>>> if you want to find the root of the adamants of the urgency of the thirst for confrontation that animates todays republican party, the spirit that has led the gop to shut down the government and threaten a default in the name of fighting the presidents health care law, if you want to find the root of all of this, you can do worse than to look to the night of november 4th, 2008, barack obama won his job. simple reality of a democrat being elected president of the united states, triggered on the right, reflects relentless and at times way over the top opposition to everything that barack obama did, said or tried to do from that point forward this wasnt exactly new. knee jerk opposition reaction that he contends with is what bill clinton came up against when he took office. this is how the right reacts when democrats win the white house. but there is a key difference. back in the 1990s, clinton beat the gop in a series of confrontation, the government shutdown, the 1996 election impeach. and republicans responded by changing. at least a little. thats how we got george w. bush and what he called compassionate conservatism. it was response to clintons successes. the political victories he scored by painting himself as the last line of defense between the safety net and those heartless extreme congressional republicans. if they were going to start winning national elections again, republicans had to show they werent just trying to dismantle the government, they had to prove they had a heart. thats what george w. bush told them and they got behind him and he got the presidency. but his presidency didnt exactly work out that well. there is a familiar story we all know, when bush decided to invade iraq, divided america, violence spun out of control and fema botched katrina he lost the country for good. after that, the economic meltdown of 2008 only reinforced the intensely negative feelings americans had developed toward their president. the other story of bushs presidency is how much it offended the right. how the compassionate conservatism they embraced in the name of winning the white house morphed into what they came to call big government conservatism. no child left behind, the medicare prescription drug plan, the bailout, the federal government george w. bush left behind at the end of the presidency was bigger than the one he inherited. this is another crucial source of the energy that is propelled the right into one confrontation after another with president obama. the conviction of conservatives this that he essentially let themselves get duped by bush, they let him grow the government all in the name of winning elections only to emerge after eight years with the presidency with the republican party in horrible political shape. when obama came to office, the right didnt just set out to fight him, they set out to purify the republican party. to purge those who would baited bush. it was more than just the accumulated and in some cases delayed disappointment in the bush years that the tea party grew out of. it is a lot more than that. it is a half century of similar disappointments, of the conservative movement scoring some kind of big electoral breakthrough only to conclude that republican leaders arent really as committed to dismantling government as their rhetoric suggests. modern right announced its arrival by nominating barry goldwater for president in 1964. he endured one of the worst general election beatings in history that fall. four years late, richard nixon created a winning coalition that came to define the modern conservative movement in the republican party. white southerners, blue color white ethnics in the north and what he called the silent majority, the predominantly white middle class. nixon appealed to the coalition social conservatism, he channeled their cultural angst, when it came to governing, he fell far short of the rights goldwater ideal. wage and price controls, the epa, universal health care plan, a call for a living wage, nixon is the president who said were all keynesians now. no wonder why on the occasion of his birthday this year, national review asked of nixon, was he americas last liberal? and there was ronald reagan, a more authentic goldwater republican, election in 1980 supposed to be impossible, no way america would ever choose a president so far to the right. reagan did slash taxes, but when his eight years were up, the federal government had grown bigger and more expensive. it happened again in the 1990s. by newt gingrich, republicans scored a stunning midterm triumph in 1994. they won the house for the first time in 40 years, finally conservatives believed their moment was here. the gingrich republicans forced an immediate confrontation with bill clinton, but it was a pr nightmare. clinton accused the gop of targeting medicare and the gop backed off. this is the backdrop to keep in mind as the current drama plays out. the polling data is clear, this shutdown, the threat of the default, all of this is killing the republican party. it is hurting the partys prospects of being anything more than a minority party that happens to control the house. this doesnt seem to bother the tea party that much. maybe it makes sense, because as were now seeing, they can do an awful lot of damage even if they only control the house. that seems to be the point we reached, a conservative movement that is tired of false starts, that is tired of waiting for all the stars to align, and it now just wants that all-out assault on government, the electoral consequences be dammed. here to talk about how it came to be this way for the right and what it means for this moment of history and for the future, you have robert george of the new york post, also a former staffer to house speaker newt gingrich, joan walsh, sam tannerhouse, new york times, and bob herbert. sam, let me start with you on this. im curious what you kind of make of the history i just laid out there. one of the interpretations ive sort of had for this moment, it is not just a reaction to of immediate politics, it is the conservative movement looking around and saying, look at all -- look at the big government that lbj and fdr gave us and we still largely have that consensus in tact. were sick of it. is that a part of this? >> it goes back farther than that. back to 1952. dwight eisenhower was elected. he was a republican. very moderate republican. and conservative movement was to some extent formed in opposition to this moderate republican president. it was in eisenhowers term, as first term, really, that the seeds of national review were formed, and then it was created in 1955 by bill buckley and colleagues in essence to challenge eisenhower in 1956. bill buckley said in a letter to a recruit, i plan to read dwight eisenhower out of the conservative movement. and it wasnt just the intellectuals. the senate was controlled by robert taft during first term until 1954. and taft had the same problem that someone like mcconnell or boehner has now. could not hold his right wing in check. they were challenging eisenhower from the