Let's Play "Name That Candidate!"

The following passage comes from a major address by the nominee for president of a major political party:

Whatever progress has been made we all accept.... there are certain principles that are accepted by substantially all of the American people. They cannot be treated as partisan principles. They are national policies. For instance, the policy of providing the farmer with a fair share of the national income is a national policy.... We say to you workers that the right of collective bargaining by labor's own free choice is not a partisan right. It is a national policy. The principle of setting a floor under wages is likewise an established principle. That floor should be raised as rapidly as our increasing prosperity permits... It is national policy to set a limit to the hours of labor. Whenever those hours are exceeded, overtime must be paid at the rate of time and a half. Social Security is a national policy. And so are old age pensions. Nobody has a patent on them. It is national policy to care for the unemployed.... It is national policy to care for the aged, the sick, the physically handicapped, the blind, and others who need our help.

I admit, this isn't an easy one. He did not go on to become president, so he's less well-known. So how about this question instead: which political party does he belong to, the Democratic or Republican?

Answer: The Republican Party.

This is from Wendell Willkie's final speech of the 1940 campaign, given over the radio, originating from a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

I came across this speech doing some research, and was somewhat dumbfounded when I read it. Even allowing for the real possibility that Willkie's support for all of these "national policies" might have been more rhetorical than real (after all, Paul Ryan today has the chutzpah to claim that his plan to end Medicare is really meant to "save" it), this is remarkable.

My first thought was the rather obvious one: can anyone imagine the Republican nominee in 2012 full-throatedly supporting all of these policies that were enthusiastically embraced by the Republican nominee 72 years ago in 1940?

To be fair, Willkie also said things that could easily have come from Romney's mouth in this campaign: "We believe ... that in order to protect [these benefits] and to extend them it is necessary to have a government that is financially sound."

In fact, Willkie's defense policy statement is almost exactly the same as Romney's: "All of us believe in the need for a powerful national defense. But our administration ... would have it so powerful that no aggressor would ever dare or seek to strike."

Romney has repeatedly said in this campaign: "I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it."

Those similarities notwithstanding, it is remarkable to see how different the rhetoric is.

Willkie supported collective bargaining, while Romney has praised Gov. Walker's and Gov. Kasich's efforts to limit collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Willkie supported not only the concept of a minimum wage, but anticipated increasing it, while Romney is against an increase and in the past has proposed at most indexing it to inflation (which would have the effect of never increasing it in fact). Some Republicans (e.g., Ron Paul and Tea Party leader and former congressman Dick Armey) even favor abolishing it.

Willkie talks about caring for the unemployed, while Romney has opposed extending unemployment benefits and has even said he'd like to see "reform of our unemployment system, to allow people to have a personal account which they're able to draw from as opposed to having endless unemployment benefits." In other words, he would privatize it and end any government responsibility for the unemployed.

Willkie says it is "national policy" to care for the sick, but Romney would repeal the Affordable Care Act and has proposed no national policy to advance the cause of providing health insurance for the uninsured.

Willkie supported Social Security and old age pensions, while Romney would increase the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare.

The unavoidable conclusion is how far to the right the Republican Party (and, to some extent, the Democratic Party) has moved over the last 70 years, with most of that rightward movement having taken place in the last twenty years.

It has become commonplace to note that Ronald Reagan, the nominee in 1980, and Richard Nixon, the nominee in 1968, would be too liberal for today's Republican  Party. Turns out, Wendell Willkie in 1940 would be, too.

"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.]

The "All-In" Mentality

I'm not much of a poker player. For a few years, I played in a friendly local game, low stakes: the most anyone could lose in an evening was $10, and if that happened, you got to play for free until you won a hand. The games were often high-low, which encouraged you to play out your hand, no matter how bad it might initially seem.

On a couple of occasions, I've also played some Texas Hold 'Em. It's a different kind of game. Often, the smartest move is to fold right away and hope for a better deal on the next hand. Alternatively, you might want to go "all-in," and bet everything you have.

Now, I was never a good Texas Hold 'Em player, so I might get this wrong, but it seemed to me there were basically three reasons you might go all-in: 1) your read of the cards tells you there is a really low probability that anyone else has a better hand; 2) your read of the players is that they can easily be bluffed into folding, even if they have better hands than you do; or 3) you are desperate, and figure you've got nothing to lose.

On the day when Jon Huntsman folded his campaign, the "all-in" mentality came to mind. Huntsman, in my reading, was not an all-in kind of candidate (though I suppose one could characterize his singular focus on New Hampshire that way). When Mitt Romney reduced the America's China policy to a simple matter of getting tough in the last New Hampshire debate, for example, Huntsman answered with a more nuanced approach, citing the complexities of the US-China relationship, and said (in Mandarin!) that Romney simply didn't know what he was talking about.

