The Culmination of Republican Decay by Sean Wilentz


The Culmination of Republican Decay
by Sean Wilentz, nybooks.com
October 10, 2019
The Culmination of Republican Decay
October 10, 2019 Issue
by Tim Alberta
Harper, 678 pp., $29.99
Early in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage, Peter Wehner, the head of President George W. Bush’s Office of Strategic Initiatives under Senior Adviser Karl Rove, remarks bitterly that John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 presaged the rise of Donald Trump. Wehner deplores how his party, founded on “glorifying excellence and achievement,” came to embrace “this anger and grievance and contempt.” He had a different view in 2008, though, when he described Palin as the future of the Republican Party, which she had “suddenly revitalized” with her “grace and style.” Palin, he said, was “a supremely gifted political talent” whose “conservatism seems organic rather than manufactured, ingrained rather than recently imbibed.”

The main responsibility for Palin’s selection lay with two pillars of the post-Reagan Republican establishment: Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, and Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief political strategist and previously a deputy assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney. In plucking Palin from obscurity, Kristol and Schmidt, like innumerable GOP leaders before them, were promoting the party’s indispensable hard-right base—a base it has done so much to arouse and exploit since the late 1960s. “A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington—the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside,” Kristol wrote breathlessly in early September 2008. “That spectre has a name—Sarah Palin…a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who’s a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who’s a leader.”

Kristol, Schmidt, and others somehow persuaded McCain that he could appease the reactionary elements in the GOP, including the white Christian right and the Second Amendment zealots, while still keeping the party firmly under control. In fact, Palin’s nomination was only one incident in the party’s continuing radicalization. After Barack Obama was elected president, the Koch brothers and the Donors Trust of dark money funders (to which the Kochs were leading contributors) would mobilize and subsidize the Republican base in the so-called populist revolt they named the Tea Party.

Wehner, Kristol, and Schmidt are today among the most prominent of what remains of the Never Trumpers, hoping against hope that they can wrest the Republican Party from Trump’s grasp. Wehner has fared the best, securing prestigious contributing writers’ posts at The New York Times and The Atlantic, and a fellowship at the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center. Kristol—whose magazine, once owned by Rupert Murdoch as a premier vehicle for conservatism, was closed under pressure from Trump—rails against the president on the cable-news talk shows. Schmidt, who formally broke with the party in 2018, was last spotted guiding into oblivion the quixotic third-party presidential aspirations of the former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. While they stumble around dazed, the Never Trumpers seem unable to admit, at least publicly, to their complicity in their own downfall. Nor do they seem to grasp that when Trump seized control of the GOP in 2016, he reaped the populist whirlwind that Richard Nixon began sowing nearly half a century earlier and that the Bush administration—their administration—had whipped to hurricane force.

American Carnage does not have much to say about the Never Trumpers’ continuing efforts, a sign of their irrelevance to the current Republican Party but also of their unassailable status to the book’s author. Alberta, a conservative-leaning reporter, reserves his admiration for those loyal Republicans who have resisted becoming Trump’s sycophants and who seem, to Alberta at least, poised to succeed him. Above all, he looks to Senator Mitt Romney, a figure contemptuously dismissed by much of the party for his defeat by Obama but who, now that Trump is in the Oval Office, has assumed “his true political identity” as a “sincere, pragmatic, well-intentioned statesman who sees that something is wrong and wants to help fix it.”1

Whether Romney or any other Republican can halt what Alberta calls the party’s “civil war” between its establishment and its hard-right wing, and then restore the GOP to what he considers normality, seems a very long shot given the intense devotion that the vast majority of Republicans have shown the president since his election. The struggle that American Carnage covers in fact may well be over, won by Trump and his loyalists—who are now drawn from both the establishment and the hard right—and leaving supposed moderates like Romney on the fringe.

Alberta’s guarded optimism about the party’s future, projected upon the once-and-future Romney, reflects a major limitation in his densely reported book: its paucity of historical background. He begins with Obama’s presidency, during which he started his reporting career, and there is some justification for his choice. Obama’s election was a pivotal moment in American history for many reasons, including how it further inflamed the right wing of the Republican Party. Given Trump’s obsession with his predecessor and his determination to destroy anything Obama achieved if only because he achieved it, the Obama presidency is a crucial point of reference for understanding Trump. Still, starting an account of the GOP’s civil war in 2008 is a bit like starting a history of the American Civil War after Gettysburg.

