Talking Baseball (and Mitt Romney)

[This post is not even remotely historical. I'm not even pretending.]

Campaigning in Michigan the other day, Mitt Romney got one of those questions that has nothing substantive to do with politics, but can have actual political consequences:

"Tigers or Red Sox?"

"Oh, Red Sox, I'm afraid," Romney answered. "I've lived in Massachusetts for how many years now? Forty years."

That really is the perfect Romney line, isn't it? If I had to script just one line that would capture everything that people who don't like Romney don't like about Romney, I think that would be it.

Let me explain. As I see it, the essence of Mitt Romney's problem connecting politically is the feeling many of us get that there is no there there, that there is nothing you can hold onto and depend upon about the guy. For any true-blue fan of any sports team, this Romney reply says exactly that.

I was born and raised in New Jersey, to parents who both grew up in New York City. We lived my entire childhood in the New York media market. My teams growing up were the New York Giants in football and the New York Mets in baseball. I got the former from my dad who has rooted for the Giants almost as long as there has been a team called the Giants.

I picked up the Mets on my own, probably influenced by the hysteria over the 1969 Miracle Mets (though I don't actually remember following them at that time). But I was a full-fledged fan in plenty of time to share the agony of Willie Mays, captured in this picture from the 1973 World Series which the Mets lost in seven games to the Oakland A's. That image of Mays, one of the greatest to ever play the game, is seared into my memory.

Willie Mays argues with umpire Augie Donatelli after teammate Bud Harrelson was thrown out at home plate in Game 2 of the 1973 World Series in Oakland, CA on October 14, 1973. Photo by Jerry Cooke/ Sports Illustrated/ Getty Images

I left New Jersey in 1985 for graduate school in Texas. Since then, I've lived in New Jersey for maybe a total of four years. I've lived in South Carolina for over ten years now. But you know what? Those are still my teams.

When a friend and colleague with season tickets to the Carolina Panthers invited me to join him at the Panthers-Giants game some years ago, I proudly wore my Giants cap to the stadium in Charlotte. I didn't become a Panthers fan. Because real fans do not abandon their allegiance to the team they grew up rooting for just because they move to someplace else. Because it's about staying loyal.

Because being a fan of that team, your team, becomes part of your identity. It's the team your dad rooted for, the team you and your dad watched together when you were a kid. When my Giants made their amazing run this year, ending with a Super Bowl victory, in my family there was series of emails after each improbable victory: my dad, my brother, my sister's son, and by extension, my nephew's infant son who was born right before the Giants began their run. (In my family, little Ryan is responsible for all of those Giant victories. And don't dare try to tell us any differently.)

Being a fan--a real fan--is a part of who you are, and you stay true to who you are. That doesn't change because you move out of state.

But Romney? He moved to Massachusetts, so he roots for the Red Sox. Of course he does.

Romney may have thought he was saying the politically brave thing, since he was in Michigan at that moment, talking to Michigan reporters, and went with the Red Sox rather than Michigan's Detroit Tigers. But then, naturally, he had to claim the Tigers, too.

"I grew up as a Tigers fan, of course, and Al Kaline was my hero." But then, you know, he moved, so ...

New state, new team. New political race, new ideology.

Really, it is just perfect. As president, I guess he'd be a Nationals fan. It would serve him right.

"The Effort to Americanize the Catholic Church"

John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore, became the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States in 1789. As Daniel Walker Howe notes in his Pulitzer Prize winning history, What Hath God Wrought, just how he became bishop is worthy of note: he was "elected bishop by his clerical colleagues."

Those who know how the Catholic Church operates know that this is not how things are generally done in Rome. It was, however, how things were generally done in the United States. So Rome discreetly (and wisely) let that one slide.

Howe says that Carroll "undertook to demonstrate to a skeptical public that his church could reconcile itself to republicanism" and that "American Catholics embraced freedom of religion." When the pope appointed John England Bishop of Charleston in 1820, England

carried the effort to Americanize the Catholic Church still further, creating a written constitution for his diocese that included participation by elected delegates, clerical and lay, in an annual convention.

All of these efforts to be more American had a single source: the knowledge that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority did not trust Catholics, believed they were under the direct control of the pope, and thus were not really good Americans, because they could not be good republicans.

The connection between anti-republicanism and Catholicism was not just a paranoid Protestant delusion. In fact, the Catholic Church in Europe at the time was closely aligned with the post-French Revolution conservative ideology that explicitly rejected constitutional government.

Writing in 1814, Joseph de Maistre, perhaps the foremost conservative thinker of his time, said the idea that a "sovereign could reign legitimately only by the deliberation of the whole people, that is to say, by the grace of the people," was an absurd idea "which will never happen."

