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Thanks as always for your participation, readers. Have a question for next Thursday’s mailbag? Leave it in the comments below.
And if you have the time and inclination, I rapped with Tim Miller on The Bulwark’s flagship podcast for about an hour on Tuesday. I thought it was a good conversation and think you all might as well.
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Bill: The GOP has made owning the libs over all else their defining characteristic since the heyday of Newt Gingrich.
Why do you think this is and what do you see breaking this spell?
It may be a bit reductive, but I think the answer to “why” is the movement right-wing’s febrile antipathy to the New Deal and Great Society.
If conservative organs and their fanatical donors had at some point made peace with the social compact, and the distributive institutions required to insure against deep poverty, old-age poverty, medical bankruptcy—but was still determined to fight over other unresolved issues—we’d live in a much different world. In that world, the GOP might well have proven even more successful than it has in this one.
Why didn’t that happen? Part of it hinges on timing and coincidence, but much else hinges on the decisions of powerful actors. Imagine if after LBJ crushed Goldwater, right-wing fundamentalists with too much money on their hands had reached a stage of acceptance: There will be progressive taxes and welfare and civil equality in America, but we’ll be here to slow or stop a creep toward social democracy, and fight for conservative regulatory policy, social policy, and cultural priorities.
That would have changed the course of realignment, or at least slowed it. Republican appeal would have been less regional, less white, less concentrated in the south. Instead, Vietnam took LBJ out of contention, and the conservative movement continued on its parasitic course. (Nixon’s illegal, secret diplomacy would foreshadow Reagan’s Iran-hostage sabotage, and Trump’s encouragement of Russian election interference.)
Conservatives rebuilt. They made further inroads into the GOP, and in almost no time fomented the Reagan Revolution. Then George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan. The far right believed it had achieved total victory, its destiny manifest. When Bush showed disloyalty to the movement by increasing taxes, conservatives viewed it as a kind of treason against what should have been his higher loyalty, and turned on him. America was for conservatives, not for technocrats. One of the leaders of the revolt was a megalomaniac named Newt Gingrich.
It was Gingrich who schooled congressional Republicans in the art of personal-destruction politics: Our oppone