At first glance, the decision by congressional Republican leaders on Monday to strip Representative Steve King of his committee assignments for remarks last week defending white supremacy last week appears to be an example of the party stepping in to police its own extremists. But it’s actually the opposite.
The condemnations of Mr. King, now in his ninth term in Congress, come only after years of ignoring his white-nationalist rhetoric — and address what is merely the tip of a vast iceberg.
People took little notice when, over the weekend, President Trump approvingly cited a column from Pat Buchanan about the border wall that described the Democratic Party as “hostile to white men.”
The president’s shout-out was a reminder that the Republican Party’s dalliance with radicalism goes beyond his presidency and long predates it. For more than a half-century, two characteristics have defined what we term the “Long New Right”: a politics centered on mobilizing group resentment and conflict, and a determined refusal to police boundaries.
By building an electoral coalition to give it power and winning factional battles to control its agenda, the Long New Right ultimately captured the Republican Party — and fatefully rendered it permeable to extremist forces it lacks either the will or ability to challenge.
Unless party leaders draw and enforce meaningful boundaries and develop a more appealing economic agenda for the Republican rank-and-file, the party will continue its dance with extremists after Mr. Trump departs the scene.
Today’s Republican Party, both pro- and anti-Trump, tells a shared origin story: A “remnant” of conservative thinkers toiling in the wilderness of the postwar liberal consensus developed an ideological agenda blending traditional morality and free-market economics, popularized it in the pages of National Review, and inspired the movement to win Barry Goldwater the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and, eventually, to put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Missing from this story is a key point: Postwar American conservatism was forged in battles over extremists. A formative fight for many movement founders concerned Senator Joe McCarthy’s reckless crusade against Communists. Before founding National Review, William F. Buckley, then in his 20s, was a co-author of a 1954 book that offered what might be called a full-throated anti-anti-McCarthy case. It separated McCarthy the flawed man from McCarthyism the worthy “program of action against those in our land who help the enemy.” On civil rights, Buckley would eschew even such “anti-anti” arguments in favor of openly defending Jim Crow.
In the later 1950s and early 1960s, Buckley’s circle of movement ideologists regularly intermingled with harder-edged actors. It was a world populated by conservative book clubs and advocacy groups, Bible-pounding anti-Communist crusaders and the secretive John Birch Society, with its tens of thousands of members and well-earned reputation for gonzo conspiracism.
Contrary to movement myth, Buckley did not “purge” the Birchers from the movement in the 1960s. National Review articles in 1962 singled out the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, for personal condemnation while sparing ordinary members of his organization. (A more full-throated attack on the group followed three years later, but only after Goldwater’s defeat.)
Goldwater, too, criticized Welch personally — but went no further. His campaign was powered by best-selling tracts like Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice, Not an Echo,” steeped in the Birchers’ baroquely paranoid style. A who’s who of the hard right, including the anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, enthusiastically supported his candidacy, and the campaign did little to disavow them.
Even the party establishment that resisted Goldwater’s nomination blanched at calling out extremism. A proposed platform plank at the convention denouncing extremism and explicitly naming the Birch Society failed to find support even from Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney. By the early 1980s, long into the Birch Society’s decline, Republicans would feel less reason than ever to hide or apologize for engaging Birchers; the Society’s magazine, The Review of the News, featured interviews with the likes of Dick Cheney and Chuck Grassley.
The next generation of conservative movement activists, including Paul Weyrich (a key mentor of Newt Gingrich), Morton Blackwell and Richard Viguerie, adopted a more pugilistic approach that brought together radical and mainstream elements on the right. In the 1970s, they avoided traditional Republican small-government political appeals in favor of mobilizations over busing, abortion and gay rights while courting the segregationist George Wallace’s followers and brokering a fateful alliance between Christian evangelicals and the Republican Party.