That absurd idea also happened to be the cornerstone of American government, as stated in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

For de Maistre, constitutions were "divine" in origin and not to be written down by men:

What is written is nothing.... Man cannot make a constitution, and no legitimate constitution can ever be written ... almost always these declarations are the effect or the cause of very great evils, and they always cost people more than they are worth.

This conservative ideology in Europe was supported by the Catholic Church. It was antithetical to American constitutional government. That was the root of the suspicions American Catholics needed to overcome in American politics. No wonder Carroll and England made a point of choosing leaders "by the grace of the people" and having a constitution for the diocese.

The tension between the moral absolutes of religious beliefs and the demands of pluralism in a religiously diverse republic has always been there. It emerged again rather dramatically last week.

I come from a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools for twelve years, so I was not terribly surprised when the bishops objected to the requirement that the health insurance offered by Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities cover contraception.

Given that Catholics have long been a part of the Democratic Party's coalition, I was also not surprised that there was backlash within the party against the Obama administration's decision, nor that the president quickly realized that he needed to find a way to accommodate the objections.

What surprised me somewhat was the rejection of that accommodation by the bishops.

Before that, I think one could argue that the bishops had the moral and political high ground. But once Obama made a good faith effort to accommodate their objection, by making the insurance companies themselves responsible for offering contraception coverage, and not requiring the Catholic institutions to pay for it, they ceded that high ground.

By rejecting the president's proposal, they have reversed the religious liberty dynamic. Before, they could plausibly claim that the rule amounted to forcing them to act in a way contrary to their religious beliefs. But their new demand is "removing the provision from the health care law altogether." In other words, because the Catholic Church finds contraception morally objectionable, no employer should be required to provide insurance that covers contraception.

By insisting that the Church (and any other employer) be granted the right to deny certain coverage to their employees--even if those employees do not share their faith, even if the coverage is being offered free of charge to the employee directly by the insurer--the bishops have now entered the realm of insisting that their religious beliefs trump the rights of their employees.

As a result, this is no longer (if it ever was) about the government imposing its views on the Church--it is about the Church seeking to impose its beliefs as government policy. And that the Church has no right to do.

That the bishops cannot see the difference between these two things shows an unthinking ignorance of American history and the American system of government. Those early American Catholic bishops understood that they had to find a way to both faithfully practice their religion and politically assimilate to the culture within which they tended to their flock.

Despite their best efforts, for well over a century and a half, American Catholics labored under the bigoted assumption that if they gained national political power, they would try to use it to impose their religious beliefs on others. Over the last fifty years, that bigotry has largely disappeared.

(This line made the rounds on Twitter last week: "Fifty years ago, they were afraid JFK would listen to the pope. Now they're mad that Obama doesn't.")

Ironically, now that it is no longer burdened by that bigotry, the Church has seemingly lost its sensitivity to the political culture. Encouraged by opportunistic Republicans (who also don't really understand the difference), the Catholic bishops have put themselves in a position where one can plausibly argue that the bishops are trying to do the kind of thing the bigots always said they would do.

In doing so, the bishops have done a terrible disservice to every American Catholic over the last two hundred plus years who labored long and hard to demonstrate that Catholics can be good Americans, ones who can practice their faith devoutly without seeking to impose it on anyone else.

"You Republicans" and "We Conservatives"

I was reading last week about the 1940 presidential election for a book I'm working on. Coinciding as it did with Mitt Romney's latest stumble on his way to the Republican nomination, I couldn't help thinking he had a few things in common with the GOP's standard bearer that year, Wendell Willkie.

After being crushed in consecutive elections by FDR, Republicans were desperate for a winner in 1940. Prior to 1932, Republicans were accustomed to winning presidential elections: from 1896 through 1928, they won seven out of nine contests. The only exceptions were 1912 and 1916. In the former, the Republican vote split between the sitting Republican president William Howard Taft and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, delivering the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson who got just 41.8% of the popular vote. Four years later, Wilson eked out a narrow re-election victory.

In short, Republicans had come to feel the presidency really belonged to them before FDR. Going into the 1940 campaign, they had two reasons to hope for a comeback: 1) FDR might not be a candidate, because of the two-term tradition; and 2) though the economy was much improved from the depths of the depression in 1932, it was nowhere near true recovery (unemployment was down from 25% to between 14 and 15%).

The problem for the Republicans was that they had not come to any consensus about their way forward as a party. Should they hold onto the low-tax, laissez-faire approach (which many Americans still blamed for the depression) and fight for repeal of the entire New Deal, or reconcile themselves to a "New Deal Lite" policy that merely promised to manage the new social welfare programs better?

As a result, the Republican convention was torn in 1940, needing six ballots to settle at last on a nominee: corporate lawyer and businessman Wendell Willkie. 

Willkie was an odd choice. He had never held elective office. He had been a delegate to the 1932 Democratic convention. 

