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Rejoice! Rejoice! Victory, oh Victory!
The most common form of contemporary conservative electoral argument is flawed in its premise. They argue that we don’t win elections because we don’t follow their advice (give up on social issues / double down on social issues / the same for fiscal issues and/or foreign stuff / use stronger language / use more moderate language / educate the public on abstract issues / stop talking about abstract issues / talk about gaffes more / talk about gaffes less).
In fact, we win elections. We run the legislature in most states, reaching a level of (small d) democratic control rarely seen in American history. We have most governor’s mansions, again, right at the edge of the historical record. We have the House; after decades of suffering from Ike’s neutrality and Watergate, we got it back in 1994 and we’ve mostly kept it. We have the Senate. Even presidentially, we’ve lost just five out of the last twelve races, with the “always losing” argument often resting on the last two. If you decide on the basis of receiving two tails after tossing a coin twice that the coin must be faulty and have no heads on it, you’re probably excessively predisposed that belief.
When people tell you that we’re losing and the only way to win is to buy their snake oil, whether classy snake oil like Arthur Brooks’ or off-brand oils like Mike Murphy’s or Mark Levin’s, they’re wrong in two ways. Firstly, we’re winning, and secondly, many of those who are winning are not from their faction of the party. Ron Johnson and Pat Toomey win in blue-purple states while being unapologetically socially conservative, whatever Murphy might prefer; while Graham, McCain, Murkowski, Capito, Cochran, and Alexander can win in red states despite Levin’s assurances that their path is doomed to fail.
Allied to this is the claim that we don’t win on the issues. Sometimes this is specifically aimed at McConnell and Boehner. In the comments, I’d like people to suggest a Senate leader and speaker who have been more effective at stopping the legislative agenda of a post-war President. I don’t believe that such a man exists. Bush got what he really wanted from Daschle and Reid. Clinton got a bunch of what he wanted from Dole and Newt. Anyone who wants to argue that Reagan and 41 failed to leave a legislative legacy has a tough case to make. And so on. From tax cuts to gun rights to trade agreements to partial birth abortion to bankruptcy to the surge, the Democrats never united in the way that McConnell and Boehner have kept the party together in opposition to Obama, so time and again Bush could peel off enough Democratic moderates to get his reforms passed. Today, pro-choice Republicans refuse to vote for pro-choice bills. Pro-union Republicans don’t vote for pro-union bills. Obama has been reduced to acting through executive orders by the most effective and courageous Republican party leadership in a half century. Obama did pass radical reforms, but only while he had a supermajority; a supermajority that was kept brief between the death of Ted Kennedy and the election of Scott Brown. It’s the united efforts of moderates and less moderate Republicans that has won us our position.
At some level, most of us are aware of this. Over and over again, I speak to closeted McConnell fans who will not admit it in public (some, like James O’Keefe, are open about it if they’re asked, but don’t raise the topic). It’s not cool, and it’s bad for fundraising, to declare that affection. I’ve spoken to people who were coming off a panel discussion angry because they didn’t get to demonstrate their bona fides by attacking McConnell on a point irrelevant to the discussion. Our pundits have overwhelming incentives to bad-mouth our leaders. There’s sometimes almost as little respect for the achievements of our governors and state legislators, although the Constitution gives them the scope to go on the offensive even when there isn’t a cooperative President. Our states are popping and fizzing like mad, deregulating labor, protecting electoral integrity and self-defense rights, closing abortion clinics, cutting taxes, reducing recidivism by expanding religious charitable access to inmates, expanding school choice, shoring up the Constitution with anti-Kelo laws and the like, and finding many other ways of expanding Americans’ freedom.
It’s my belief that America, and the world, were in a precarious state in Reagan’s first term, but that we are in a better position now, and that we were in a precarious state when Ted Kennedy died, but that we are in a better position now. I outline why in posts addressing each of the three legs of the conservative stool and comparing our position to Reagan’s first term and to what one could refer to as the B.M. period of American history (“Before McConnell,” the period of supermajority).
