Conservatism for the People
Henry Olsen
I
n some k ey r espects, American politics has exhibited remarkable
continuity for more than two centuries. Parties, issues, and coalitions
have come and gone, yet certain basic American political values and
aims have remained constant.
Among the most important of these has been the willingness to use
government power to help individuals advance in life. Every dominant
national political coalition since at least the Civil War has had this idea at
its heart. These winning coalitions promoted neither paternalism nor libertarianism. Instead, they gave voice to a uniquely American outlook that
emphasizes personal freedom and self-reliance while leaving room for the
use of collective, democratic self-government to promote those virtues.
As a result, virtually every important national campaign has revolved
around one central question: How can we best give average people respect, dignity, and an opportunity to make their way in the world,
tyrannized neither by government nor by private individuals?
That was the question over which the 2012 election was fought.
President Obama and the Democrats advanced one answer; Governor
Romney and the Republicans advanced another. Both sides understood
that this election would begin to settle whose approach would govern
America for years to come.
Republicans, and especially conservatives, would like to dismiss their
defeat as an aberration. They proffer many excuses: Governor Romney
was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign; President Obama’s
technology-driven ground game made the difference; Hurricane Sandy
stopped Romney’s momentum at the worst possible time. None of these
explanations is without merit, but all miss the major point of the election results: The president made the campaign into a choice between
H e n ry O l s e n is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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two clear visions of America, and Americans preferred his vision to
the Republicans’.
The Republican denial of this simple truth stands squarely in the way
of their pursuit of the presidency. Republican renewal can start only
when the party understands that it lost because its vision has slowly
drifted away from the concerns of most Americans. By abandoning the
American people’s foremost political priority, the GOP places its continued national relevance at risk.
Believ e i n A mer ic a ?
Mitt Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America.” The clear
implication of that motto was, of course, that he and his party did believe in America and the president and the Democrats did not. Rather
than complain about this subtle swipe at his patriotism, the president
calmly accepted the challenge. He built his entire campaign around
defining what America means and the role government should play in
our national life.
Obama effectively asked: Which do you like better? Would you prefer the Republican alternative as exemplified by the candidacy of Mitt
Romney and the policies he and his party have proposed in Congress and
on the stump? The president then characterized the Romney-Republican
definition of America as an “on your own” society, one in which government would not be used to help the average person pursue happiness
but would be used instead to help the rich and powerful get richer and
more powerful.
One would have thought that Romney would actively join the debate.
In a way he did, for he often emphasized that America was a land where
anyone could start from scratch and build a business. The subtle implication, however, was that people who did so were the best Americans
and everyone else was just along for the ride. It is in that sense that the
phrase “you built that” and laments about “makers” versus “takers” were
the essence of Romney’s America. Judging from the cheering crowds
at the Republican convention and Romney’s campaign rallies, they were
also the essence of the Republican Party’s vision of the nation.
The fundamental debate, then, was not over whether America stood
for individual freedom and opportunity. Both candidates agreed that it
did. The debate was over whether government had a legitimate role to
play in directly helping all people exercise their freedom and opportunity
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or whether government’s role was to get out of the way of the few so that
they could directly help the many. Romney’s Republican Party argued for
the latter; the president and the Democrats argued for the former.
Republicans and conservatives never seriously considered they could
lose that debate. One could see this throughout the campaign. When
polls suggested that Romney was behind, Republicans disputed the accuracy of the polls. “Too many Democrats,” they said. “Don’t believe
those pollsters behind the curtain. Believe in America.”
Nevertheless, the president’s view won, 51% to 47%. This is rightfully
distressing to conservatives. It is distressing because they believe the president seeks to fundamentally remake the idea of American citizenship
into something that no longer uniquely encourages personal freedom
and self-reliance. Conservatives believe, with much justification, that
the president places a higher moral value on collective decision-making
and requirements than on individual judgment and preferences. That
may indeed be the case. But by choosing to define America as a land
primarily for hardy strivers, Republicans have strayed from the center of
American politics, a center that has held for all of our history.
Some conservatives may think American principles require hands-off
government, but most Americans have consistently rejected that idea.
One could date this rejection to the election of 1912, when two progressives and a socialist got 75% of the vote against the constitutionalist
incumbent, William Howard Taft. But one could also date it back to
1860, when the party of Lincoln stood for government action on behalf
of ordinary Americans through protective tariffs, subsidization of intercontinental railroads, creating land-grant colleges to extend learning,
and giving federal land out for free to western settlers.