That fact alone made him highly suspect to many Republicans (and reminds one of Romney's vote in the 1992 Democratic primary, as well as his past claims to be a "moderate" with "progressive" policies).  

One former Republican senator had this reaction to the thought of this former Democrat getting the GOP nomination:

If a whore repented and wanted to join the church, I'd personally welcome her and lead her up the aisle to a pew. But, by the Eternal, I'd not ask her to lead the choir the first night.

Yet this convert bested elected Republican officials like Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, because the business wing of the party and the liberal eastern establishment supported his nomination--because they thought they could control him.

But when it came time to speak to the convention, Willkie slipped. As he finished his acceptance speech, he said:

And so, you Republicans, I call upon you to join me, help me. The cause is great. We must win.

That phrase was the tell: "you Republicans." Willkie had given away the game. Deep down, he didn't really consider himself a Republican.

I couldn't help but think of that phrase when I heard Mitt Romney at CPAC on Friday repeatedly say things like "we, as conservatives ..." He used some form of the word "conservative" over twenty times. He was so intent to avoid pulling a Willkie, that he repeatedly did the anti-Willkie.

The effect, however, was much the same. He was so desperate to say that he is a conservative that he undermined the case that he is one.

There are, of course, many differences between Willkie and Romney, but some of the parallels are telling.

One is the absence of ideological clarity, the focus (in both cases) on "electability."

In 1940, Willkie got the nomination because enough Republicans feared that a real Republican, someone too much like Herbert Hoover, would lose. Though they would have been loathe to admit it openly, they recognized that things like Social Security had been accepted by the public. More importantly, the public had also largely accepted the general idea that the federal government should have a role in managing the economy and mitigating the wild swings of the unregulated market. Willkie would not be a hard-edged ideologue, he would win over disgruntled Democrats, he could win.

As I have noted recently, many of today's Republicans also seem more concerned with defeating President Obama than deciding what exactly the party's principles should be. While they are united in pledging to abolish what they call "Obamacare," you'll rarely hear them say that they want to go back to allowing insurance companies to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions, or that they want to throw children under 26 off their parents' policies. They rail against the individual mandate, but can't agree on why they do. What they all agree on is that they want to beat Obama, and will support whoever seems most likely to do that.

Second, in both cases, the party looked to a businessman, someone who had not served politically in Washington, someone who claimed expertise as a manager and executive who could run things more efficiently.

As David Kennedy notes in Freedom From Fear, Willkie was "a leading spokesman for those in the business community who felt themselves aggrieved by the New Deal." He would restore a pro-business climate. Willkie did not explicitly reject the New Deal, but he "denounced the Democrats as having acquired vested political interest in the Depression and therefore as having willfully throttled the wealth-making and job-creating potential of private enterprise." 

It takes little imagination to hear Romney saying precisely that about Obama. While Romney served as a governor (and was, as he told CPAC, a "severely conservative" one), his campaign has focused overwhelmingly on his private sector experience in a way that emphasizes pragmatic management more than ideology.

One major difference, however, would be foreign policy.

In 1940, most of the other Republican candidates for president were from the isolationist wing of the party. Though most Americans remained determined to avoid direct involvement in the war, they supported FDR's efforts to aid Britain short of war. So did Willkie.

Willkie even went so far as refusing to exploit foreign policy in the campaign. When FDR decided to send 50 old destroyers to Britain in early September 1940, Willkie did not make an issue of it. When two weeks later the administration supported a peace-time draft, Willkie was told that opposing it would help him politically. But he favored it. Willkie replied, "I'd rather not win the election than do that."

I'd like to think that, if the issue were important enough, Romney would say the same. But given his rank opportunism and foreign policy demagoguery so far in this campaign, I can't say I'm confident he would.

(To be fair, even Willkie, in his desperation late in the campaign, called the destroyers-for-bases deal "the most dictatorial act ever taken by an American president," and dabbled in some FDR-as-war-monger rhetoric.)

In the end, Willkie lost. That was most likely because, with the world in flames, most Americans wanted FDR's experienced hand on the wheel. But that's not how Republican conservatives saw it.

Historian Richard Ketchum says that for "twenty-four years the resentment would fester, the schism would be unresolved."  At the 1964 convention, 

Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen rose on the floor ..., pointed a finger at the New York and Pennsylvania delegations, led by Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, and shouted at those reminders of Wendell Willkie: 'You led us down the road to defeat ...' And at last the Old Guard chose one of its own, Barry Goldwater, only to see him crushed in the worst defeat in any presidential election to that time.

If Romney gets this nomination and loses in the fall, it won't take 24 years. In four years, the Tea Party and conservative wing will likely say "You led us down the road to defeat" to the establishment, and chose one of its own.

If that happens, the big, historic question will be this: will that nominee end up being Goldwater in 1964, or Reagan in 1980?

