Romney, Bain, and the End of the Reagan Coalition

Listening the last couple of days to the Republican crack-up over Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital has been fascinating. Conservatives have pounced on Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their harsh criticisms of Romney. Perry, for example, has said: "We need more venture capitalism, and less vulture capitalism."

This is an attack from the "left," observers left and right have said. It is not conservative. Rush Limbaugh sputtered in exasperation: "My gosh, that's what the people who indict capitalism say ... this sounds like left-wing social engineering." Gingrich, Rush said, "sounds like Elizabeth Warren."

I couldn't disagree more. This isn't an attack from the left, it is an attack from within the unstable marriage that has been the Republican Party for at least the last thirty years. What's happening, I think, may be nothing less than the disintegration of the Reagan coalition.

The idea that the critique of Romney and Bain is "left-wing" is only true if you conceive of modern American conservatism in extremely narrow terms. By any reasonable definition of the word "conservative," the critique (especially as made by Newt Gingrich) is in fact deeply conservative.

What we are seeing here is the tension, if not outright contradiction, between two strands of modern American conservatism. On the one hand, conservatives value tradition. They talk about small-town values: family, work, religion. But the other strand is unrestrained free-market capitalism, the single most progressive force in history. The essence of capitalism is incessant change. Everywhere it has enjoyed free rein, it has undermined traditions and traditional values.

Ever since Herbert Hoover, the Republican Party has tried to maintain a coalition that includes both strands. Hoover was the epitome of both small town values and capitalist business success: born in the heartland (Iowa), he was orphaned at age 9, overcame being shuffled around for several years, attended Stanford, became a mining engineer, sought his fortune abroad, and became a self-made millionaire. As president during the depression, he warned against the moral degeneracy of dependence on the state.

But the Republican political leader who best combined these strands was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Like Hoover, he came from humble origins. But unlike Hoover, he became "the Great Communicator," a politician who never lost the common touch. The key to his political success was winning over the so-called Reagan Democrats: white, middle-class voters who had become disaffected with 1960s liberalism, and whose economic interests had suffered in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Modern American conservatives, however, have sometimes had trouble maintaining the coalition Reagan forged, and in Romney's Bain experience, we have a stark example of why it can be so hard.

When faced with the recent criticisms, Romney has relied on the power of the free market strand of conservatism. He claims that all of the attacks on him are meant to put "free enterprise on trial." In that, he has the support of Ron Paul, conservatism's purist defender of laissez-faire capitalism: “Bankruptcy and restructuring are very important principles in free markets.”

Free markets always create the correct, and moral, result according to this doctrinaire view. If people get fired in the pursuit of greater profits, so be it. The greater economic good counter-balances whatever harm may have been done by the invisible hand.

But we all know that unemployment is socially corrosive. When people lose their jobs, families suffer. It puts tremendous strain on them, sometimes they break up. When a company goes bankrupt, it can destroy an entire community.

That is the thrust of the devastatingly effective video put out by the pro-Gingrich Super Pac.

What  makes it so powerful is the testimony of real people put out of work by Bain. These are the Reagan Democrats. They come off, as Andrew Sullivan notes, not as "envious," as Romney condescendingly puts it. "They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute."

Newt's real apostasy here is that he is pointing out the contradiction that has always been there: the market is not inherently moral. The workings of free enterprise can be entirely legal and also immoral.

And, believe it or not, Gingrich is making the moral argument.  Here's how he put it on MSNBC Wednesday:

A company Bain had invested $30 million in, they took $180 million out -- that's 6 to 1-- and the company went bankrupt. And you have to ask yourself, if you're going to get a 6 to 1 return when the company's going bankrupt, gee, what if you'd only taken  3 to 1? ... Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

This is the traditional values argument: doing the right thing. In the video, we see families harmed, we see good people who want to work unable to support those families. We see them sincerely question whether what Bain did was morally right.

This is a conservative case, one that harkens back to an older, pre-capitalist, communitarian ethos, one that values the stability of the community, one that seeks a balance between the interests of the individual and those of the whole.