I’ll conclude with a post on the stakes for the upcoming election. We can fix entitlements to make them affordable, but not every party is likely to do so, and even four years would make the problem much harder. We can restore American leadership to the world, but we would have to choose to do so. Almost all the regrettable Court decisions are 5-4, so we can revive our Constitutional fidelity to unprecedented levels, but the good decisions are also mostly 5-4. It is merely likely, not certain, that the shining city on a hill will illuminate the world even more brightly than before.
Published in Domestic Policy, Politics
VA was mixed briefly at the time of the map. In June of that year, one of the senate Democrats resigned giving the GOP a one-seat margin which they expanded to two by winning the special election to fill the vacancy.
Have you read Rubio and Walker’s healthcare plans? They’re both focused on giving power to the states to run their own Medicaid and similar plans.
When Walker was County Executive, he started the process of abolishing the county government he ran. As governor, his primary focus (Act 10) was on empowering the smaller governments below him. Similarly, Bush’s initiatives in school choice empowered the little battalions rather than treading on them and his book and chief policy intiatives have all been on federal issues (foreign policy and immigration). Huckabee doesn’t seem to be keen on policy of any kind; his book is solid class warfare grumbling without policy content. I think Christie’s made efforts to decentralize New Jersey and empower subsidiary government; Cory Booker spoke positively about that stuff, if I remember correctly. Kasich was a big welfare reform guy.
For the moment, the healthcare initiatives and the Ryan Plan welfare reform stuff (which most of the governors support, although Walker’s the only guy who talks about it a lot, with Ryan being a Wisconsinite) are all that stand out as being explicitly federalist in the current detailed policy proposals, but that’s mostly because it’s clearly unwise to roll out a lot of detailed policy proposals at this stage. They create ammunition for enemies and nobody celebrates them. Heck, for the most part nobody but oppo researchers even reads them. The healthcare plans were an exception because of the importance of being able to respond to questions about Obamacare with an explicit repeal and replace platform.
Give it time and they’ll each have positive federalist plans.
I wouldn’t call Brooks, Murphy, or Levin snake oil salesmen. They have their beliefs. Any candidate can say or do something unwise.
There are an almost infinite number of reasons why some candidates succeed while others don’t. Southern states and states with older populations seem to like established, older candidates and politicians with family names like Murkowski and Capito. Both governor Bushes were elected in Southern states, and one is known for an older demographic. One thing that often gets politicians in trouble with the voters is not really living in one’s home state.
Huh? Do you have any cases in mind? AFAIK, the Roberts Court has been pretty strong on Federalism. Sebelius limited the commerce clause and made Medicaid expansions optional on the states on explicitly federalist grounds. I disagree with the striking down of DOMA, but again it was done for federalist reasons. Other than limiting the ability of the states to regulate guns buy strengthening the Second Amendment, prohibiting them from regulating political speech, etc., what has the Court done to weaken state sovereignty?
It’s also a Republican state at the State level, now. Both chambers flipped in the 2014 election and it’s unlikely that they’ll flip back again any time soon.
Well, sure, “most of the states”, but it’s still a big map. That’s 299 electoral votes in the red column and 31 undecided. If our Presidential predictions map looked like that, my post would barely have mentioned the other stuff.
McConnell has fought successfully as minority and majority leader on a consistent basis for the last five years or so. That’s hardly “did something well once”. Offensively, he’s done a few things, from the March ’13 renegotiation of the Sequester, to his lone, heroic, unpopular, and successful charge against campaign finance reform.
It’s true that it’s not clear how good he’ll be at offensive stuff. God willing, we’ll have a chance to see. I think it’s highly likely that he’d get the fifty votes we need for the Ryan Plan in the first few weeks of a Republican Senate, but for things like abortion and gun rights he’d need sixty, and that would be tougher. If he’s not good at it, hopefully someone else will take over. One of McConnell’s strengths has always been his modesty, and I suspect that if he suffered a real defeat and there was someone who would be likely to improve things, he’d step aside and take a different prominent role.