The Republicans: The New Whigs?

I've never seen a poll on this, but I'd guess that most Americans couldn't identify the Whigs. Of all the major political parties in American history (defined as those that got at least one president elected), they remain the most obscure. Their brief history, however, is looking strangely relevant to me these days.

The Whigs were one of the two major parties in what American historians call the second party system. The first party system was the Federalists (led by Washington, Adams, and Hamilton) and the Republicans (led by Jefferson and Madison), which lasted roughly from the 1790s to the 1810s. The third is today's Democrats and Republicans, which emerged in the mid-1850s. In between was the second, made up of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs.

I've always found it a bit of challenge to teach about the Whigs, because they represented an odd collection of views. The very name reflected their amorphous identity.

The name has two meanings. Since they claimed as a foundational principle a dedication to the republican government of the Founders, and the Whigs were the anti-monarchy party in Britain, the American Whigs adopted the same name.

There was a second meaning, however. On a practical level, one of the organizing principles of the party was its opposition to Andrew Jackson, whose high-handed style led them to label him "King Andrew." So the American "Whigs" were the opponents of the "King," Andrew Jackson.

This led to some odd political bedfellows in the Whig Party. While it is certainly possible to identify a Whig ideology (active government, particularly in pursuit of economic development), there were also members of the party who were not supporters of the ideology, but who sided with the Whigs out of an anti-Jackson animus.

So, for example, when Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun and the state of South Carolina during the nullification crisis of 1832-33--despite the fact that the Democrats were the party of states rights--some of the more vehement supporters of states rights joined the Whigs.

The resulting ideological incoherence came out in the presidential election of 1840, the first the party ever won. To hold together its diverse anti-Jackson coalition in the race against Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, the Whigs nominated the old Indian-fighting general, William Henry Harrison.

For most Americans, that campaign is remembered (if at all) for its alliterative slogan: "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!" John Tyler, the vice-presidential candidate, was in the words of Daniel Walker Howe an "eccentric Virginia state-righter," who joined the Whigs "because he found Andrew Jackson high-handed."

The Whigs, as Howe notes, "possessed a more coherent program" than the Democrats, but when Harrison died only month into his presidency, Tyler--who did not believe in most of that program--became president. He then proceeded to thwart his own party on important issues such as a national bank and tariff policy. The ideological incoherence of the Whigs wrecked their first administration.

What does this have to do with today?

My last post examined the ways that various forms of conservative thinking have been clashing below the mudslinging surface in the Republican debates. This, I argue, suggests an ideological cracking up of the Reagan coalition that has survived and prospered since 1980.

What holds it together? Right now, one thing: hatred of Barack Obama.

No matter how nasty things get in this primary season, all of the candidates and their surrogates return to that theme: the need to defeat Obama. After winning the Florida primary Tuesday, Mitt Romney tweeted:

Thank you FL! While we celebrate this victory, we must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.

Whenever they are searching for unity, they go back to that.

That's fairly natural. Obama is the incumbent president, after all. But there is a particularly harsh edge to it this time. It's personal, it's vitriolic, it's irrational. And it's potent.

That is what reminds me so much of the 1830s: the tendency to reduce the party platform to the opposition to an individual, to personalize everything. It is no coincidence that its enemies never call it "The Affordable Care Act," but rather "ObamaCare." There is a whole "King Obama" meme on the internet, like this Photoshopping of Obama's head onto a famous painting of Emperor Napoleon.

The effects of another Obama term are put in apocalyptic terms. It's not his policies, but his person. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, in a Romney radio ad, says: "America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama." Seriously? Cannot survive? This, from the campaign whose slogan is "Believe in America"?

Of course, apocalyptic rhetoric is practically the norm in American presidential elections. One Whig, in the 1840 campaign, said the following about President Van Buren:

Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order, there you may be certain of a voter for Van Buren.

Republicans today would need to do little more than change the name.

There is, of course, not much evidence put forth to justify the gloom and doom. As comedian Bill Maher noted, the opposition to Obama is mostly to a deluded fantasy of the man, not the actual president: "Republicans have created this completely fictional president ... The Republican hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling about what he might do, what he's thinking, what he secretly wants to change."

Note how Gingrich put it Tuesday night: "If Barack Obama gets re-elected, it will be a disaster for the United States of America, make no bones about it.... you can’t imagine how radical he’ll be in his second term." No, Newt, I can't. Because he has never been a radical president, outside of your fevered imagination. The Republican caricature of "Obama the radical" is nothing but imagining.

(Again, this is not unlike the Whig caricature of Jackson--he was called "King Andrew," but his era is now more commonly known as the "Age of the Common Man," because of the democratizing forces that brought him into office.)