beginning. joe mccarthy was trying to hold up essential cold war appointments in russia for the united nations. there was the bricker amendment that came out of ohio that actually tried to stop any president from having treaty making power, even of the smallest kind. that was the hard right, fighting against a moderate republican. so it actually goes back 60 years. >> and in the context, in the 50s, the new deal was still new, back in the 1950s and the great society hadnt happened. to give you a taste of -- >> eisenhower in a sense consolidated the new deal and took it under a bipartisan -- a bipartisan framework and that was another one of the reasons why conservatives reacted, people like -- thats when buckley said, you know, were standing -- were standing, yelling stop. >> famously said you would be crazy to go after social security and totally solidify social security and wound up, you know, putting federal troops behind integration in 1957. >> the highways and under eisenhower. to put this in context too, this conservative movement in that era that sam is talking about, here is ronald reagan who -- this is before he was the governor of california, long before he was the president, he was speaking out, said the context is harry truman as president pushed for national health care plan, hadnt worked, democrats were starting to talk now and liberal republicans about that became medicare. this is in 1961. medicare doesnt exist, though. this is ronald reagan, the voice of the conservative movement, one of the voices talking about medicare, 1961. >> write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write them. if you dont, this program i promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. until one day as norman thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism, and if you dont do this, and if i dont do it, one of these days you and i are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our childrens children what it once was like in america when men were free. >> again, he was -- it became medicare. >> and i wouldnt -- i wouldnt say we wouldnt go so far as ronald reagan did that were living in this kind of socialist america, but conceptually he was right in terms of how the programs would expand and, youre right, he anticipated the entire great society. >> he equated that with a loss of freedom. where does that come from? >> well, there is a sense among conservatives that the larger that the federal government gets, less freedom both for the individual, and at the state level. and thats part -- thats part of the reaction -- >> freedom, if youre a freed people and you decide you want a program like social security or a program like medicare and you vote for it, you know, then you have the freedom to establish those programs and thats what the united states had. >> thats the paradox you have, you have the republican party, which wants to be a major party in a two- party system and realizes it has to attract people who essentially do want the government to take care of them to some extent, and a conservative movement which is aligned with the republican party, but not identical. >> and this is one of the frustrations that happened with the conservative movement, and they often see these polls that show that the average voter by two to one tends to be more right of center than left, at least identifies it as conservative versus liberal. and i think there is a confusion between the idea of being ideologically conservative and temperamentally conservative. we saw a couple of those signs of tea party rallies saying, you know, government, keep your hands off my -- my medicare. and so those people who see medicare and make use of it, it is sort of baked -- it is baked in the cake now as part of the -- as part of the structure, so for them, it is conservative to not want to have any changes to it, such as paying for parts of medicare, to pay for obama care. meanwhile, the more ideological conservatives, you know, want to remove a lot of these programs and thats some of the tension you see. >> when you look at the basic appeal of conservatism as a political message, the idea of attacking big government, big bloated wasteful inefficient government, always polls well and is a good selling point for conservatism, the problem that i think conservatives come up against when they get into office and they try to really attack big government, you look at newt gingrich and the republicans in the 90s, medicare, look at the early days of social security and the reagan administration in 1980s, you actually go after what is big government, the social safety net, a program like social security and medicare you find out thats popular. >> the problem with right wing conservatives is they have been on the wrong side of history ever since world war ii and, you know, theyre not dealing with the real world. and it is a mistake to equate the right wing ideologues with the idea of conservative government in general, or until now with the republican party in general. so what the right wing ideologues wanted ever since the new deal is a country that americans do not want. they are on the wrong side of history there, a fight they can -- >> why is it so -- i listen to the reagan clip we played, i remember in the fight over health care reform in 2010, conservatives sort of recycled that and were using that and saying, ronald reagan speaking out from beyond the grave against obama care. but the persistence of sort of this basic conservative vision of not just expanding the social safety net, but in a lot of ways dismantliing it, what accounts for that? >> i think everyone here has touched on it. and the word we havent brought up, though, is libertarianism. this is a fascinating moment for us in american history. this is the strongest upsurge of the libertarian argument we have seen, certainly in my lifetime. the closest would have been barry goldwater. if you look closely at libertarian texts, going back to the great founder who is ludwig von mesus, ron paul was a political godfather of a lot of what were seeing now, it is a moral crusade to strip away as much government as you can for the reason bob mentioned. it will impugn your freedom as government gets bigger, you become smaller. you lose your american values. gary wills may be the greatest political thinker of our time, has a book called necessary evil, which published during the clinton years at the time of the militias, all the rest. he goes back to the founding and says you will see powerful anti-governmental strands, the foundation of american democracy. remember, too, the figures who gave us what we think of as the nullification politics, which is what were seeing in action now, the two figures who founded it were the two authors of our greatest documents. james madison and thomas jefferson. it is wound into our dna as a people, to think that government is the enemy, even when we depend on -- >> robert, once again here, we have to squeeze a break
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 06:16:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015