If American principles simply require hands-off government, then
American principles have not been part of our politics for a very long
time. A hands-off approach is not what American politics and principles require; it is a parody of what America and American conservatism
mean. One can see this by looking at the statesmanship of Ronald
Reagan, whose victories in 1980 and 1984 set the modern conservative
movement and Republican Party on the path to power.
R e ag a n’s Conservat i v e A mer ic a
In 1976, when Ronald Reagan lost the struggle for the Republican
presidential nomination to the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, the
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prospects for a genuinely conservative Republican Party seemed in grave
danger. Only one-third of the House of Representatives was Republican
that year, and about half of those Republican members, by any measure,
were moderates or liberals. The nation’s elites considered conservatism
simply irrelevant to modern life. The Minnesota Republican Party even
changed its name to the Independent-Republican Party because it didn’t
want to be known solely as Republican.
But Ronald Reagan walked into the Conservative Political Action
Committee conference in February 1977 and said, to paraphrase, “The
common wisdom is wrong. We’re going to get power back, and we’re
going to get it back without changing our principles.” He then presented
his 1980 battle plan. He explained how to talk to Americans. He talked
about principles of freedom. He described how people who were economically successful and people who were not could unite over a core
set of values and an appreciation for each other’s concerns and priorities.
In other words, he asked the Reagan Democrats to join the Country
Club Party and create what he called “a new Republican Party.” We’ve
been living in the age that Ronald Reagan created in that speech and
through his subsequent actions ever since.
How did he do it? What did Reagan understand that conservatives
before him — and many after him — did not? He added two elements
to conservative thought and action, both of which were apparent in his
thinking as far back as his speech endorsing Barry Goldwater in 1964 — the
televised speech that launched him on his way to political fame and the
presidency — and in his post-election analysis that year for National Review.
The first element was a profound respect for the aspirations of the
common person. This person was not a stereotypical frontiersman seeking personal independence. He was merely “a simple soul,” someone
“who goes to work, bucks for a raise, takes out insurance, pays for his
kids’ schooling, contributes to his church and charity and knows just
‘ain’t no such thing as free lunch.’ ”
Ronald Reagan thought this simple life was valuable. Those who
sought it did not want a handout or a “free lunch,” but they weren’t
hardy, hands-off pioneers either. They drove to work on government
roads. They educated their kids in government schools. They relied to
some degree on the government’s retirement program to avoid poverty
in old age. They were neither libertarians nor socialists, neither entrepreneurs nor dependents. They were simply Americans.
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Second, Reagan accepted the federal government’s potential as a
means of directly helping these people. Much of his Goldwater speech,
“A Time for Choosing,” blasted all sorts of government overreach and
incompetence. But at one point in the middle of the speech, he turned
to rebut the old liberal complaint about Republicans, that “we’re always
‘against,’ never ‘for’ anything.”
Reagan spoke about Social Security and a program that has since
come to be called Medicare (Americans were debating in the 1964 election whether to create Medicare). With respect to Social Security, he said
that “destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age,
and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting
the problem.” In other words, there was nothing wrong with the federal
government acting to help people in need. He was not the hands-off
conservative who wanted to repeal Social Security and say, “you’re on
your own.” That wasn’t Ronald Reagan.
He went on to discuss different ways to think about providing for
retirement that avoided a one-size-fits-all government program, one that
allowed people to provide for themselves but did not throw the people
who really needed help out on the street. He then applied that same
principle to what we now call Medicare. He opposed the kind of centralized, one-size-fits-all government program that Medicare wound up
being. He said that he favored a smaller program that addressed people
who really needed support, allowing them to access health care without
submitting everybody to the same government-run system.
Conservatives in 1964 did not call him a “RINO.” They did not argue that he stood against the Constitution, nor did they argue that he
was usurping the free market and civil society. Instead, they embraced
Reagan as the leader they had always wanted and maintained their devotion to him through good times and bad, until death did them part.
The reason conservatives embraced Reagan was that he expressed
their most deeply held values. He did not speak about government
power; he spoke about justice. He spoke about how government could
help average people do things that they could not be expected to do for
themselves — and how it should expect average people to do those things
that they could. The American government would neither keep its hands
off nor heavily place its hands on; it would offer everyone a hand up.