What the Republican Party as an institution needed more than anything after the George W. Bush years was some serious ideological self-examination. The Tea Party, for all its many faults, was at least in part an attempt to begin that process. But if the pundits are right, and the nomination is now inevitably going to Mitt Romney, that will not happen.

Romney is a man without any ideological core. There is no ideological there there. He will say or do anything to be president. In poll after poll, Republican voters say that they support him mostly because he is seen as the most electable, the most likely to defeat Obama. The fact that he does not truly stand for anything is secondary to the hope that he will vanquish their fictional "King Obama."

Already, voices on the right are crying out in despair. This week an editorial in the Wall Street Journal began: "Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose."

And the target of their ire is the ostensible candidate of Wall Street, Mitt Romney:

Thus the core difference between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama: For the governor, the convictions are the veneer. For the president, the pragmatism is. Voters always see through this. They usually prefer the man who stands for something.

Another voice from the right, of a more Tea Party bent, had this to say:

The Establishment could not have made a more strategic blunder. They will, in all likelihood, succeed in securing the nomination for Mitt Romney, but the damage they have inflicted upon themselves is approaching irreversible. The public now sees the length to which the Establishment will go to make certain their hand-picked candidate is chosen regardless of the dire circumstances facing the nation. 

Average Republican or conservative voters are the same people that buy the books or magazines or subscribe to the websites ... A number of them (how many is anyone's guess right now) will no longer be willing to support those factions within the Establishment and the Party or to believe what they are told. These are the people suffering the consequences of the disastrous policies pursued over previous decades, while those in the Establishment live lives of relative ease and comfort, which seems to be their primary concern.

The cracks are showing. For now, they are being papered over with posters bashing "King Obama." For all I know, given the hard economic times, that could be enough--for now.

Historian Michael Holt, the author of a comprehensive account of the Whigs, wrote:

the history of the Whig Party can best be understood in terms of a tension or balance between centrifugal forces that always threatened to tear it apart and the centripetal force of conflict with Democrats that held it together.

Under the strains of the polarized politics of the 1850s, the Whigs fell apart and disappeared.

Today, the Republicans are in no danger of disappearing, but they are being held together by their centripetal forces. Like the Whigs, they ignore the centrifugal forces of ideology at their peril.

"Nobody Has Defined What Being Conservative Means"

Last Thursday night saw the 19th Republican debate of the primary season. It has become fairly common to complain about the proliferation of these events. How much more is there really to learn about the candidates at this point?

Many people seem to view them as sporting events (something CNN has encouraged with the singing of the national anthem at the start), and the analysis almost always uses terms from sports: who won, were there any knockouts, who hit a home run.

Speaking as both an historian (see, I've been hearing way too much from Newt) and someone who has seen most of these debates, I think there is more going on than that. Despite the superficial nature of most of the analysis (and I've been as guilty of that at times as anyone), the recent debates in particular have begun to illuminate a significant conversation among the candidates about what "conservative" means in today's American political culture.

Not too surprisingly, Ron Paul, the candidate with the clearest and most consistent ideology, was also the one to identify the centrality of that question in the last debate. We have to decide what conservative means, he said.

For Paul, the answer is fairly simple and straightforward: "Conservative means smaller government and more liberty ... not to run a welfare state and police the world."

On that last point, Paul has most effectively distinguished himself from the rest of the pack. To one degree or another, all of the other candidates have embraced the idea that the United States not only can, but should--even must--be the leader of the entire world.

Ostensibly, there is consensus among the four candidates on the first part of his formula: smaller government. But once you start getting into particulars, the waters get considerably muddied.

From a historical perspective, that's also where it gets interesting.

I see at least four different strands of domestic conservatism running through American history, all of which have appeared in these debates: libertarian, states rights, Hamiltonian activist, and, for lack of a better term, social traditionalist.

They do not consistently line up with a given candidate. The various contenders adopt a given position to take advantage of a perceived weakness in another. But the strands are there.

The libertarian strand is of course mostly associated with Ron Paul, but it also crops up in the views of the others. At the last debate, it was most clearly on display during an extended exchange between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney on "RomneyCare" and the individual mandate, which also brought out the states rights and social traditionalist strands.

Since its passage, Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act has focused primarily on the individual mandate to require all citizens to either have insurance or pay a fine. The principle behind this opposition is basically libertarian: government cannot require a citizen to purchase insurance, because it violates personal liberty and is an unwarranted expansion of government's power.

Because Romney signed a health insurance law with an individual mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts, his opponents have relentlessly attacked him. In response, he has tried to seek refuge in states rights. Back in September, Romney said:

States have the right to mandate. States mandate kids go to school. The federal government can’t do that. States mandate that you have to buy auto insurance. The federal government can’t do that.

Such a response, however, is not entirely satisfying from a libertarian perspective. If a government action is oppressive, whether the oppression comes from the state or federal government is not particularly important.