By the time Alberta’s account gets underway, most of the political dynamics behind the events he describes were long established and extremely powerful. Some of the book’s major figures, like former House Speaker John Boehner (who was also one of its principal sources), were remnants from earlier phases of the party’s strife, and developments like the growth of the Tea Party or the uprisings of the House Freedom Caucus make sense only as outgrowths of previous internecine battles. Most importantly, by 2008, the Republican Party had already become what the political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein would call “an insurgent outlier” in American politics: “ideologically extreme… scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Alberta has written, in short, a book that is more denouement than drama, detailing the fall of a hollow GOP establishment that, having abandoned normal party politics in favor of relentless polarization, was already teetering. While American Carnage describes the outcome of the party’s radicalization, it completely misses—indeed, fundamentally misunderstands—a major impetus behind Trump’s ascendancy: the destructive presidency of George W. Bush.

Alberta, a former reporter for National Review and The Wall Street Journal, and currently the chief political correspondent for Politico, is certainly an expert on the workings of high-level Republican politics, especially on Capitol Hill, and he is a demon researcher. He has also mastered the knack of culling juicy quotations and narrating colorful vignettes that seem to jump off the page, part scoop and part gossip. They confirm that Alberta has amassed a fortune in the debased coin of the realm of modern journalism, which is access; but they also display his genuine gift for fly-on-the-wall storytelling from certain Republican walls.

Many of these stories and quotations capture Trump in all his malignant megalomania, as practically all stories about Trump do, although Alberta’s take on them is sometimes questionable. One story describes how Trump caught on early to the charismatic appeal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—“I called her Eva Perón,” the would-be American Juan Perón remarks—and how he boasted about his prowess as a talent spotter after she won her primary. Plainly Evita, which Trump has said he has seen six times and is his favorite Broadway show, still plays in his head. But as Alberta relates it, this by-now banal exhibition of Trump’s unbounded narcissism translates into a false equivalence between right and left, implying that it takes one menacing demagogue to recognize another.

Alberta also has an irritating habit of reviving hackneyed Republican platitudes and talking points, and of blaming Democrats for Republicans’ partisan excesses. He ascribes the unanimous Republican opposition to Obama’s stimulus plan in 2009, for example, not to the GOP leadership’s well-documented determination to defeat the new president at every turn but to what he unpersuasively describes as Obama’s overbearing partisan arrogance behind the scenes. Alberta seriously asserts that Republicans were driven “crazy” over issues having to do with race chiefly because of Obama’s “perceived exploitation of racially driven identity politics”—a perception that turns out to have been based on evidence no more grievous than his emotional response to the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Alberta reports long-disproven Republican canards, such as the 2013 pseudoscandal about the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups, which was untrue. (The real scandal was the Republican hounding of IRS official Lois Lerner.) The probe into the Benghazi attacks in 2012, which Alberta seems to acknowledge was wholly partisan, appears fleetingly as one of several “controversies” that dogged Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Some of the most egregious Republican power plays, meanwhile, disappear almost completely: Alberta mentions Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stunning refusal to grant a hearing to Obama’s highly qualified Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, but does so matter-of-factly to help explain how Trump won over the Christian right by pledging to name only right-wingers to the federal bench.

Alberta is more convincing and even entertaining when he sticks to narrating his book’s three main storylines: the battles between the GOP’s congressional leadership and its caucus’s strident right wing; Trump’s emergence in 2015 and triumph a year later; and the tumults that rattled the first two years of his presidency. Alberta has a sharp eye for folly, and it serves him well in covering some of the escapades of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus troublemakers. It would take a latter-day H.L. Mencken—or maybe the Marx Brothers—to do full justice to these scenes, but Alberta describes adroitly enough how an admixture of zealotry, self-importance, and amateurish hugger-mugger drove various hard-right palace intrigues. They include a hilarious account of a failed right-wing coup against Speaker Boehner in 2013, featuring a fired-up sermonizing congressman who deserted the losing cause at the last minute with the excuse that he had prayed one more time and seen the light of Christian mercy.

Still, the clowns kept threatening to take over the circus. Having reclaimed the House majority in 2010 thanks largely to the enthusiasm of the Tea Party, the GOP leadership finally resolved in 2014 to prevent what a top figure at the US Chamber of Commerce called “the Caveman Caucus” from enlarging their number any further. In every contested Senate primary and nearly every House primary election that year, establishment candidates defeated right-wingers. Yet in a high-profile race in Virginia, an unknown college professor named David Brat ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Boehner’s presumed successor as Speaker. Cantor had tempered his early antiestablishment politics and, with an eye to expanding the Republicans’ base, begun working on, among other issues, comprehensive immigration reform. Brat, supported by the talk radio agitators Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, focused his campaign on charges that “a vote for Eric Cantor is a vote for open borders…a vote for amnesty,” and won the primary in a landslide. Many in the party were rattled, but the establishment soon confidently supported Jeb Bush for president even as the dark political passions that would elect Trump were gathering force.