For advancing this line of attack, Republicans and other conservatives are roundly condemning Gingrich. The president of the right-wing Club For Growth has accused Newt of engaging in “economically ignorant class warfare” and making an "attack on a basic tenet of economic freedom."

Newt has rightly countered: "Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism." Of course that's true. But there's a good reason today's conservatives cannot agree to that. They're all in. They have fully committed to the free market strand of conservatism.

Note how John McCain put it to Fox News: "To go after [Romney], on really what is the essence of what we Republicans believe about economy, is a serious mistake.... There's an alternative to how Bain does business. It's called communism."

In other words, the distinction Newt makes -- between the ideal of capitalist competition and the predatory practices of Bain -- simply does not exist for today's Republican Party. It is either unrestrained free market, with all of its excesses and destruction (both "creative" and not), or it is communism. There is no middle ground.

Republicans and conservatives cannot acknowledge the conservative moral legitimacy of the Gingrich critique because they have been damning it for at least the last three years. To say that Gingrich has a point would invalidate their entire critique of Barack Obama: it would expose the "Obama is a socialist" line for the idiocy that it is.

It is Obama who has been making the conservative critique of capitalism. It is Obama who has been criticizing specific businessmen and specific business practices. It is Obama who has championed Wall Street reform and consumer protection -- not because he doesn't believe in capitalism (as Republican demagoguery would have it), but because, like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt before him, he sees that capitalism is in crisis and needs to be saved from its greatest and most self-destructive excesses.

There is no room for such a view among the power elites of the Republican Party and conservative movement. They have forgotten that the moral component of conservatism was never merely lip-service opposition to abortion or gay marriage. At its best, it has been much more than that.

Reagan knew that. As Obama has adroitly noted, his so-called "Buffett Rule," far from being "class warfare," was Reagan's idea.  In 1985, Reagan said that tax loopholes "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy.... Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?"

That same year, Reagan said the following:

I told some people ... of a letter that I just received ... from a man out here in the country, an executive who's earning in six figures -- well above $100,000 a year. He wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said, “I am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code -- nothing dishonest, doing what the law prescribes -- and wind up ... paying a smaller tax than my secretary pays.” And he wrote me the letter to tell me he'd like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that's possible for him to do and why it is wrong [emphasis added].

Legal, nothing dishonest -- but wrong. Reagan knew the difference, and knew how important that difference was politically. Today, in his political desperation, Newt Gingrich also knows it matters politically.

In his segment on Romney's Bain problem Wednesday night, Lawrence O'Donnell put it beautifully:

The freedom to choose our occupations, the freedom to choose what we will do for money, requires us to check, not just if it's legal, but if it is the right thing to do.... What we do for money, and what harm we do while doing it, goes a long way to define who we are.

O'Donnell is a liberal, but that is a fundamentally conservative statement: freedom is not license, freedoms come with responsibilities, and we are responsible not just to ourselves, but to others and to our communities.

This debate over Romney and Bain is not about Republicans sounding like Democrats, or about both parties trying to be economic populists: it is about the moral dimension of our politics. It's something that a significant number of Republican voters value, but that the radical individualists among the Tea Partiers and libertarians either reject or flatly deny, and the corporate elite don't even understand.

Gingrich is, of course, primarily motivated to make these attacks by personal animus to Romney due to the negative ads that killed Newt's chances in Iowa. But one of Newt's (few) political virtues is that he does sometimes see a bigger picture. In this case, he knows that the Republicans, if they nominate Mitt Romney, are handing this potent political issue to President Obama, and with it, possibly, an essential component of Republican political success over the last 30 years.

If Obama can take advantage of Romney's moral blindness and regain a significant number of Reagan Democrats, he will win re-election. If he can go further and recapture the mantle of the moral dimension of politics, he can realign American politics and fracture the Reagan coalition.