Under persistent pressure from Santorum last Thursday, Romney tried another strand, the social traditionalist:

If you don't want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn't have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility. Either get the insurance or help pay for your care.

Romney here does a good job of making the case that, as I noted back in October 2010, the individual mandate is fundamentally a conservative idea. (Perhaps if it were known as the "no-free-rider clause" that would be more obvious.) Romney's strong argument here makes that clear: the individual mandate, with its rejection of freeloading, insists on personal responsibility--one of the cornerstones of conservative social traditionalism.

In this specific case, Santorum was taking an extreme libertarian stand, in opposition to the social traditionalist argument. On most issues, however, Santorum is a steadfast supporter of social traditionalism. While in his exchange with Romney he suggested that the individual mandate, even one implemented by a state, was oppressive ("in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated, as a condition of breathing ... to buy health insurance"), he has elsewhere argued that states should be allowed to ban birth control.

He has argued that this is a states rights issue, but it also coincides with his personal opposition to birth control (he has spoken of the "dangers of contraception" and has said that it harms women and society).

But when it comes to other issues, his social traditionalism trumps states rights. Santorum favors a federal ban on abortion and gay marriage--in other words, he opposes giving states the right to choose to allow either, even if majorities in some states approved of them, because to do so violates his social traditionalist concept of what is morally right. In such cases, he has no sympathy for the libertarian principle of personal freedom or for states rights.

Interestingly, Santorum also challenged the libertarian/free market primacy of low taxes in the January 21 debate in South Carolina:

We need a party that just doesn't talk about high finance and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates. We need to talk about how we're going to put men and women in this country, who built this country, back to work in this country in the manufacturing sector of our economy.

Though Santorum was far from explicit about it, he was endorsing here not untrammeled free markets, but positive government efforts specifically designed to redevelop the manufacturing sector of the economy. This is a far more activist role for government than the libertarianism he embraced in the health insurance exchange with Romney.

This Hamlitonian approach has a long conservative pedigree, going back to the 19th century Republicans, as well as the Whig Party before them. It embraces the idea that government should work deliberately and actively to produce particular economic ends in the national interest (railroads, e.g.), rather than leave that to the free market.

Santorum is not, however, consistently a Hamiltonian activist. For example, he reversed course and attacked Gingrich's "grandiose" plan for a moon base because government needs to do less:

to go out there and promise new programs and big ideas, that's a great thing to maybe get votes, but it's not a responsible thing when you have to go out and say that we have to start cutting programs, not talking about how to grow them.

Gingrich, not surprisingly, reverted to Hamiltonian form, and argued that government can and should do great things:

in response to what Rick said, when we balanced the budget with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and ultimately had four consecutive balanced budgets, we doubled the size of the National Institutes of Health because we set priorities. It is possible to do the right things in the right order to make this a bigger, richer, more exciting country. You don't just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done.

Gingrich neglects to note, of course, that those balanced budgets came under the Clinton era tax rates, which he and other Republicans now routinely decry as socialistic due to their reflexive obedience to the party's tax-cutting dogma. Newt's grandiose, Hamiltonian schemes would require far higher taxes than he can dare propose today.

I've written recently how Gingrich's attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital reflected a social traditionalist challenge to a libertarian (in this case, free market) conservatism, so I won't belabor that here.

My larger point is simply this: Paul is right. Nobody has defined what being conservative means. All drama aside, these debates have served to highlight the ideological disarray in today's Republican Party.

With the exception of Paul himself, none of the candidates consistently represents a clear vision of conservatism for the 21st century. Each one has, for short-run tactical reasons, adopted whatever strand of conservatism promises to advance his immediate political prospects vis a vis the others.  If, as seems inevitable, any of those three gets the nomination, the definition of "conservative" is likely to remain hopelessly muddied.

[In my next post, I plan to examine the role the right's hatred of President Obama plays in this disarray, and how it threatens to turn the Republicans into a modern-day version of the Whig Party.]

Newtpocalypse Now

Just as it seemed like we were about to see the Season Finale of the 2012 Republican race, we got a rerun. Newt is back. Again.

The big question is "why?"

I would like to think that Gingrich's victory was due to the fundamental questions he raised in his attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital. But everyone who saw the two debates last week knows that it was something else, something much more base and disturbing. Newt didn't win this primary with economic populism.

If Gingrich's victory in South Carolina on Saturday was in fact a Tea Party victory--and it is repeated elsewhere--then we will have to put to rest the idea that that movement is just about taxes and spending. It will be the culture war all over again.

It was, I think, extremely revealing to see Gingrich in victory. For one brief moment at the start, he actually seemed, as he said, "humbled." It didn't last long.