Alberta ably relates Trump’s march to the nomination and the contingent events that made it possible. He amusingly recalls, for example, how, at a moment when the sometime Tea Party favorite Senator Marco Rubio’s fortunes were rising, not Trump but another brawler, Governor Chris Christie, wiped the floor with him during a televised debate, ridiculing Rubio’s canned replies to reporters’ questions. The book’s coverage of the election itself is skimpier—Alberta passes briskly over matters essential to Trump’s victory such as the Russian interference and FBI Director James Comey’s sudden interventions—as it is chiefly concerned with the turmoil Trump stirred inside the party. For Alberta, the central mystery involves how the party leadership, before and after the election, came to embrace their execrable tormentor.

Alberta is unsparing about the Republicans’ desertion of the party’s professed principles—including its devotion to free trade, small government, and fiscal responsibility—in succumbing to Trump. Yet he flounders when it comes to explaining their willingness to support a man they held in contempt—and still do in private. Personal ambition accounts for some of the more abject defections, most notably that of Vice President Mike Pence, a former Trump critic reported by long-time friends and allies to have “loathed” Trump, whose subsequent obsequiousness Alberta calls “obscene.” Fear of reprisal from Trump’s fanatical base has certainly concentrated some Republicans’ minds and shut their mouths. Yet these individual flaws and anxieties, which are among the more commonplace facts of political life, cannot explain how Trump could so swiftly capture virtually an entire political party.

A plausible answer to that puzzle is hiding in plain sight in Alberta’s book. Although Trump came into office with majorities in both houses of Congress, and although, as Alberta notes, the White House ceded control over domestic legislation to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan, the Republicans had terrible difficulty scoring legislative wins. Most galling to Trump as well as the party’s congressional leadership was the failure to repeal Obamacare, one of the GOP’s core campaign pledges since the program began. On two fronts, though, Republicans moved with absolute assurance: the approval by the Senate of right-wing nominees to the federal bench, including Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and, after a brutal, unexpected fight, Brett Kavanaugh; and the rapid approval of a fiercely regressive tax bill in 2017. Control of the courts for the Christian right and the Federalist Society, tax windfalls and deregulation for the donor class: these were the causes that truly stirred the GOP majorities in Congress. It’s not simply that the recumbent Republicans are intimidated by the party base that Trump has captured; they are motivated chiefly by right-wing dogma and their own baseness, which Trump understands and manipulates.

Alberta’s assessment of what he recognizes as a Faustian bargain betrays a surprising naiveté, especially in his account of the Trump tax bill as rammed through the House by Ryan. Alberta is inclined to take Republicans like Ryan at their word when they claim that their greatest cause is a simpler and fairer federal income tax code. He seems stunned that the law the Republican Congress enacted did little more than benefit corporations and the wealthy while also, although he doesn’t mention it, harming middle-class voters in Democratic states by eliminating property-tax deductions—justified on “the disproven theory that economic growth would make up for the lost revenue.”

How, Alberta wonders, could the party have created such a terrible “intellectual quandary” for itself, as if intellectual honesty were what mattered in Washington. (He never says when he thinks the GOP renounced supply-side “voodoo economics” as a “disproven theory,” and for a good reason: it never has.) The best explanation he can offer for the tax bill is that the Republicans desperately needed a victory on Capitol Hill. He never stops to consider whether the Republicans’ talk about fairness and helping hard-working families is just the latest round of cynical conservative propaganda that began with the Reagan supply-side fraud forty years ago. Short of accusing the GOP’s supposed policy wizard Paul Ryan of monumental bad faith—at the time, Ryan celebrated the bill as a triumph of “generational” magnitude—is it not more plausible to understand the Republicans’ alacrity in passing the tax bill not as a display of inconsistency but as a fulfillment of desire?2 Might this also explain why the Republicans en masse have become outwardly such unwavering Trumpians? Arthur Laffer, inventor of the magical curve that defined the supply-side trickle-down hoax seized upon by Reagan, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump. Some discredited nostrums never die among post-Reagan Republicans.