These Republican primaries are no place for that kind of candidate. It's a year for going all-in.

Take Rick Perry's ridiculous comments recently about the disgraceful video of American Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters. Perry condemned the Obama administration for "over-the-top rhetoric ... and their disdain for the military." Note the mindset Perry betrays with that remark. For him, criticizing the actions of any servicemen for even a reprehensible act shows "disdain for the military." (He repeated those comments at last night's Republican debate, in which he also said that desecration of American corpses is "despicable" while desecration of Afghan corpses is a "mistake.")

Compare that with the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey: “Actions like those are not only illegal but are contrary to the values of a professional military and serve to erode the reputation of our joint force,” Dempsey said. 

Perry is either too stupid or too blinded by his all-in mindset to understand that criticism of such egregious acts, even calling them illegal, does not show disdain for the military. On the contrary, it is Perry who is truly showing disdain for the military by downplaying the incident, and suggesting that it is not unusual. He tried to minimize the incident, saying "there’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River." Perry evidently doesn't know the difference between a river and a human corpse.

This is what the current tribal politics of the Republican Party produces in dim bulbs like Perry: an absurd reflex to condemn any criticism of the "core values." If the military is good, no criticism can be broached; all criticism signals "disdain."

Others are just as guilty. Take Romney's repeated assertion that every question about the business practices of Bain Capital constitutes "putting free markets on trial." Effectively, he is saying there are no legitimate questions, and asking one makes you an enemy of capitalism. He evinced the same attitude when asked if any questions about income inequality in America were legitimate, and he dismissed them all as "envy." At last night's debate, Romney said he would not negotiate with the Taliban, because you never negotiate with people who are trying to kill you. "Unconditional surrender" was US policy in World War II, but by that standard, most of the other wars in human history would never have ended.

All of these are conversation enders, and are meant to be. There is no interest in actual debate, a real give-and-take that might illuminate and enlighten. There is no desire to learn or deepen understanding (one's own or anyone else's). The discourse has all become about who can seem to be the most vociferous defender of the faith, and the most zealous persecutor of the heretics. (On that score, Gingrich was at his demagogic best in last night's debate.)

That's why I continue to believe that Gingrich's attempt to challenge Romney's business record, and Ron Paul's persistent questioning of the rest of the field's foreign policy myopia (particularly on Iran) are both valuable. Primaries should not be about unthinkingly reaffirming dogma, but unfortunately that's what this "all-in" campaign has been about, far more often than not.

So what does this "all-in" mentality tell us about this year's GOP field? It's possible that the candidates really, truly believe that they hold the best hand: that Obama is so unpopular, and that their core values are so in tune with the electorate, that they don't really need to examine them.

If they think that Obama can be bluffed into folding, well, they have not been paying attention for the last four years.

But I suspect the real reason is, in fact, desperation. The dogma being defended is indeed passionately held by the Republican base. That base, however, is shrinking. With the evidence and consequences of income inequality growing daily, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising to cut the taxes of the wealthiest yet again. With the war in Afghanistan now in its eleventh year, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising ever-continuing war. With America growing ever more diverse, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by pandering to racial and ethnic resentments.

There were two candidates, I think, who understood all that. One dropped out yesterday, and the other is routinely ridiculed as having no chance of getting the nomination because of his views.

Today's GOP is going all-in. Deep down, I think they know they're holding a losing hand.

Paul & Huntsman: "Bring 'em Home" Republicans

Back in November, before the GOP debate here at Wofford, I noted that one of the interesting things to look for in the debate, whose ostensible topic was foreign policy, was how large a role the historical internationalist v. isolationist split in the GOP would play: "I’ll be looking for signs that this old debate within the Republican party may be re-emerging in the 21st century."

Last night, I could not help but note that the primary in New Hampshire produced a 40% vote for two candidates who explicitly call for the US to get out of Afghanistan: Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Granted, Mitt Romney, who called for "overwhelming military superiority," won the primary with 38%, and if one adds in the 20% that went to the combination of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, that means that about 60% of voters went for candidates whose foreign policy is much more aggressive and interventionist.

It is also worth noting that voters don't generally vote on foreign policy, and this year that is probably more true than it usually is. So one can't take that 40% as a necessarily isolationist vote.

Nonetheless, it does seem fair to say this: for that 40% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters, the foreign policy views of Paul and Huntsman were not disqualifying. That is significant. 