Within minutes, Gingrich seemed to forget he no longer had to demagogue for votes in South Carolina. But that's because the demagoguery he used here during the last week was nothing new. It was vintage Gingrich. You see, he's on a mission to save America.

As I've noted previously, Newt Gingrich is a child of the 1960s. His is not the 1960s of the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, anti-war demonstrations, and the sexual revolution, however, but of the opposition to all of those things.

I thought the most telling lines from his speech were those that clearly referred to Newt's pining for a bygone, pre-1960s, era. He unambiguously dated the start of the decline he proposes to reverse. He attacked the "elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system."

The decline began, in other words, in the early 1960s. In Newt's world, the progressive changes of all the years since amount to an attack on--or even the destruction of--what he calls "the America that we love." The proponents of those changes, he sneered, don't like "classical America."

(Somehow, this does not constitute "dividing" Americans in his book--since, of course, those "others" don't love "the America that we love" and thus are not real Americans.)

This is unabashedly reactionary politics. For all his dabbling in futurism, candidate Gingrich has his gaze fixed firmly on the past.

Nothing Gingrich said better demonstrated how out of touch with modern America he is than his extended ode to the diversity of the current Republican field. "We produce leadership from an amazing range of places," he said. "I watched tonight the fine speeches of the other three candidates on our side and I was struck by how much they reflected the openness of the American system.... You look at the four of us and you see that anyone can come from a wide range of backgrounds."

Think about that for a moment. A 68-year-old white man with a net worth in the millions of dollars, looked around him, saw three other fairly wealthy white men also running for president, and saw diversity, a "wide range of backgrounds." In what world is that true? In the America of the 1950s, of course.

Certainly, there are differences among the four--geographic, religious, economic, etc. Only Romney was born to wealth and privilege. But compare that to the last primary contest in the Democratic Party, that came down to a battle between a white woman and a black man, neither of whom would have been able to vote 100 years ago. That's what diversity looks like in modern America. And Newt's coded message to his supporters was that is not "the America that we love."

The rest of the speech, as others have noted, was a long list of resentments against various kinds of "elites." If it weren't so despicable, I could almost admire how effortlessly Gingrich appeals to bigotry without resorting to the overtly objectionable terms that the progress of the last half century has driven from polite political discourse.

He doesn't use racial epithets, he calls President Obama a "food stamp president" who wants "your children to have a life of dependence." He doesn't call him a communist, he says Obama isn't inspired by American exceptionalism but by "the radicalism of Saul Alinsky" and the ideas of "people who don't like the classical America." And, of course, Obama has "extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco."

This is not about taxes and spending. Those topics were barely mentioned by Gingrich. He has no real answers to our economic woes, other than the tired Republican bromides of cutting taxes and abolishing regulation. So, in the grand old reactionary tradition, he rails against imaginary threats like the "growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites."

That line worked in South Carolina, but will it work outside of South Carolina? Perhaps this state will prove an aberration, and Gingrich's reactionary culture war will not play elsewhere. The answer will be telling.

No doubt, part of Gingrich's strength was due to Romney's weakness. Back in November, before the Republican debate here at Wofford, a CBS News reporter asked me about the contest here:

"If you look at politicians who've done well in South Carolina historically - Strom Thurmond, Jim DeMint - generally speaking, they're people that at least the public perceives as straight shooters," Byrnes said, "I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable that they know who [Romney] is."

I think the results Saturday reflect that fact. Romney, bless his heart, tries to tap some of the same cultural anger and resentment that Gingrich does. Saturday night, he again said that this election is a fight "for the soul of America." But to most voters here (and elsewhere, I suspect), Romney comes across as someone without a soul--or, perhaps, as someone who would sell his soul for the presidency.

By contrast, when Gingrich turned his wrath on Juan Williams and (in the disgusting words of supporters here in South Carolina) "put him in his place," he seemed all too sincere and real.

"I articulate the deepest held values of the American people," Newt solemnly intoned. For anyone remotely familiar with the facts of Gingrich's life, that assertion was jaw-dropping. "Yes, you just don't live them!" is the only reasonable response.

But as I noted last month, Gingrich sees himself as a world-historical figure. His utter shamelessness comes from that conviction. Gingrich holds himself to a different standard. "It doesn't matter what I do," he told his second wife when she called him on his hypocrisy. "People need to hear what I have to say."

He believes he is above conventional morality, because only he can save civilization. He truly believes that. That conviction served him well in South Carolina, particularly when contrasted to Romney's self-evident falseness.

The irony is that the combination of "authenticity" and willingness to place ends over means was typical of the '60s leftist radicals Newt disdains. As George Will nicely put it, Gingrich "would have made a marvelous Marxist." Tactically, he is one.