The New Right formed think tanks, advocacy groups and political action committees to do the work they didn’t trust the formal party to do. Parties “are no more than instruments, temporary and disposable,” declared the Maryland congressman Bob Bauman at 1975’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
This troublemaking activism irked party officials like Ronald Reagan’s first Republican National Committee chairman, Richard Richards, who called the outside groups “loose cannonballs on the deck of a ship.” But their approach eventually came to dominate, thanks to the expanding right-wing media ecosystem, primary voters, and direct-mail fund-raising dollars. The refusal to police boundaries evolved from an ethos to a structural feature of the political world built by the Long New Right.
For decades, the Long New Right has depended on buy-in from moneyed interests within the Republican coalition. The grass-roots right may have disliked the plutocrats’ economic agenda, but they repeatedly accepted it to gain access to power. For their part, the plutocrats may have regarded the New Right as uncouth and their social agenda divisive, but they, too, preferred it to any available alternative.
The Trump presidency, featuring fights over a wall with Mexico alongside corporate tax cuts, embodies this enduring bargain. Whatever President Trump’s fate, as long as the core economic agenda of the party’s funders remains unpopular, Republicans will have to stoke group resentment to win elections.
While the party doesn’t lack for proposals that would update its outdated, plutocrat-friendly agenda — see the books and proposals from Oren Cass, Henry Olsen and figures around the Niskanen Center, to name a few — changing this dynamic will not come easy, certainly not as easy as various Never Trumpers imagine. The hard, sustained political work in the trenches will require both meaningful shifts in the Republican Party’s program, toward policies that speak to the material welfare of its constituents, and robust party organization with the means and the will to contain the fever swamps.
In the long run, the danger on the right is not just Republicans’ problem, but all of ours. American democracy depends on the Grand Old Party learning to secure its own borders.
Sam Rosenfeld, an assistant professor of political science at Colgate University, is the author of “The Polarizers.” Daniel Schlozman, an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “When Movements Anchor Parties.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Why Steve King’s Punishment Took So Long
Opinion | Why Steve King’s Punishment Took So Long
At first glance, the decision by congressional Republican leaders on Monday to strip Representative Steve King of his committee assignments for remarks last week defending white supremacy last week appears to be an example of the party stepping in to police its own extremists. But it’s actually the opposite.
The condemnations of Mr. King, now in his ninth term in Congress, come only after years of ignoring his white-nationalist rhetoric — and address what is merely the tip of a vast iceberg.
People took little notice when, over the weekend, President Trump approvingly cited a column from Pat Buchanan about the border wall that described the Democratic Party as “hostile to white men.”
The president’s shout-out was a reminder that the Republican Party’s dalliance with radicalism goes beyond his presidency and long predates it. For more than a half-century, two characteristics have defined what we term the “Long New Right”: a politics centered on mobilizing group resentment and conflict, and a determined refusal to police boundaries.
By building an electoral coalition to give it power and winning factional battles to control its agenda, the Long New Right ultimately captured the Republican Party — and fatefully rendered it permeable to extremist forces it lacks either the will or ability to challenge.
Unless party leaders draw and enforce meaningful boundaries and develop a more appealing economic agenda for the Republican rank-and-file, the party will continue its dance with extremists after Mr. Trump departs the scene.
Today’s Republican Party, both pro- and anti-Trump, tells a shared origin story: A “remnant” of conservative thinkers toiling in the wilderness of the postwar liberal consensus developed an ideological agenda blending traditional morality and free-market economics, popularized it in the pages of National Review, and inspired the movement to win Barry Goldwater the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and, eventually, to put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Missing from this story is a key point: Postwar American conservatism was forged in battles over extremists. A formative fight for many movement founders concerned Senator Joe McCarthy’s reckless crusade against Communists. Before founding National Review, William F. Buckley, then in his 20s, was a co-author of a 1954 book that offered what might be called a full-throated anti-anti-McCarthy case. It separated McCarthy the flawed man from McCarthyism the worthy “program of action against those in our land who help the enemy.” On civil rights, Buckley would eschew even such “anti-anti” arguments in favor of openly defending Jim Crow.