The source of American Carnage’s weaknesses, though, is not so much Alberta’s ingenuousness about Republicanism as it is his lack of historical depth, particularly about the GOP. In a passage emphasizing how deep the Republican commitment to free trade has run, he points to odd dissenters like Pat Buchanan; near his conclusion, he quotes Ryan to the effect that what was once the “paleocon” Buchanan wing of the party was “kind of what you have now: isolationist, protectionist, and kind of xenophobic, anti-immigrant.” Ryan’s “kind of” gives pause: in fact, Buchanan pioneered Trump’s isolationist, xenophobic America First rhetoric almost to the letter, as in one typical speech he delivered during his presidential primary challenge to George H.W. Bush in 1992 condemning the “illegal invasion” from Mexico, calling the border “a national disgrace,” demanding new concrete fencing, and promising to deploy military force if necessary to deter immigrants.

Alberta elides this rancid strain in accounting for Trump’s rise to power. Far from an aberration inside either conservatism or the Republican Party, what became known as paleoconservatism was a direct extension of the Republican Old Right, a powerful force inside the party in the 1940s and 1950s that disavowed the postwar liberal international order while it promoted free-market fundamentalism. Its champion was “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a figure whose rectitude and unblemished character were as unlike Trump’s as can be imagined. Supposedly effaced by something called the New Right in the late 1950s—mainly the old calling itself new—the Old Right in fact remained a major force inside the GOP and allied easily with southern segregationists who flocked to the party during the breakthroughs of the civil rights movement.

Buchanan became the most conspicuous unapologetic Old Right figure in national politics when he served on the staffs of presidents Nixon and Reagan. He proved in his bruising primary race in 1992—as, in a different way, the billionaire Ross Perot proved in his third-party bid that same year—that insular protectionism with overtones of nativism, further incited by resentment of Republicans and Democrats alike as globalizing elitists, still struck a loud chord with the party’s voters.

It would take the presidency of George W. Bush, however, to reorder national politics and prepare the way for Trump’s America First revival. One side effect of Trump’s presidency is how, particularly in the accounts of the Never Trumpers, it has made the Bush White House look like a golden age, a time of decency and civility, Peter Wehner’s bygone era of excellence and achievement. According to one Republican source, Bush has been known to half-jest about the Trump White House, with his inevitable smirk, “Sorta makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it?” His postpresidential chumminess with Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton and his open criticisms of Trump—beginning with his muttered remark right after Trump’s inauguration, “That was some weird shit”—have softened memory of how deeply unpopular he came to be as president.

Alberta’s view of the Bush years is more politically attuned but equally fanciful, as if strained through the perceptions of the Republican hard right. According to Alberta, Bush was, in his own way, an apostate from conservative principles, the launcher of efforts like No Child Left Behind education reforms and the Troubled Asset Relief Program that responded to the financial emergency of 2008. To Alberta, these initiatives, plus the vast overall expansion in federal spending, mark Bush’s presidency as “eight years of big-government policies,” a “big-spending tenure” vulnerable to criticism from the right. Bush’s pursuit of his 2000 campaign pledge of compassionate conservatism, meanwhile, no matter how sincere, enraged conservative lawmakers from largely white districts for whom talk of drug treatment programs and rehabilitating prisoners was pernicious nonsense.

Above all, Alberta dates the rising Republican fervor over immigration back to Bush’s failed effort to reform immigration laws after his reelection in 2004. The populist outbursts after 2008 targeted Obama as the great un-American villain, but it was George W. Bush, the warm-hearted, big-government Republican, whose disastrous presidency really touched off the rebellion.

In fact, the Bush White House was deeply and purposefully polarizing, and in foreign as well as domestic affairs it actually foreshadowed the Trump presidency. Bush had learned the lessons of his father’s one-term presidency, which was derided and undermined by the congressional bomb-thrower Newt Gingrich and then by Buchanan for its treachery to right-wing Republicanism. Bush the Younger would not make the same mistake of letting the hard right outflank him. After winning the presidency in 2000 by the fiat of the Supreme Court, Bush, guided by Rove, rejected appeals to unite the country and proceeded to govern as if he had secured an enormous mandate. On domestic issues this almost invariably meant pursuing the standard Republican plutocratic reforms while also acceding to the party’s culture warriors, feeding the base in what the political commentator Ronald Brownstein astutely identified as the Rove-inspired “51 percent solution.” Although far from identical, the Bush presidency and the Trump presidency—so far—bear some striking resemblances.

The centerpiece of Bush’s presidency was, of course, the dramatic tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, a turbo-charged resumption of supply-side attacks on progressive taxation that, apart from lowering marginal rates, attempted to destroy the estate tax, long a cornerstone of the progressive tax code. Trump’s tax cuts, so disturbing to Alberta, are merely a repeat performance. Also anticipating Trump, Bush began hollowing out talent from vital federal agencies, which became most apparent when the Federal Emergency Management Agency utterly failed the people of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A rapid retreat from financial oversight as well as questionable personnel decisions “encourage[d] regulators,” one critic remarked, “to believe that the goal of regulation is not to regulate.” In particular, The New York Times later reported, the Bush administration, devoted to Republican free-market orthodoxy, “failed to adequately regulate increasingly sophisticated financial products that eventually blew up and triggered the financial crisis” of 2007–2009.

