The General US Politics Thread

Ignoring the dictum that if one is not of the left as a young person, one has no heart, and not of the right in middle age, one has no head, I have always been a conservative. I voted Republican most of the time, affiliated with the GOP, and served proudly as a political appointee under two Republican presidents. I bitterly opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy and dropped my Republican affiliation once he won in 2016, figuring that the party would soon fall in line. I said as much in public, and my predictions were borne out. But it is only now that I have concluded that the break between conservative beliefs and the party that claimed to uphold them is complete and irreversible.

Being a conservative has always meant, to me, taking a certain view of human nature, and embracing a certain set of values and virtues. The conservative is warier than her liberal counterpart about the darker impulses and desires that lurk in men and women, more doubtful of their perfectibility, skeptical of and opposed to the engineering of individual souls, and more inclined to celebrate freedom moderated by law, custom, education, and culture. She knows that power tends to corrupt, and likes to see it checked and divided. Words like responsibility, stoicism, self-control, frugality, fidelity, decorum, honor, character, independence, and integrity appeal to most decent people. They come particularly easily to the admirers of thinkers from Edmund Burke to Irving Kristol.

The GOP threw frugality and fiscal responsibility away long ago, initially in the Reagan years, but now on a stunning scale involving trillion-dollar deficits as far as can be forecast. It abandoned most of its beliefs in fidelity and character when it embraced a liar, cheat, and philanderer as its nominee and then as president. But something else snapped this week.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy as expressed in various statements and conclusions was, for the most part, pretty standard conservative fare, save for one telltale element: his ascription of very high levels of immunity and discretion to the executive. In this respect, what passes today for conservatism is anything but. Where traditionally conservatives have wanted “ambition to check ambition,” as Alexander Hamilton put it, Republicans are now executive-branch kinds of people. It is not surprising that Kavanaugh himself worked at a high level in a Republican White House. The disdain of many contemporary Republicans for congressional power and prerogative makes them indistinguishable from liberals who (as recently as the Obama years) turned to sweeping uses of executive power to circumvent a balky House of Representatives and Senate.

It was, however, in the epic clash over the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that the collapse of conservatism in the Republican Party became most evident. Eleven men, most of them old, hid behind a female prosecutor wheeled in from Arizona, because they could not, apparently, trust themselves to treat a victim of sexual assault with consideration and respect. So much for courage. Their anger at Democratic shenanigans was understandable, but virtually without exception. When they did summon up the nerve to speak (during Kavanaugh’s turn), their questions consisted almost exclusively of partisan baying at the opposition. Genuine conservatives might have snarled initially, but would have, out of regard for the truth, tried to figure out exactly what happened to Ford 35 years ago, and whether the character of the man before them was what it was said to be.

Perhaps the collapse of modern conservatism came out most clearly in Kavanaugh’s own testimony—its self-pity, its hysteria, its conjuring up of conspiracies, its vindictiveness. He and his family had no doubt suffered agonies. But if we expect steely resolve from a police officer confronting a knife-wielding assailant, or disciplined courage from a firefighter rushing into a burning house, we should expect stoic self-control and calm from a conservative judge, even if his heart is being eaten out. No one watching those proceedings could imagine that a Democrat standing before this judge’s bench in the future would get a fair hearing. This was not the conservative temperament on display. It was, rather, personalized grievance politics.

Real conservatives have always prided themselves on their willingness to stand up to their own kind in the name of moral principle. Think of Senator Robert Taft opposing the North Atlantic Treaty, knowing that those positions could destroy his political career. Taft was wrong in his views, but he was principled, he was courageous, and he went down speaking truth as he saw it. William F. Buckley took on the John Birch Society in the middle of the 20th century, and the anti-Semites in the conservative camp later on. In 1993, when Buckley had to choose between loyalty to Joseph Sobran, his longtime protégé and colleague at the National Review, and rejection of bigotry, principle won and he fired his friend.

During the Ford and Kavanaugh testimonies, Americans watched the cranky maunderings of Senator Chuck Grassley and the spitting, menacing fury of Senator Lindsey Graham. The combination of calm strength and good humor that characterized the modern conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, was nowhere to be found. But that spirit, the spirit of a president who celebrated America as a city on a hill that was generous abroad, welcoming to newcomers, and self-confident at home, has been replaced by the sour meanness of a party chiefly of men, who build walls to keep the world out, erect tariffs to destroy free trade, despise the alliances that keep Americans secure, and sanction the deliberate plucking of babes from their mothers’ breasts in order to teach illegal immigrants a painful lesson. In such a world, decorum and courtesy are irrelevant.

There has always been a dark side to American conservatism, much of it originating in the antebellum curse of a society, large parts of which favored slavery and the extermination of America’s native population, the exclusion of immigrants from American life, and discrimination against Catholics and Jews. Many of us had hoped that the civil-rights achievements of the mid-20th century (in which Republicans were indispensable partners), changing social norms regarding women, and rising levels of education had eliminated the germs that produced secession, lynching, and Indian massacres. Instead, those microbes simply went into dormancy, and now, in the presence of Trump, erupt again like plague buboes—bitter, potent, and vile.

The last twitches of conservative independence consisted of Senator Jeff Flake securing a week-long FBI investigation of Ford’s charges. For the rest, there was not a profile in courage to be seen. Not one.