In the later 1950s and early 1960s, Buckley’s circle of movement ideologists regularly intermingled with harder-edged actors. It was a world populated by conservative book clubs and advocacy groups, Bible-pounding anti-Communist crusaders and the secretive John Birch Society, with its tens of thousands of members and well-earned reputation for gonzo conspiracism.
Contrary to movement myth, Buckley did not “purge” the Birchers from the movement in the 1960s. National Review articles in 1962 singled out the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, for personal condemnation while sparing ordinary members of his organization. (A more full-throated attack on the group followed three years later, but only after Goldwater’s defeat.)
Goldwater, too, criticized Welch personally — but went no further. His campaign was powered by best-selling tracts like Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice, Not an Echo,” steeped in the Birchers’ baroquely paranoid style. A who’s who of the hard right, including the anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, enthusiastically supported his candidacy, and the campaign did little to disavow them.
Even the party establishment that resisted Goldwater’s nomination blanched at calling out extremism. A proposed platform plank at the convention denouncing extremism and explicitly naming the Birch Society failed to find support even from Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney. By the early 1980s, long into the Birch Society’s decline, Republicans would feel less reason than ever to hide or apologize for engaging Birchers; the Society’s magazine, The Review of the News, featured interviews with the likes of Dick Cheney and Chuck Grassley.
The next generation of conservative movement activists, including Paul Weyrich (a key mentor of Newt Gingrich), Morton Blackwell and Richard Viguerie, adopted a more pugilistic approach that brought together radical and mainstream elements on the right. In the 1970s, they avoided traditional Republican small-government political appeals in favor of mobilizations over busing, abortion and gay rights while courting the segregationist George Wallace’s followers and brokering a fateful alliance between Christian evangelicals and the Republican Party.
The New Right formed think tanks, advocacy groups and political action committees to do the work they didn’t trust the formal party to do. Parties “are no more than instruments, temporary and disposable,” declared the Maryland congressman Bob Bauman at 1975’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
This troublemaking activism irked party officials like Ronald Reagan’s first Republican National Committee chairman, Richard Richards, who called the outside groups “loose cannonballs on the deck of a ship.” But their approach eventually came to dominate, thanks to the expanding right-wing media ecosystem, primary voters, and direct-mail fund-raising dollars. The refusal to police boundaries evolved from an ethos to a structural feature of the political world built by the Long New Right.
For decades, the Long New Right has depended on buy-in from moneyed interests within the Republican coalition. The grass-roots right may have disliked the plutocrats’ economic agenda, but they repeatedly accepted it to gain access to power. For their part, the plutocrats may have regarded the New Right as uncouth and their social agenda divisive, but they, too, preferred it to any available alternative.
The Trump presidency, featuring fights over a wall with Mexico alongside corporate tax cuts, embodies this enduring bargain. Whatever President Trump’s fate, as long as the core economic agenda of the party’s funders remains unpopular, Republicans will have to stoke group resentment to win elections.
While the party doesn’t lack for proposals that would update its outdated, plutocrat-friendly agenda — see the books and proposals from Oren Cass, Henry Olsen and figures around the Niskanen Center, to name a few — changing this dynamic will not come easy, certainly not as easy as various Never Trumpers imagine. The hard, sustained political work in the trenches will require both meaningful shifts in the Republican Party’s program, toward policies that speak to the material welfare of its constituents, and robust party organization with the means and the will to contain the fever swamps.
In the long run, the danger on the right is not just Republicans’ problem, but all of ours. American democracy depends on the Grand Old Party learning to secure its own borders.
Sam Rosenfeld, an assistant professor of political science at Colgate University, is the author of “The Polarizers.” Daniel Schlozman, an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “When Movements Anchor Parties.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article