In light of Tea Party favorite Rand Paul's overwhelming victory over
the Republican establishment candidate Trey Grayson in Kentucky
yesterday, it's worth taking a brief trip with the Ghost of Republican
Past back to the first of many conservative purges in the modern era.
[CUE PSYCHEDELIC FLASHBACK TRANSITION]
Once upon a time, rare and exotic creatures lurked in the fetid
swamps of the District of Columbia and urban jungles of the northeastern
seaboard. The scientific name for the species is Republicanus
Liberalus, but most people called them "Rockefeller Republicans"
after Nelson Rockefeller, a prominent Republican governor from New York
who expanded his state's universities, parks, welfare programs, and
subsidized housing. Rockefeller Republicans were pro-business
capitalists who often espoused liberal principles on gun control,
welfare, women's rights, affirmative action, abortion, education, and
environmentalism. According to legend, these strange Republicans were
known for civility, pragmatism, and human decency, though some cynics
dismiss the possibility that such wondrous beasts ever existed.
The species was relatively plentiful in the 1960s but went into steep
decline in the late 1970s and was all but extinct by the end of the
1980s. The last liberal Republican in the Senate, Jim Jeffords, mutated
into an independent in 2001, after his Republican colleagues undermined
the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which he had
helped pass back in 1975.
Political analysts offer many explanations for the extinction of
liberal Republicans. Some point to national disenchantment with large
public social programs, some to a backlash against the cultural shifts
of the 1960s, and some to the increasing conservativism of aging baby
boomers. Most of these explanations place the impetus on the mood of the
American electorate, suggesting that liberal Republicans
died out because they failed to adapt to the changing political climate.
I submit an alternative hypothesis: the liberal Republicans were hunted
into extinction by an invasive right-wing cousin.
]]>
It was no accident that the Rockefeller Republicans began to
disappear in the late 1970s. President Richard Nixon resigned in August
1974, and Gerald Ford, a moderate Republican, assumed the presidency.
When Ford selected Nelson Rockefeller as his vice-president,
conservative Republicans went apoplectic. Richard Viguerie, an
ambitious, talented, and extremely conservative political fundraiser,
wrote,
Nelson Rockefeller--the high-flying, wild-spending leader of the
Eastern Liberal Establishment. As a conservative Republican, I could
hardly have been more upset if Ford had selected Teddy Kennedy.
The day after Ford's announcement, Viguerie organized a meeting with
some fifteen conservative friends to discuss strategies for stopping
Rockefeller from becoming vice-president. One of the participants was
Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of
Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. While Viguerie ultimately concluded that
they couldn't stop the appointment, the meeting spurred him to launch
an initiative to challenge Republican leadership and empower the right
wing. The movement that he and Weyrich subsequently spawned became known
as the New Right.
The New Right bore much in common with today's Tea Party. Its
adherents were extremely hostile to liberals and intolerant of any
dissent from conservative principles. They were suspicious of government
and emphasized social issues, like abortion and school prayer. And they
were full of hate. Weyrich described the conflict between conservative
Christians and liberal "secular humanists" as "the most significant
battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces
of God and the forces against God, that we have seen in our country."
Viguerie deliberately exploited anger and fear in his direct mail
campaigns to white Christian voters. "People are motivated by anger and
fear much more so than positive emotions," he explained in a 2005
interview, "You get people's attention stronger than you would if you
speak in a more positive way." (In the same interview, Viguerie sought
to defend his negative marketing campaigns by alluding to slavery and
civil rights. "It's sometimes very good to have anger," he explained,
"Abraham Lincoln was very angry about slavery. Martin Luther King was
very angry about how minorities and African-Americans were treated back
in the 50s and 60s." Viguerie would know. He raised millions of dollars
for George Wallace's racist, anti-civil rights presidential campaign.)
Like the Tea Party, the New Right also sought to harness grassroots
activism to challenge the Republican establishment and purge legislators
that they deemed insufficiently conservative. For instance, in 1978 the
New Right supported primary challenges to Clifford Case, a four-term
Republican senator from New Jersey, and Edward Brooke, a two-term black
Republican senator from Massachusetts. Case lost in primary, Brooke won,
but both seats went to Democrats in the general election--two fewer
Rockefeller Republicans in the Senate.
In one of his most brazen undertakings, Viguerie also targeted the
House Republican Caucus chair, John B. Anderson (R-IL), the number three
ranking Republican in the House. Don Lyon, a fundamentalist minister,
challenged Anderson in the Republican primary, denouncing him as a
turncoat conservative who now "comes back talking like some god of the
East. Viguerie supported the challenge with fundraising letters that
called Anderson "part of the liberal establishment clique." Anderson
complained to the press of a deliberate right-wing crusade against him,
I'm the test case for this whole effort to purge the Republican Party
of any progressive element. Mine is an early primary, and if they can
defeat the chairman of the House Republican Conference, they can put the
fear of God into a lot of other Republicans.
Much as today's right-wing Tea Party has captured the attention and
interest of the media, the political pundits of 1978 obsessed over the
challenge from the New Right. One popular columnist, commenting on the
Anderson race, wrote,
The Republican 'left' has been shrinking even faster than the party
itself has been. Today, the GOP is a conservative party, with less
diversity than exists within Britain's Labor and Conservative parties,
and more ideological uniformity than any major American party has had in
this century.
The journalist who wrote these words back in 1978 was George Will,
the Pulitzer-winning conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
(Republican Party circa 1978 to George Will: "You ain't seen nothin'
yet.")
[CUE PSYCHEDELIC FLASHBACK TRANSITION AGAIN]
I've spoken to many liberals who are complacent about the Tea Party
challenges, figuring that American voter will ultimately reject
extremists. In some elections, that will happen. For instance, in
congressional district NY-23 last year, Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman knocked out Republican Dede Scozzafava, which resulted in the seat going to Democrat Bill Owen. But our
journey with the Ghost of Republican Past suggests that this game is not
about a single election. The Republicans lost seats to purges in 1978,
but sixteen years later, they swept the elections took control of both
Houses for the first time since 1954. By then, there were scarcely any
liberal Republicans left, and the moderates too had begun to decline,
resulting in a conservative-dominated government that would have shocked
Americans of the 1960s.
The Ghost of Republican Future might show us a G.O.P. that is even
more extreme and less diverse than today's conservative-dominated party.
And it might show us a government controlled by this same party. To
assume otherwise is to ignore the Ghost of Republican Past.
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I'm currently writing a book about right-wing paranoia, How
Bill O'Reilly Saved Christmas, and Other Right-Wing Persecution
Fantasies, to be published in October. For details and
updates, please become a fan on Facebook.
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