Obama Baffles the Baby Boomers

Andrew Sullivan had a nice post on Friday praising President Obama's restraint and refusal to take credit for what Sullivan is calling the Arab 1848. When Mubarak left office, Obama rightly said "Today belongs to the people of Egypt."  The credit, he made clear, was all theirs.  According to Sullivan, Obama's "willingness not to take credit" is "part of his nature."  While that's true, it is,  I think, only part of the story.  The rest is generational. 

Baby boomers of the left and right have a common trait: they tend to see the United States at the center of everything.  For far left groups like the Weather Underground in the late 1960s, the U.S. was the root of all evil.  For the "love it or leave it" right, America was unquestionably the source of all good.  But in either case, whatever happened in the world, for good or ill, was due to American action (or inaction).

Obama, by temperament and by generational background, eschews such extreme views, and in doing so, confounds his opponents who remain mired in the 1960s political and cultural divisions that shaped them.

Depending on how one dates the baby boomer phenomenon, Obama, who was born in 1961, is either post-boomer or late-boomer.  In my view, he is our first post-boomer president.  The previous, World War II generation, had a long 32 year run in the presidency.  Every president from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush was 18 years old or older during the war.  By contrast, the two boomer presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, only held the presidency for 16 years.

I define Obama as post-boomer because he came of political age after the polarizing issues of the 1960s.  He was too young to be a participant in the vehement disagreements over the Vietnam war.  He came of political age in a later time: the post-Watergate troubles of the late 1970s and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

Why does this matter?  This past week, Roger Newman of the Columbia School of Journalism gave a talk at Wofford and I was invited to have dinner with him afterwards.  During the dinner conversation, the topic turned to the question of when American politics became so polarized.  Newman, who is of the Vietnam generation, argued that Reagan's election was the turning point.  I argued that it was the Clinton-Gingrich confrontation of the early to mid-1990s that was more significant.  I've been thinking about that disagreement, and I think it comes down to this: For Newman's generation, Reagan represented the conservative enemy of the 1960s coming to power to reverse the gains of that decade. 

But as harsh as the criticism of Reagan was from the left in the early 1980s, I would argue that it never reached the depths of personal vilification that greeted Clinton in the early 1990s.  Reagan was denounced by the left as a man of the past, even a reactionary.  Clinton, on the other hand, was accused of being a draft dodger, a murderer, a drug dealer, a traitor (the last for protesting against the Vietnam war while studying abroad).  These accusations almost always had their roots in the cultural and political divisions of the 1960s.  He came to embody for conservatives everything that they had loathed about that decade. 

Similarly, Newt Gingrich embodied the radical right's rejection of the social and cultural developments of the 1960s.  While condemning the results, he often embraced the extremist tactics of the radical left: he consciously demonized the opposition in an effort to discredit them as un-American.

Beginning with Gingrich, the baby-boomer right in the U.S. developed a consistent campaign theme: their opponents were not merely wrong on the issues, they were anti-American.  With figures like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the boomer right employed themes pulled directly from the cultural and political baggage of the 1960s.  These tactics have proven successful enough, at least with the base, that they remain addicted to them, even when the new target, Obama, is maddeningly inappropriate for them.

Last fall, Gingrich said of Obama: "he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating--none of which was true ... He was authentically dishonest."  Gingrich is not describing Obama--he is describing what he wishes Obama would be: a mirror image of Gingrich.

Think back to the 2008 campaign and Sarah Palin's favorite line, that Obama "palled around with terrorists."  That of course was a reference to Obama's acquaintance with 1960s radical, Bill Ayers. Obama was too young for 1960s radicalism, so they tried guilt by association.  Last August, boomer Rush Limbaugh, whose rise to prominence coincided with the Clinton administration, called Obama "our first anti-American president."  While hawking his new memoir, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reiterated another common trope: that Obama "has made a practice of trying to apologize for America," a none-too-subtle suggestion that the president, like the radical left in the 1960s, thinks America is evil.