The painful truth is that President Obama’s rhetoric was closer to
Reagan’s than was the rhetoric of Romney and many other leading
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Republicans in 2012. Obama’s policies will not deliver what he promised,
but conservatives will not be given an opportunity to implement their
vision until they show they understand and respect the average person’s
life. Conservatives must channel their inner Reagan and rediscover the
sources of his connection with the heart of the American electorate.
T he GOP’s Fata l Concei t
Reagan’s heirs have misunderstood his legacy because they have taken it
to be largely a political legacy rather than an intellectual one. The political legacy was supposedly simple: Run against the liberals. As a result,
for 30 years conservative campaigns have been run against the liberals,
with liberals defined as people who opposed tax cuts and supported welfare expansion. In doing so, modern conservatives have fallen into the
pre-Reagan trap of emphasizing what they are against rather than what
they are for. This allowed them to avoid touching the core, expensive
programs of the entitlement-welfare state, which have remained widely
popular. Unfortunately, however, it also left conservatives powerless to
change the course of those programs, leaving them powerless to change
the course of our government more broadly.
This simple fact explains why we keep getting bigger government
when we elect people who are running against liberals. This has happened time and again throughout the post-Reagan era. A revealing
moment in the first presidential debate in 2012 helps us see why. In that
debate, President Obama tried to pin Governor Romney down on how
he would pay for his tax cuts by alleging that Romney would cut education spending. Romney responded, “No, I’m not going to cut education
spending,” thereby taking $91 billion in federal spending off the table.
Why would he do that? If you haven’t thought about what government’s role in education is — if your campaign is based on what
you are not instead of on what you are — you get trapped in trying
to explain what you’re going to cut and what you’re not going to cut.
Because you’re not offering any coherent, compelling vision for how
the federal government can help improve education, the cut-or-fund
question stands in for the question of whether you care about the issue.
When this happens, by the time the campaign is over you have nothing left to cut or reform — and government grows. The post-Reagan
era has thus resulted in an anti-liberal public consensus, but not a proconservative one.
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The conservative failure to grasp Reagan’s intellectual legacy mirrors
the shortcomings in the intellectual legacy of conservatism itself. Modern
American conservatism, as it took shape in the second half of the 20th century, was often described as a fusion of several different factions united in
their opposition to the Soviet Union abroad and the expansion of the state
at home. It was, in other words, primarily defined by what it was against
rather than what it was for. The conservative coalition therefore contained
people who seemed to agree about relatively little.
There were traditionalists who generally liked small towns and didn’t
have a problem with government on a local level but didn’t like the
new, post-New Deal role of the federal government. They were skeptical of American involvement overseas but supported containing the
Soviet Union.
There were anti-communists like Whittaker Chambers, most of
whom were former leftists who thought that the New Deal was fundamentally sound but that we should not try to remake society at a rapid
pace and we should actively oppose the Soviet Union. They supported
many domestic programs that traditionalists opposed.
There were libertarians, people who followed Friedrich Hayek and
later Ayn Rand. The libertarians opposed both sets of conservatives on
domestic policy as they opposed activity at all levels of government.
They also tended to oppose anti-communists on questions of government power abroad, except when the Soviet Union was directly involved.
Even Ms. Rand, as an immigrant from the Soviet Union, didn’t have a
problem with fighting the Cold War.
There were religiously inspired conservatives whose primary motivation was to restore Christianity’s cultural primacy. They tended to oppose
libertarians on most matters, but quarreled with many anti-communists
over cultural issues and were more comfortable than were traditionalists
with the idea that federal power could be exercised successfully.
These separate strains of conservatism still exist within the movement nearly 60 years after its founding. As a result, conservatives have
never reached agreement on what aspects of the post-New Deal world
should be retained, reformed, or repealed. This difficulty has hindered
their ability to govern whenever they have seized power, and it continues to bedevil the movement today.
Reagan implicitly proposed a way forward for all stripes of conservatives through his hand-up approach to the entitlement-welfare state, but
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his heirs have largely failed to recognize this. Instead, they have tended
to follow his contemporary, Jack Kemp, in seeing America first and
foremost as a land where anyone can make it big rather than as a place
where anyone can live the life he seeks. This small but crucial difference
has thrown conservatism off course. Modern conservatives have tended
to discount the moral value of the average person, focusing instead on
extolling the moral superiority of the great.