The Bush administration’s reputation for big spending, which Alberta affirms, is in fact highly misleading. Although it enlarged federal expenditures by 70 percent, double the increase during the Clinton administration, the bulk of that spending was to pay for defense and military operations, with solid conservative approval, while discretionary domestic spending as a share of the overall budget actually declined between 2001 and 2008. From there to Trump’s malign efforts to destroy various federal agencies through budget cuts is a matter of scale, not a measure of Bush’s compassion.

The Bush administration’s specific policies, meanwhile, amounted mainly to a long list of hard-line conservative initiatives, from restriction of stem-cell research and withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on the environment (while raising doubts about the scientific validity of global warming) to the fierce promotion of anti-gay referenda at the state level during Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, coupled with support for a Federal Marriage Amendment barring same-sex couples from receiving any legal recognition. To bind itself more closely to the Christian right, the White House established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, whose first director quit in protest, angered by the unending effort of what he called the administration’s “Mayberry Machiavellis”—a reference to Rove and his culture warrior deputy Wehner—to turn all of domestic policy to partisan political advantage.

Bending to pressure from the National Rifle Association, the Bush administration in 2004 allowed to lapse the federal ban on the manufacture of assault weapons for civilians, an essential provision of the now much-maligned Crime Bill of 1994. Although he was not a Trumpian protectionist, Bush, like Reagan and George H.W. Bush before him, deviated from free-trade principles when he placed a steep 8-to-30 percent tariff on imported steel early in 2002, a move rescinded the following year after the World Trade Organization ruled it a violation of US tariff-rate commitments.

Hanging over everything was the catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, which shattered the sense of national unity that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. Over the long term, the Iraq War would corrode public confidence in American engagement abroad, which Trump—who supported the war before he claimed he hadn’t—would turn to his advantage. More significantly, though, the administration’s brusque disregard for the objections to the invasion by crucial international allies—among them nearly half the members of NATO, including France, Germany, and Canada—marked a major breach in the Western alliance, in retrospect a prefiguring of Trump’s return to America First. At home, Cheney’s scorn for the independence of the nation’s intelligence services and his unbridled interference with their operations anticipated Trump’s attacks on their integrity.

In their efforts to twist and then control public perceptions, meanwhile, Bush officials displayed a contempt for mere facts that Trump has turned into an Orwellian onslaught. The repeated dissemination of gross falsehoods to the public—like the disinformation about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry, first peddled by a suspicious Iraqi defector nicknamed “Curveball” and then shamelessly hyped by the administration—bespoke an arrogance about who would determine reality itself. One senior aide, later said to have been Rove, famously dilated to a reporter on how the “reality-based community,” including the press, had become irrelevant, a boast that today seems a portent:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Finally, Bush’s push for immigration reform—the policy that seemingly most distinguishes him from Trump—is much less clear-cut than either his defenders or Alberta suggests. To be sure, he backed legislation that would have provided legal status and a path to citizenship for the approximately 12 million illegal immigrants residing in the US, while also beefing up border enforcement. But while the Senate insisted that the citizenship provision be included, House conservatives, herded by talk show hosts, balked. Had Bush publicly pressured the House Republican leadership, the bill, whose approach had broad public support, could have been passed. Unwilling to confront directly his carefully nurtured base, Bush backed down. He did sign legislation devoted entirely to enforcement, including the construction of a seven-hundred-mile fence along the US–Mexico border, more than double the length originally envisaged.

George W. Bush certainly looks “sorta” good or “pretty good” compared to Donald Trump—even better than that. His decency toward Muslim Americans in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks alone put him in a different moral category. He is a likable fellow, and his paintings are “sorta” interesting. But that should not cloud just how divisive and destructive his presidency actually was, and how it contributed to the degradation of our politics—not because, as Alberta says, he was too generous and too compassionate, not because, contrary to his campaign slogan, he proved more a divider than a uniter, and not even because he thought that by being more hard right than his father he could contain the hard right.

Much of the wreckage Trump has caused is simply the expression of his willingness to pursue long-standing Republican policies while coarsening the polarizing politics practiced by the George W. Bush White House. Any number of historians, political scientists, and journalists have chronicled the long history of the Republican Party’s decay, but you won’t find it in Alberta. He would prefer that Trumpism be something other than Republicanism, not its culmination.

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