Once upon a time, long long ago, when I was actively involved in trying to improve the public schools in my town from the position of outsider-parent, I heard Christie give a couple of speeches. I was so moved by them. It was clear to me in listening to him that he knew schools, and the schools he knew looked just like the ones I knew. I was really impressed.
Then I was busy and lost track of him (he’s in New Jersey, and I’m in Massachusetts).
Then last week I saw a Newsweek 2015 list of the top ten high schools in the United States, and six out of the ten were in New Jersey. Wow.
I do think a governor gets credit for the quality of the public schools in his or her state. Maybe Christie has been making some constructive changes. There was a beast of a problem with the unions in New Jersey years ago.
Christie was not on any of my candidates-I’d-vote-for lists until I saw that. Now I’d have to listen a little more carefully. :)
Possibly more fodder for your Republicans Are Winning in Some Places theme. :)
There is a very important distinction to be made that James does not make: Politics is NOT Government.
Our politicians may be more from the Right than they used to be. We may be winning there.
But our government is the Leviathan. It is always expanding its reach, limiting our freedoms . This is not, of course, merely a matter of spending. It is a matter of crushing regulations, seizures of all matter of property without even a nod to due process, ridiculous overreach in attempts to make US regulations apply in every corner of the globe, automatically giving coercive and violent power to bureaucracies that do not need them, and cannot be trusted with those powers. It is a matter of blind obedience to stupid rules without any recourse to common sense.
In other words: the Right may win elections. But the bureaucracies are winning the country.
You’ve put the finger on the point that has been eluding me. It’s this that has given me that inchoate feeling of unease.
I didn’t know this and need to know more. I find it disturbing that in Indian the township government has been mostly destroyed under conservative Republican governors. Oh, it still exists, but it’s basically an administrative arm of the state now.
Here in Michigan both Democrat and Republican governors have tried to gut the townships, but the townships have too much independent power for it to happen.
In Illinois the centralizing greedsters at the state level look at all the money the townships have, and want to get their hands on it. They want control.
Block grants to the states have the effect of destroying states, making them effectively administrative agencies of the federal government. We’ve been down the road of block grants before, more than once, and although the idea is to give money with no strings attached, there is no such thing and the puppet strings are soon pulled.
In no way does giving block grants to the states constitute empowering them. Quite the opposite.
Good point. It is much like school vouchers – it becomes the camel’s nose under the tent, because the money comes with strings attached, and the inertia is always toward more control, not less.
Oh, I don’t know what obscure issues you have in mind, but the two biggest topics the past few years have been Obamacare and homosexual marriage.
James, I think, regarding the Presidential side of your argument, you have to look at the attitudes of those people who won and those who didn’t. Reagan, no doubt, was a full-throated movement Conservative. He talked the language, campaigned with the language, and for the most part governed with the language. Bush Senior, ran in 88 as Reagan’s third term, but he did not govern as a Conservative (at least domestically, just read PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores) and that showed in 1992 when he was basically abandoned by many Conservative voters. Then there was Bob Dole–unfortunately I was in my late teens and thus not really worried about how his campaign was ran–whose knock was that he wasn’t a full-throated Conservative and didn’t campaign as one. Then you get to Bush ’43, who definitely spoke the Conservative language very well, but he had to caveat it with “compassionate.” This showed in how he governed: largest expansion of Medicare since ’65, a 33 per cent (I used some of your British lingo there) increase in non-defense spending, and in the end a complete buying in of the nonsense that the Left peddled with having to funnel trillions to banks and financial firms who bought into securities back by mortgages held by people who could never repay them. And then you get McCain and Romney, and I don’t think I need to get into that.