How many times in recent years have conservative leaders told us
about the virtuous entrepreneur? He built his own business, creating
jobs and helping to make America great. But what about the worker?
Does he automatically identify with his boss? Does he think, “Whatever
is good for General Motors is good for me”? Of course not. As much
as Ronald Reagan believed America was a land of opportunity, the opportunity he spoke of was open as much to the factory worker as to the
factory owner.
We can see this clearly if we think about Reagan’s famous Normandy
speech. In 1984, Reagan honored the 40th anniversary of the storming
of the beaches of Normandy with what was then a momentous address.
He was most noted for his praise of the average people who stormed
the cliffs under withering German fire, people who were farmers from
Kansas and bricklayers from Charleston and teachers from Brooklyn,
who went up under orders and took the cliffs and saved Europe. He
called them “the boys of Pointe du Hoc.”
It is easy to picture Mitt Romney praising the sagacity of Eisenhower,
or the bravery of Patton, or the genius of the armaments makers who
gave the soldiers the tools they needed to take the beach. But praising
the valor of the good old boys who took the Pointe du Hoc? That’s much
harder to envision.
A Li t t le Help from our Fr iends
The sense that the average person has a moral life that is worth leading
and pursuing — and that he sometimes needs government to help him
on his way — is central to American political identity but is disconnected
from much of today’s conservative thought. The Obama campaign created its majority by exposing this disconnection relentlessly.
Take for instance the question of Obamacare’s requirement that
employers — including even religious employers — pay for contraception for their workers. This is a classic wedge issue: one designed to force
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Republicans to defend their base at the expense of appealing to swing
voters. Many women of all ideological stripes believe their ability to
succeed in modern America would be imperiled if they could not have
access to contraception. And many of these people believe that priests
and churches oppose their having such access and hence are obstacles
to the fulfillment of their dreams.
Democrats harnessed this set of views in a very calculated way. They
essentially told women: “You know you need to control your body.
Republicans are not only opposed to abortion, but they don’t even want
you to get contraception. They’re on your foes’ side, not yours. They’re
not running for you.” Make what you will of the substance of their case;
it was politically effective.
The immigration issue was used to make the same point to Hispanics
and Asians. Blue-collar workers of whatever race or gender, but particularly white men in the industrial Midwest, were also targeted. They
were particularly likely to have been unemployed, or to have known
someone who was, during the recent recession. They voted en masse
against Obama’s Democrats in 2010, but in 2012 the Obama campaign
said to them, “Look at Romney’s Republicans. You’ve spent the last 20
years seeing your lives squeezed even if you’re making it, and a lot of you
aren’t. Their economic policy is to give more money to their rich friends
and hope that they do right by you. They’re not running for you.”
Is it any surprise, then, that we saw phenomenally high margins for
Obama among single women as well as Hispanics and other immigrant
groups, and that we saw depressed turnout in areas where non-evangelical,
non-southern, blue-collar men predominate in the electorate?
Evidence of conservatism’s failure to learn from Reagan — and of the
effectiveness of the Obama campaign’s ruthless exploitation of this failure — can be seen in the response to one question in particular from the
election-day exit polling. Voters taking this poll were asked to choose
which of four characteristics they would most want to see in a president.
Fully 74% of them chose “shares my values,” “is a strong leader,” or “has
a vision for the future.” These people voted for Mitt Romney, and not
by narrow margins: For each of those categories, he won by nine to
23 points.
Usually when you carry three-quarters of the vote by about 14 points,
you’re measuring drapes for the Oval Office. But Romney lost because
21% of voters chose the fourth characteristic: “cares about people like
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me.” Romney lost them by over 60 points. Republicans aren’t suffering
from a racial gap. They aren’t suffering from a gender gap. They aren’t
suffering from a marriage gap. All of those are symptoms of the real
problem: Republicans are suffering from an empathy gap.
Empat h y a nd t he Demogr a phic Ch a llenge
The empathy gap is made more crucial because many of the groups
moved by this concern are growing in electoral power. Non-whites are
particularly likely to believe they need a hand up to join the American
mainstream, and their share of the electorate is expanding.
The 2012 election was clearly decided by the non-white vote for the
first time in American history. About 72% of the electorate in 2012 election was white, according to the exit poll. Romney carried the white
vote 59% to 39%, a 20-point lead and the fourth highest for a Republican
since the advent of exit polling. No presidential candidate in American
history had ever carried 59% of the white vote and lost. Yet Romney
lost the election by four points because he lost the non-white vote by
63 points.
