I rarely
post an entire article, but this one is really important!
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 Thus these leaders gradually solidified their choice to no longer
represent what had been their constituency, but to openly adopt the identity of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. Buckley National 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 Republican qua
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.
Angelo M.
Codevilla is Professor Emeritus of international relations at Boston University
and a fellow of the Claremont Institute.
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