Actually the population is not majority urban centers. If you take into count the suburbs and the rural areas, the vast majority of people live in those areas. Urban areas only become the most populated when you include suburbs in your definition of urban. I think it is Stanley Kurtz who pointed this out with his book about how Obama is basically making war against the suburbs.
You know I have heard this before–from James in fact–that the GOP during Obama has actually brought spending down. I am going to have to look into this more, but something just doesn’t seem to add up to me. In 2010 the total debt for the Federal government was–and I am going off the top of my head here–something close to 15 trillion and not it is around 18 trillion. Well if spending went down, how did the debt go up? Also, from 2010 until 2015, when the GOP took the Senate back and could actually go through the budget process, were we not operating under continuing resolutions? If so, I was always under the impression that you could not spend a penny less in one CR than what was in the previous CR. So again, how did spending go down?
J.O.E. – Thanks for your response(s).
Regarding giving the governors running for POTUS time to come up with federalist plans. With all due, we’ve heard this line before. I don’t know of a candidate that has gotten more free market, conservative after getting in office. Exhibit A is the Trump phenomenon as the lack of faith we have in “we’ll do the right thing after you elect us, wink wink”.
I hope you appreciate the Bush hypocrisy.
So I’m with you on pointing out the overall success of the Republican party nationwide (and have done so myself commenting on other Ricochet posts when I thought the tone too defeatist) which shows that a large number of Americans are instinctively resistant to the Progressive mantra. I also think that you are correct in pointing out the importance of Supreme Court appointments in the next Administration, particularly with the opportunity to appoint Ginsburg and/or Breyer’s replacement.
But you lose me when you want us to praise the McConnell/Boehner/Bush Family Consortium. 21st century Progressivism is outfitted with modern armored assault vehicles while the Consortium is hanging out on street corners singing do-wop and showing off their switchblades to each other still thinking it’s 1957.
Why do I say that? Let’s put aside for a moment the sheer embarrassment of having the inarticulate and unpersuasive members of the Consortium as spokespeople for the party. Let’s look at the record, focusing on domestic where Congress is most involved..
When the Consortium had full control of things (yes, McConnell & Boehner were not in their current position but fully supportive) we got tax decreases. We also got No Child Left Behind, the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society (Medicare Part D) and the Republican party spending like a bunch of drunken sailors (with no disrespect meant to drunken sailors – they’re good for the local economy!). More to come . . .
I liked the comment, but I don’t think James is actually missing your distinction. He’s just focusing on the politics.
I am decidedly on the anti-pollyannish view of America today, but I don’t think the Republican Party is the ultimate problem. That doesn’t mean everything it does is done well — only that in global and historical terms it’s hard to find another example of another political party being more effective or more principled in comparable circumstances.
All of this is happening in a certain cultural context, and it’s happening after a liberal President and Congress briefly held and used a supermajority. Simple majorities in Congress alone just can’t undo that damage.
This cannot be over emphasized. For all the members wailing, gnashing teeth, wearing sackcloth covered in ashes over Donald Trump – if you believe the Consortium is on our side then you deserve Donald Trump as your standard bearer or much worse.
If you dig deep down to the roots of the tea party movement it was not in response to Obamacare (it predates by nearly a year at least). The movement is rooted in the Bush admin overindulgence.
. . . and we almost ended up with Harriett Meiers on the Supreme Court which was only stopped because those crazy conservatives outside the Consortium objected. We also had a President, who if he’d had his way, would have, in effect opened the borders (and you know that’s what Boehner & McConnell and their Chamber of Commerce supporter are still).
In contrast when Obama and the Democrats had full control they got the stimulus (which cleverly reset the baseline for spending), Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, the last two of which will have lasting impact on America. We also got Supreme Court justices Kagan and Sotomeyor who are guarranteed to vote in ideological lockstep on the core Progressive issues. And in Harry Reid the D’s had a leader willing to gut the judicial filibuster allowing the D’s to expand the DC Circuit, which handles the most important regulatory litigation in the U.S., and name judges trusted to follow the Progressive line giving them control of the Circuit for the next decades.