Romney did slightly better than John McCain among AfricanAmericans, winning 6% of their vote compared with 4%, but even that
was well below the 10% Republicans averaged for the 40 years before
President Obama. Romney substantially underperformed McCain,
however, among Hispanics and Asians. Hispanics gave Romney an
abysmally low 27%. His share of the Asian vote was also lower than
McCain’s, 26% as compared with 35%.
The non-white segment of the electorate is growing quickly. In fact, in
every presidential election since 1996, the non-white vote’s share of the total vote has increased by about two percentage points, and the share of the
white vote has gone down by about two percentage points, much of that
change stemming from Hispanic and Asian population increases.
There are some caveats to this overall trend. Some of it is attributable
to the record-high turnout of African-American voters in 2008 and 2012.
No one can know whether they will continue to show up when Obama
is not on the ballot. Nevertheless, because of racial and ethnic differences in birth and death rates, and because of ongoing immigration,
whites will shrink rapidly as a share of the future electorate.
In 2016, if there is not a dramatic reduction in African-American
turnout, a Republican presidential candidate will need to get 60% of
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the white vote, plus a record-high share among each portion of the nonwhite vote (African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and others) to win a
bare 50.1% of the vote. Republicans who have previously received 60%
or more of the white vote have done so by appealing to non-evangelical,
blue-collar whites and to women. The constituencies among which
Republicans need to increase support, therefore, are not likely to flock
to an agenda even more focused on opposition to immigration, cuts in
the top marginal tax rate, and reductions in core entitlements.
Nor can Republicans retake the White House by returning to Bushera conservatism. That agenda was founded on the idea of cutting taxes
and limiting government growth without significantly trimming core
entitlements. Our ongoing fiscal crisis precludes that approach because
it is now impossible to limit borrowing to a prudent level without touching some aspect of the entitlement-welfare state, dramatically increasing
taxes, or sharply cutting defense. Conservatives have to choose among
these options, a tough choice they haven’t had to make in the postReagan era.
The conventional wisdom says that conservatism cannot deal
with this new reality and, consequently, we are about to go into a 30to 40-year liberal period akin to the New Deal era and the age that
followed — decades during which American society became more centralized and government-focused. But, as conservatives learned in 1977,
the common wisdom does not have to be right. Conservatives today
now face their own “time for choosing” that will determine whether the
common wisdom will prevail or whether we will enter a modern age of
conservative ascendancy.
T he New R epublic a n Pat h
Republicans and conservatives can succeed only if they come home to
Reagan’s vision of America. That vision sees government as a danger but
not an enemy, and looks for ways to make it useful rather than harmful to the advancement of a free society. It is a vision in line with the
spiritual heritage of Lincoln’s Republican Party — one that gives average
people a hand up, not a hand out.
Many conservatives fear that this vision means Republicans will become the second party of big government, but that need not be true.
Enabling government to do what it should do also involves pulling it
back from all that it should not be doing. Fully implementing this vision
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would create smaller government because, over the years, we have extended so many handouts to people in all classes who do not need or
deserve them. Congressional Republicans have tried to rein in entitlement spending in recent years, but they have failed, in large part because
they are using arguments that do not resonate with the majority of the
electorate. If Republicans instead simply restored the historical hand-up
approach to government, they could shrink the size of the state by as
much as or more than their recent budget proposals have suggested — all
while increasing the political appeal of the conservative agenda.
Finding this new path will require both new rhetoric and new policy.
First and foremost, however, it requires a renewed emphasis on an old
goal: helping the common man advance in life. This has long been the
driving purpose of American politics and the stated aim of just about
every successful political coalition in our history. But in many respects
it has ceased to be the goal of the Republican Party, and it needs to
become so again.
We now stand at a decisive moment of a sort that comes only about
every 40 years in American politics. Ours is a period in which Americans
will debate first principles and decide which party is best suited for the
foreseeable future to help the average person get along with the realities
he faces. In this new century, we are deciding who is going to offer us a
modernized form of the American dream.
If conservatives can understand that they are the party of government by and for the people as opposed to the party that wants to repeal
all government entirely — that they are the party of a hand up rather
than the party of the handout or of hands-off government — then, and
only then, can they continue to lead America further on what Ronald
Reagan called mankind’s journey from the swamp to the stars.
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