It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder, it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple. It might stumble into a political tar pit and cease to exist or it might survive as a curious, decaying relic of more savage times and more primitive instincts, lashing out and crushing things but incapable of much else.

Intellectuals do not build American political parties. Politicians do. The most we can do is point out the truths as we see them, and cheer on those who can do the necessary work. It is supposedly inconceivable that a genuinely conservative party could emerge, but then again, who thought the United States could be where it is now? And progressives, no less than bereft conservatives, should want this to happen, because the conservative virtues remain real virtues, the conservative insights real insights, and the conservative temperament an indispensable internal gyro keeping a country stable and sane. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” runs the proverb. The hour is upon the country: Conservatives wait for the men (or, more likely, women) to meet it.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Tina Fey took to task the white women who had helped elect Donald Trump, providing him with 52 percent of their support. Fey particularly focused her remarks on college-educated white women, 44 percent of whom voted for Trump, chastising them for wanting to “go back to watching HGTV” and forget about the election. “You can’t look away,” Fey implored. “Because it doesn’t affect you this minute, but it’s going to affect you eventually.”

New evidence suggests many of these women may now agree with Fey. In the wake of sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Morning Consult/Politico poll found that President Trump’s net support among Republican women had dropped by 19 points.

Those numbers, while perhaps a momentary reaction to gruesome news, fit within a larger pattern that has emerged over the past year: Women are moving to the Democratic Party en masse. A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released on September 26 counted a 28-point advantage for the Democrats among all women. Among married, white, college-educated women, a group long tied to the GOP, the Republicans now lead by only five points.

If those numbers hold, they may spell disaster for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. Even more significant, they may signal that a monumental historical shift in partisan alignment is underway.

For more than 40 years, college-educated white women have formed a substantive bloc for the GOP, the key constituency in establishing the party’s hold on suburbs and exurbs across the country. Indeed, the modern conservative movement was built, in part, by the very type of women who may now be fleeing the Republican Party.

That movement owed much to Phyllis Schlafly, the Harvard-graduate lawyer who marshaled thousands of women against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s. A devout Catholic, Schlafly appealed to other religious women’s fears that the ERA would upend traditional gender roles and legalize the worst abominations, including gay marriage. She also tapped into a cultural sentiment among a certain set of white college-educated women that their class status and way of life was under attack—a sort of counterresponse to the argument feminists were making to a different set of women, who felt that their education was being wasted as homemakers.

Republicans built from Schlafly’s premise, assuring college-educated women in the 1980s that their economic program was best for their family. Ronald Reagan backed his pledge to shrink the federal government, slash business regulations, and cut taxes with the promise that doing so would put more money in Americans’ hands. Reagan boasted in 1984 that “millions of young families” had been “set free from unfair tax increases and crushing inflation” during his presidency.

White women thrilled to his message. It’s true that Reagan suffered from the “gender gap” in both of his presidential races, but that disparity depended on his poor support among women of color. He won a majority of white women in 1980 and again in 1984. The latter victory included nabbing 53 percent of white college-educated women.

The popularity of Reagan’s economic agenda among white college-educated women was coupled with their approval of his aggressive approach to the Soviet Union and his “tough on crime” stance. Convinced that Democrats were unsympathetic to their concerns, white suburban women viewed Reagan’s increase in military spending, his push for a nuclear-missile buildup, and his War on Drugs as essential to their family’s safety.

The belief that Republicans provided the strongest national security and would protect their family against Islamic terrorism bound white women more closely to the GOP after the events of 9/11. George W. Bush justified the war in Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, and enhanced interrogation as necessary for keeping Americans safe. White women agreed: Fifty-five percent voted for Bush’s reelection in 2004.

Since the 1970s, Republican activists and leaders have successfully convinced white women that theirs was the party of economic security and national safety. Yet the politics of safety and security may be what is now driving white women to the Democratic Party.

Some traditionally Republican women may be turned off by the party’s steadfast support for the National Rifle Association and its unwillingness to pursue gun reform, arguably a threat to their children’s lives. Others may feel that the party dismisses their concerns when it comes to the most personal and intimate matters of their bodily integrity.

On that latter point, the Kavanuagh nomination process obviously isn’t helping. Meanwhile, the Democrats have made zero tolerance for sexual harassment and assault the party standard.

That wasn’t always the case. Just think of Senator Joe Biden’s poor handling of the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, or Democrats’ regular dismissal of credible sexual-assault allegations against President Bill Clinton. But that record has now been improved by the party’s vigorous rebuke and removal of recent aggressors, such as Senator Al Franken and Representative John Conyers.

For decades, many women may have seen little difference between the two parties when it came to sexual misconduct, allowing them to prioritize other concerns. Now there’s a bright line.

On Thursday, during a break in Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, a woman called out to Senator Lindsey Graham that she had been raped in the past. “I’m so sorry,” Graham responded as he ducked into an elevator. “You needed to tell the cops.”

Such casual indifference to women’s mistreatment is visible not only in the Republicans’ endorsement of Kavanaugh, but also in the party’s general dismissal of the #Me Too! movement and the president’s obvious sympathy for accused men over accusing women.

Since Ford has come forward with her allegations against Kavanaugh, Republicans in Washington have questioned her story because she didn’t speak out sooner. But if the Republican message to women is that they need to speak up, they might not like what they have to say this November.