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When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? Some of my Republican friends
ask if I’ve gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror.

- By David Frum
- Published Nov 20, 2011


"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you
understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together
[his actions]?"
(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone
crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still
others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do
something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I
was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven
years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing
about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really
are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”

It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy
people never do. So let me put the case to you.

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial
page of *The Wall Street Journal*, at *Forbes* magazine, at the Manhattan
and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush
administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable
regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I
have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama
administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I
see things I simply cannot support.


<http://nymag.com/news/politics/liberals-jonathan-chait-2011-11/index.html>

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to
the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And
yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of
default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the
worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand
massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the
face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating
middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk
to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered
Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late
seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big
questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is
getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut
the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the
poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the
poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their
federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such
meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000,
candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By
2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in
lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a
Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in
Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the
Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under
age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting
economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry,
coyly seconded by *The**Wall Street Journal.* In 2000, the same policy
qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of
the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health
reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates,
and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an
open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform
was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative
fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is
“socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for
rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody
else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess.
People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George
W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways?
What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush
experience<http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/858/the_limits_to_my_selfimportanc_1/>,
although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor
role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions
certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for
something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues
emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political
conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to
the morgue.” I came out thinking, *I want no more part of this cycle of
revenge.* For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we
conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument
that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly,
sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to
you?<http://www.frumforum.com/frum-on-frum>”
I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to *you*?”


"If we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could
potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely."
(Photo: Jim Spellman/WireImage/Getty Images)

So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy
bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending
with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we
seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks
radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary
Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the
economics of Ayn Rand.

Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are
opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent
from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the
lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me,
“Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism
is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and
emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say
something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude
others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest
and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite
authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has
gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and
relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No
counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high
corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not
the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit
this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president
is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for
him—and yet that is done too.

Conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment.

Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their
own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more
power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was
the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II,
followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP
suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a
rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your
home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work.
Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame
you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know
for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to
deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s
accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage,
what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be
discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from
bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites
but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories,
populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by
ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have
praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet
it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a
remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump,
Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of
tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space
program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved
liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was
exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in
governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in
to *American Idol* to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early
auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news
entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public
affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or
Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of
bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea
party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course
it never got them.

Many hope that the tea-party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to
subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism
practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and
Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and
John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt
Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who
eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned
its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of
Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does
capture the White House next year.

"[Obama] grew up in a privileged way. He never had to really work for
anything; he never had to go through what Americans are going through."
(Photo: Kevin Winter/NBC Universal/Getty Images)

*1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation*
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the
ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies
already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They
are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are
siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is,
however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich,
the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies.
Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of
Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance
the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut
programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries,
farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the
mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank
and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their
ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are
playing dirty tricks upon them.

*2. Ethnic Competition*
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since
2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the *National Journal*: “63 percent of
African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their
children to exceed their standard of living. Even ­college-educated whites
are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege
whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live
better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match
their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears
are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a
distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new
jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born.
Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase
in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen
continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s
approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is
now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color
symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock
Americans intuit they will be left behind.

It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to
college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of
noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group
today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives
voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not
born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has
shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by
Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of
dispossession and disinheritance.

*3. Fox News and Talk Radio*
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past
two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a
market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its
stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The
business model of the conservative media is built on two elements:
provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching)
and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never
change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked
brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of
political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at
which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like
the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion.
Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by
think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies,
conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own
facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative
reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian
religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the
system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing
intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to
speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to
inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the
U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western
world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in
France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to
borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where
it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

"I'm ready for the gotcha questions...and when they ask me who is the
president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm gonna say, you know, I
don't know."
(Photo: Kevin Winter/NBC Universal/Getty Images)

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own
facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media
use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of
pseudo-facts and pretend information.

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to
fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister
billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own
benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence
the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has
perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special
entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator ­McCain! Nice job,
Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires
are not acting cynically. *They watch Fox News too,* and they’re gripped by
the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party
movement, they are ­actually acting against their own longer-term
interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political
stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing
distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes
to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make
Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

Republican billionaires are not acting cynically; they watch Fox News too.

Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system
behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant
here.

Through the debate over health-care reform in 2009–10, I urged that
Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to
pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to
all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare
should not have been obnoxious to Republicans. In fact, they were drawn
from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to
provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price
to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that
supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act. My urgings went unheeded,
obviously. Senator Jim DeMint predicted that health care would become
Obama’s Waterloo, the decisive defeat that would destroy his presidency,
and Republicans accepted DeMint’s counsel. So they bet everything—and lost
everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by
redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for
the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if
they ever come at all. Republicans hope that the Supreme Court will
overturn the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision would be the most
dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that
reason alone seems improbable. Yet absent action by the Supreme Court,
outright repeal of President Obama’s health-care law is a mirage, requiring
not only 60 votes in the Senate but also the withdrawal of benefits that
the American people will have gotten used to by 2013.

On the day of the House vote that ensured the enactment of health-care
­reform, I wrote a blog post saying all
this<http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo>—and
calling for some accountability for those who had led the GOP to this
disaster. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former
colleagues at *The Wall Street Journal* as a turncoat. Three days after
that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not a
solitary case: In 2005, the economist Bruce Bartlett, a main legislative
author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, was fired from a think tank in Dallas for
too loudly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s record, and I
could tell equivalent stories about other major conservative think tanks as
well.

I don’t complain from a personal point of view. Happily, I had other
economic resources to fall back upon. But the message sent to others with
less security was clear: We don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat.
For myself, the main consequences have been more comic than anything else.
Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for *Newsweek* arguing that Republicans would
regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been
a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid
down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning
calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day.
For sport, I’d always answer, “I’m available—but does your senior producer
know you’ve called me?” An hour later, I’d receive an embarrassed second
call: “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” Earlier this year, I
did some volunteer speechwriting for a Republican contemplating a
presidential run. My involvement was treated as a dangerous secret,
involving discreet visits to hotel suites at odd hours. Thus are political
movements held together. But thus is not how movements grow and govern.

Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative
mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of
intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative
creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic
troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push
the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes,
and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to
show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that
President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique
Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response
to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get
better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term
trend in government
spending<http://www.frumforum.com/two-cheers-for-welfare-state>,
and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of
full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent.
It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent
administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of
legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even
coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting
richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse
over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of
Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my
party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for
the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares.
This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the
baby-boom generation.

I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If
CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the
tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend
to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP
now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected *them
*as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an
inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between
Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater
Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan
governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today,
Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their
tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice
between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger
government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged
opposition.

This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The
conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology
has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American
system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each
other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others.
In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this
kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically, the party that holds the
Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the
other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a
lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old
inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that
the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional
every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican
president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this
dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system
supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a
psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in
2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now
agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012.
Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted:
The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party
struggling with more self-­imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the
party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party.
Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great
political party is worth fighting for.


--

Alexander Snyder-Mackler
(302) 598-867