicans of the 1920s were certainly conservative, and by the 1930s most of them were obstructionist. The majority closed ranks against the New Deal, even voting against Social Security. They weren’t any more enthusiastic about Harry Truman’s social agenda or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Bob Dole, onetime GOP Senate leader and presidential candidate, used to brag that he voted against Medicare when he sat in the House. But Republicans were not entirely unregenerate. Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, with some blandishments from LBJ, did support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year, telling colleagues that the party’s future was at stake if it opposed the legislation. Both bills passed overwhelmingly.
How the GOP went from a right-center party that joined Democrats in supporting civil rights to an extreme right-wing party that has its own leaders declaring Obama wants to kill old people is a long, sad story that has been told brilliantly by the political historian Rick Perlstein in his books “Before the Storm,’’ which describes Barry Goldwater’s hijacking of the party for being too moderate, and “Nixonland,’’ which describes how Richard Nixon settled on the electoral strategy of “positive polarization’’ - shattering the longstanding consensus by pitting Americans against one another for his own political gain. Even so, while Nixon talked like an extremist, he governed like a centrist. His health care initiative was far more liberal than anything Congress is currently considering.
But all that was above the radar. Even Republicans would happily concede that they had taken a turn to the far right, justifying the change from moderation not only on the grounds of ideological purity but also on the grounds that the Democrats had turned to the far left - a patently false accusation. What is under the radar is something more recent and more terrifying for the health of our political system: The Republican Party has become a small minority of out-of-mainstream people (think Representative Joseph Wilson’s outburst to the president this week) but, by virtue of its history, of the media attention it receives, and, frankly, by default, it still occupies a central place in our political life. In any other Western democracy it might have become a far-right splinter party. In America, we don’t really have splinter parties. When one of our parties goes crazy, it doesn’t slide to the margins.
Republicans used to boast that it was the Democrats who were out of touch with ordinary Americans. So what to make of this: Democrats and Independents more or less agree on a whole range of issues from global warming to health care to Obama’s performance in office to the place of Obama’s birth. It is the Republicans who are out of touch with everyone else. How out of touch? Seventy-one percent of all Americans believe in global warming, only 49 percent of Republicans. Forty-seven percent of all Americans believe that global warming is a result of human activity, only 27 percent of Republicans. By a recent Rasmussen poll, 55 percent of all Americans now oppose health care reform, but 87 percent of Republicans oppose it, 74 percent of them strongly. And depending on the poll, President Obama’s favorability rating is anywhere from 50 percent to 58 percent; fewer than 10 percent of Republicans approve of him.
These are gaping disparities, more so when one remembers that the overall numbers include Republicans, so that the chasms are even greater between rank-and-file Republicans and everyone else, or that media attention to Republican opposition to global warming, health care reform and President Obama obviously helps drive the numbers in their direction.
Conservative intellectuals like former Bush speechwriter David Frum and Sam Tanenhaus realize that this is an untenable situation. (Even some rank-and-file conservatives realize it; only 41 percent of conservatives now identify themselves as Republicans.) The country needs a serious right-of-center party - one that has real ideas, one that can engage in a serious debate with the Democrats, one that has a sense of a larger national purpose beyond winning the next election, and one that can actually attract more Americans to its banner because it has earned their trust, not because it knows how to polarize.
Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then?
(My favorite phrase, "We now have an entire political party that is not only dedicated to the mediocre. It is dedicated to the nearly deranged.")
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