And even when Obama lost control of Congress did he mope around, whining as McConnell & Boehner like to do that their hands are tied? No, he unilaterally dismantled our immigration enforcement system, seized control of the internet and directed EPA and the rest of the administrative state to use their regulatory powers to construct a new industrial policy for America. More to come . . .
. . . While Obama has acted with strength and resolution, McConnell talks about restoring “comity” to the operations of the Senate because of his respect for the institution. Well, screw comity. When the other party regains control, as they eventually will at some point, they will, without pausing, throw comity out the window because they want to win.
And do you really think if the Consortium gets back in full control they are going to pay attention to the base? No way, their interests are aligned with the large business interests (and I draw a distinction between those interests and those of us interested in free markets). In fact all the Consortium members have made their contempt for the base clear.
I write this as someone who disagrees on a number of issues with “the base” but my disdain for the Consortium has only grown over the years and if my choice is the base or the Consortium I will not stand with the Consortium.
You are correct and James continues fighting the good fight. We are Blessed to have him.
Simple majorities in Congress alone cannot undo the damage. Simple majorities in Congress are not under any obligation to continue funding additional damage.
Two things to keep an eye on to assess the real intent of the Consortium:
1) The Ex-Im Bank. Does it get mysteriously funded by Congress?
2) The Medical Device Tax Repeal. Word is that GOP leadership will be making a push this fall to get this through.
On the latter, if the GOP leadership pushes repeal of the device tax hard it means the Consortium has no intent to repeal Obamacare, despite their rhetoric. If the device tax passes it peals off an element of support for the coalition needed for complete repeal. Now many of us have long suspected the Consortium wants Obamacare as a political issue but has no interest in repeal. They’ve had 5 years to figure out what to do beyond repeal and have failed to come up with a strategy and it was widely reported that when the Supreme Court upheld the IRS on the state/federal exchange issue that the GOP leadership breathed a sigh of relief because it meant they didn’t have to do anything. In that respect, the Consortium has gotten exactly what it wanted from Justice Roberts.
The medical device repeal is also bad politics because it is Democratic senators (including Senator Warren) most desperate for repeal because many of the largest device manufacturers are in their states. So why would R’s want to take them off the hook by taking the lead on this?.
When people look back at the last ten or twelve presidential elections, and try to infer some pattern just based on how many times each party won and lost, I think that is mistaken. Ten or twelve is not a large enough sample size to make a general inference, if all you’re going on is number of wins.
May I ask how we know this? Boehner clearly killed the gang of 8 deal. Can you see into the depths of his soul and infer his true intentions? McConnell voted against the deal. That he allowed the vote likely has to deal with he fact that the house would kill it, so why not let his Republicans from purple and blue states have their vote in favor with no consequences?
Ex-IM is dead. The house killed it. As with other issues, when McConnell knows the house will kill something, he can allow a vote on it and let his Republicans from purple and blue states have their vote with no negative consequences to the conservative agenda.
This is a good thing.
Is it too rude to predict that GOP will die?
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/the-gop-is-dying-off-literally-118035.html
And people who support Trump are not helping, on the contrary.
I literally just took on this myth.
http://ricochet.com/impending-death-republican-party-greatly-exaggerated/
The OMB has good historical tables on the budget. Tables 1.2 (receipts-outlay-deficit as a % of GDP) and 3.2 (outlays by function and subfunction) are particularly helpful.
The debt continued to grow because, while spending declined, it still exceeded revenue. Part of this was a disastrous downturn in revenue, which has largely recovered. That is the natural result of a tax code heavily dependent on taxation of the wealthy in general, and capital gains in particular.
Outlays in 2011 were $3.6 billion, declining — yes, actually declining, in nominal dollars — to $3.5 billion in 2014.
The sequester was a phenomenal example of republicans outplaying the democrats.