Last week, Mike Huckabee took this absurdity to new lengths for a supposedly mainstream politician by falsely stating that Obama grew up in Kenya and somehow trying to associate him with the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya.  Huckabee surely knows that for Americans of a certain age, the term "Mau Mau" has a particular resonance.   It was part of the anti-civil rights backlash that helped turn the solid Democratic south into the solid Republican south.  The phrase came from a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe.  "Mau Mauing" meant the intimidation of whites by the "angry black male" of the Black Panther variety.

No reasonable person could describe Obama in that way, and yet we hear the right do it time and again.  He's socialist, he's foreign, he is not "one of us."  They make themselves look utterly ridiculous by trying to fit Obama into their 1960s style preconceptions of what he should be, and yet they persist.  Certainly the first African-American president can not be someone who is the epitome of the values conservatives say they cherish: hard work, education, faith, public service, devotion to family.  So they recreate him in their own perverse mirror image.  The more Obama proves them wrong by being truly reasonable and refusing to conform to the boomer stereotypes, the more they flail about, making increasingly absurd charges, removing themselves further and further from reality.  And the more ridiculous they look, trapped in the debates of the past, the more likely they make it that Obama will be our leader for the foreseeable future.

Pilgrim's Regress

The Thanksgiving feast is in the past for another year, but the misuse of the holiday for political purposes marches on.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published an illuminating piece about the way Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and various Tea Party figures have tried to make the Thanksgiving story into a parable about the evils of socialism and the merits of capitalism.

The story is worth reading in full, but in short the case is this: the first settlers at Plymouth engaged in a kind of socialistic sharing of property and only succeeded when they abandoned it and embraced capitalism.  The substance of the Times piece demolishes this absurdity.  What I'd like to address is the way the story is framed.

My first objection is to the author's reference to the Tea Partiers as people "who revere early American history."  If there is one thing the subsequent article shows, it is that the people who believe this myth have no respect at all for history.  The same sentence notes, correctly, that Tea Partiers "hunger for any argument against what they believe is the big-government takeover of the United States."

Precisely—they want any argument, true or not.  That is not reverence.  It is blind dedication to ideology, the facts be damned.  For these people, history has no independent reality.  It is merely a tool to be used, it is a means to an ideological end.

The article refers to "competing versions of the story," as if they are both equally valid.  That is simply not the case.  The actual historians quoted in the story show that the Tea Party "version" is not merely a different interpretation, it is simply wrong.  The settlers were not practicing "secular communism," they were engaged in a business enterprise.  This is not a matter of interpretation, but fact.  There was no famine due to "socialist" practices.

The article says: “Historians quibble with this interpretation.”  No, they don’t “quibble” with it.  They refute it.  There’s a difference.  The word “quibble” suggests petty differences over unimportant matters.  What historians note in this instance is the distortion of fact for ideological purposes, and there is nothing petty or unimportant about that.

What strikes me as incredibly corrosive about this article is that real historians are placed on a par with people, who, to put it bluntly, have no idea what they are talking about.  The article refers to “Tea Party historians” but none of the people espousing this view are actual historians.  The three people cited by name are Rush Limbaugh (no elaboration required), Dick Armey (former congressman and economics professor) and W. Cleon Skousen (who was a lawyer).  The article also refers to a web site with a 25-year-old article written by a high school economics teacher.  Not a historian in the bunch.

And, on the other side, a real historian, Karen Ordahl Kupperman: a woman with a PhD in history from Cambridge, currently a professor at NYU, and the author of seven books on American colonial history (two of which won prestigious professional prizes).  And the reader is supposed to see these “two sides” as equal?

As a historian, I could read this article and easily see that there is no "debate" here in any meaningful sense of the word.  But I can imagine a casual reader picking up the paper on a Sunday morning, sipping some coffee, and thinking that there are two equally valid points of view on this subject.  There are not.  There is the view of professional historians who have studied the subject, and there is the lie told by ignorant people who will make things up to suit their political agenda.

Now I know how the evolutionary biologist and the climate change scientist feel.