Gingrich's portrait of Obama is a fantasy, a left-wing mirror image of Gingrich himself. The Manichean divide Newt presented Saturday night exists only in his mind--because, for him, it must exist. His reactionary ideology demands it. He needs Obama to be the embodiment of everything he despises, so that he can save America from disaster.

Last week, David Brooks observed: "I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

Gingrich's speech last night was the primal scream of that receding roar, and his current rise in the polls suggests that he and what he stands for will not go quietly.

Mitt Romney, Andrew Jackson, and the "Humble Members of Society"

Pundits are understandably fixating on Mitt Romney’s admission Tuesday that the tax rate on his income is “probably closer to the 15 percent rate” and that the over $370,000 he made in speaker’s fees last year was “not very much” of his income.

Much of the coverage has, I think, been misguided. For example, on NPR’s “The Takeaway” Wednesday morning, the anchor said Romney has been criticized for only paying 15 percent. I can’t speak for others, but I don’t think that’s the problem. No one I've heard has argued that Romney did anything wrong or illegal. No one is suggesting these are ill-gotten gains.

The point is one of economic justice.

The question is not “Is Romney doing something wrong?” but “Is this the right policy?” Romney simply presents a particularly stark example of the policy. And he happens to be running for president.

This is a man who, as he jokingly put it, is “unemployed.” He has been running for president for the last 5 years, but his investment income last year was somewhere between $5.5 and $37.3 million. (Some reports state that he receives $26 million a year from Bain, even though he has not worked there in over a decade.)

As Romney explained, “my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past, rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual.” In short, Romney’s money is making money, and that gets taxed at the lower, 15 percent rate.

According to our tax laws, such income—that which comes not from work but investment—gets preferred treatment in our tax code. Should it?

The standard defense of that policy is a practical one: if we want to encourage investment, we should tax income on investment at a lower rate, thus producing more investment and (hopefully) more economic activity.

The objection, on the other hand, is moral: is it right for government to give preferential treatment to income that comes not from daily labor but from the inherent advantage that accrues to those who already have money?

This is an old question in American politics. Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have debated the relative virtues of various means of making a living, and whether government policy should prefer one over another.

Andrew Jackson is perhaps the best example of an American president with a clear, unequivocal preference on that score. Newt Gingrich got boisterous applause from the South Carolina debate audience the other night when he said that Old Hickory’s attitude toward enemies of the US was “Kill them!” Had he cited Jackson’s attitudes toward workers, I suspect he would have gotten a rather different response.

Shortly after leaving office, Jackson wrote that unless “labor prospers, commerce and manufacturers must languish and the country be distressed. This is a government of the people, for their happiness and prosperity, and not for the sake of a few, at the expense of the many.” For Jackson, it was clear: the well-being of workers was paramount.

Jackson had a life-long disdain for people (especially bankers) who made money with money (though he was not above some land speculation himself), and for government policies that rewarded them:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes…. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

It is this question that we should be discussing: what economic policies produce justice? Newt Gingrich inadvertently began such a discussion with his attacks on Romney’s time at Bain. He has now backed off, due to the nearly unanimous condemnation of the GOP establishment, and switched to the evidently more "respectable" racial dog whistles.

This one form of income, capital gains, disproportionately benefits the wealthiest Americans. Alec MacGillis notes in The New Republic: “Half of all capital gains in the past 30 years have been claimed by the top tenth of a percent of taxpayers. (No, that's not a typo.)” Is this not an example of a law that undertakes to add an artificial distinction that makes the rich richer?

By shutting down any such debate in the primaries, the Republican Party in all likelihood is ceding this ground to President Obama in the fall campaign. They are poised to nominate a man who says, with all sincerity, that over $370,000 a year in speaking fees is “not very much” income, who proposes to lower the tax on that income from 35 percent to 25 percent, all while keeping the tax on his millions in investment income at 15 percent.

As I wrote last August, during the kerfuffle over Mitt’s new house: “the problem is not that Romney is rich. It is that he is rich and advocates policies that primarily advance the interests of the rich.”

Not only does Romney not have a good answer to the question of whether it is right to treat capital gains differently from earned income, he does not even understand the question. In his world, no one would even ask it. It is just as perplexing to him as the questions about Bain’s business tactics. Both seem self-evidently good to him, and people who challenge his views are merely envious.

Such an opponent might tempt Obama, who has already tried to claim the memory of the Republican Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, to channel Andrew Jackson, too.

As the first Democratic president, Jackson praised the “labouring classes” for taking “a noble stand against the corrupt money power.” In that, Jackson saw “ample proof that the peoples [sic] eyes are opening to the corruption of the times—the danger of their liberties from the mony [sic] power, and their determination to resist it…. Fear not, the people may be deluded for a moment, but cannot be corrupted.”

Romney, in his words, in his business record, and in his policy proposals, is emerging as the modern-day embodiment of the money power, leaving the "humble members of society" ripe for the electoral picking.