It is practically impossible to imagine that just four years ago. Then, there was only one candidate calling for such a foreign policy: Ron Paul.  And he got only 7.7% of the vote in 2008. He tripled that last night.  Something interesting is happening among Republican voters.

Several observers have noted the absence in this campaign of references to the last Republican president, George W. Bush. For some, that's due to the perception that he was a "big government" conservative who let spending get out of hand. But it may also be that some Republicans are recoiling from the aggressive, regime-change, nation-building foreign policy that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld pursued.

Listening to the jingoism of Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum (especially on the topic of Iran), it is clear that the animating spirit of the Bush foreign policy is far from dead. It is also not going unchallenged.

Those two things combined add up to a meaningful split in the foreign policy consensus in the Republican Party. That makes it all the more interesting that Romney's victory speech in New Hampshire focused as much as it did on foreign policy.

He accused Obama of an "appeasement strategy" and said the president  "doesn't see the need for overwhelming military superiority." If Obama is an "appeaser," then what do we call Paul and Huntsman and their supporters? Clearly, Romney is not interested in appealing to the Paul and Huntsman voters on foreign policy.

Certainly, no virulently anti-Obama voter is going to vote against Romney in the general election on foreign policy grounds. But those who find appealing the "bring 'em home" sentiment expressed by Paul and Huntsman will have no place call their own in a Republican Party led by Romney. In the long run, that could spell trouble for party unity.

Coin of the Realm

"The Congress shall have Power ... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin."

That would seem clear enough to most people, but not to South Carolina State Rep. Lee Bright, R-Roebuck, who according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal "has introduced legislation that backs the creation of a new state currency that could protect the financial stability of the Palmetto State in the event of a breakdown of the Federal Reserve System."

“If there is an attempt to monetize the Fed we ought to at least have a study on record that could protect South Carolinians,” Bright said in an interview Friday.

“If folks lose faith in the dollar, we need to have some kind of backup.”

Let us, for the moment, put aside the question of the (at best) dubious constitutionality of what Bright is proposing. What is the mindset behind it?

For starters, it would seem that Bright has been spending too much time listening to Ron Paul and Glenn Beck. This idea is the political equivalent of Beck's shameless shilling for gold on his TV and radio programs. "Be afraid! The end is nigh! Protect yourself! Buy gold!"

But even more interesting to me is what this idea reveals about the default setting for Bright: that if his paranoid fears come to pass, South Carolina can go it alone and save itself while the rest of the country falls.

Does he really believe that if U.S. currency were to lose its value, that South Carolina, all by itself, would be able to reconstitute a meaningful currency that would shelter it from the resulting economic storm? The idea is self-evidently absurd.

As the Herald-Journal article rightly notes, this is part and parcel of Bright's political playbook. Last year he proposed what amounts to a nullification bill targeted at the Affordable Care Act. “If at first you don't secede, try again,” Bright said at the time.

Now, I know he was joking. But that joke is telling. Secession is no laughing matter, but seeming to take the idea of secession seriously is enough to make Bright (and by extension, South Carolina) a laughingstock. (Though a quick Google search shows his state currency idea is playing well on secessionist websites all over the country.)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bright's proposal is yet another example, like the "ban foreign law" idea, of a disheartening lack of seriousness among South Carolina's elected officials. It panders to the people's fears and their desire to feel in control of events in trying times. Rather than confront actual problems facing the state, problems which good and effective government might actually be able to address, they propose these silly, time-wasting distractions from the real business of the people.

Lastly, it is sad that so many alleged "constitutional" conservatives in fact advocate such unconstitutional ideas. There was a time in American history when states had extensive control over the value of currency, under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution (which they purport to venerate) explicitly took that power from the states. As James Madison says in Federalist 42, by doing so, "the Constitution has supplied a material omission in the articles of confederation."

Like it or not (and Bright clearly does not), one of the most important of "original intents" of the Constitution was to shift power from the states to the federal government to make for more efficient and practical governing of the United States.

Bright will no doubt argue that what he proposes is within what is allowed by the Constitution. If that is true, then what he is proposing could not possibly be capable of addressing the false specter of disaster he raises. Either way, his proposal is nonsense.

In assessing Bright's real motive then, I can do no better than quote David Ramsay, doctor and member of the Continental Congress from South Carolina and later a member of the South Carolina state senate. Writing under the name "Civis" in the February 4, 1788 edition of the Columbian Herald in Charleston, Ramsay exhorted South Carolinians to ratify the Constitution. Don't listen to what opponents say their reasons are for opposing the ideas of the Constitution, Ramsay warned. "Examine well the characters & circumstances of men" to find "the real ground" of their positions, he said, since "they may artfully cover it with a splendid profession of zeal for state privileges and general liberty."