Beat the Establishment

The divorce papers of
Democratic lobbyist super couple Tony and Heather Podesta show that for a
certain class of people government is not a public service or a field for
settling partisan disagreements so much as an opportunity for self promotion: “As
a married couple who both lobbied they strategically cultivated their public
image,” one document reads, “and worked to build the ‘Heather and Tony Podesta’
brand for the success of their shared enterprise.”

This combination of statist
ideology and insider self-dealing has not left the Republicans entirely
untouched. There’s a new political class, one marked partly by its obnoxious
public divorces but even more by its blindness to much more important issues—the
dignity of the unborn, the plight of the working class. It’s time to open our
own eyes to the way their interests are distorting our politics.

In The Making of the President 1964, Theodore H. White described a Republican
establishment that included New England aristocrats and some heirs to the great
post-Civil War fortunes, but the mass of the establishment was made up of
business executives and law firm partners of often-modest origins. (George
Romney would be an example of the type.) The Democrats had their urban machine
politicians, their Southern courthouse pols and burgeoning activist groups, but
the responsible Republicans were men (overwhelmingly men) who made their money
in (big) business and then turned to politics.

Today’s establishment is
represented less by business executives turned political string pullers and
more by political operatives who then monetize their connections. The
representative figure of this new establishment might be Haley Barbour, the
Republican campaign operative turned lobbyist turned Republican National Committee
Chairman turned Mississippi governor turned lobbyist.

Business and other interests
pay a lot of the money and exert a great deal of influence, but that influence
is filtered through a large class
of politically connected individuals who sometimes hold elected office,
sometimes manage campaigns, and sometimes work in the policymaking apparatus. The
base of this establishment is not New York City, but the newly prosperous Washington DC area.

The new establishment, like
the old, sets the tone nationally. Haley Barbour might be from Mississippi and
current Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus might be from
Wisconsin, but they share the same priorities. When Priebus put together a team
for an “autopsy”
of the Republican 2012 defeat, Priebus picked Haley Barbour’s lobbyist nephew,
Henry Barbour, to be on the team.

Unlike the old Republican
establishment, the new one tries to avoid a distinct ideological profile. You
usually won’t catch them calling themselves moderates, and what makes them distinctive
does not map especially well onto the left-right axis, but the new Republican
establishment has its distinctive priorities, cultural affinities, and blind
spots.

Two obvious problems are a
business lobby-eye-view of the politics of the economy and a discomfort with
social conservatism. On the latter point, a column by
Republican consultant Mike Murphy makes for valuable reading. Murphy wants a
conservatism that “eschews” most social issues to focus on economics.
You would think, reading Murphy, that the 2012 election involved Romney
constantly bringing up abortion unprompted even as the unemployment rate was
ignored. Murphy lived through a campaign where Obama waged relentless culture
war (despite enormous and unexploited weaknesses
on abortion policy) and somehow Murphy decided that social conservatives were
to blame for Romney’s defeat.

Murphy fails to bring up
Romney’s (and the Republican party’s as a whole) lack of an economic agenda for
people who are at or near the economic median. You would think this would be
especially important since, according to the exit polls, 53 percent
of the voters responded that Romney’s policies would primarily benefit the
rich. The members of the Republican establishment have their priorities. They
have their blind spots. They have their story, and they are sticking to it.

What the old Republican establishment
has in common with the new is the sense that the establishment represents the
only viable alternative to the Democrats. Both the old and the believe that
they are the only game in town for realistic right-of-center voters. The old
establishment understood the swing-voter as occupying an ideological space
between the Republican party’s moderates and the Democratic party’s liberals. Today’s
Republican establishment understands persuadable voters as occupying the
ideological space between the Washington Republican lobbying class and the
Obama White House. What swing-voters want is amnesty that comes before
immigration enforcement, expanded low-skill guest worker programs and for
social conservatives to either take a vow of silence or leave politics
entirely.

Reagan and other
conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s showed that the old Republican
establishment’s understanding of the electorate was flawed. Reagan-era populist
conservatives showed that it was possible for the party to move
“right” on taxes, welfare, and foreign policy and win over the
persuadable voters that the establishment believed could only be won by moving
left.

The conservatives of the
1970s did not win just by mobilizing the conservative portion of the Republican
party’s base. The existing Republican base of the mid-1960s was too small to
win national power. Conservative Republicans won by being better than moderates
at winning swing-voters.

Populist and social
conservatives who are frustrated with today’s Republican establishment face a
similar challenge. It is not enough to beat establishment-backed candidates in
Senate primaries. What is the profit in Sharron Angle winning the Republican
nomination if the result is that Harry Reid stays in the Senate? Just as Reagan
listened to unionized Democratic workers, today’s populist conservatives should
listen to Henry Olsen
on working-class whites and Artur Davis
on middle-class African-Americans and Latinos.

This means putting aside
political chimeras like flat taxes and focusing instead on conservative
policies that will directly benefit working families around the median income. It means making immigration work for working families of all races and ethnicities even if it means that some businesses will end up
paying higher wages to lower-skill workers. And the great advantage of the new
Republican establishment is their claim that only they are able appeal to
swing-voters. Populist and social conservatives can beat the establishment by
showing that they are not only more principled than the establishment, but that
they are also smarter and more realistic about how to win the persuadable
voters who decide elections.

Pete Spiliakos writes for First Thoughts. His previous columns can be found here. Image from Zimbio.

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