Deep Roots

The Deep Roots of Jeff Flake’s Break With Trump

Republican elites were always wary of the GOP base, for their own survival. But now, the restive, angry conservative grass roots are running the party.

By GEOFFREY KABASERVICE

For the Republican Party, it is the best of times. The GOP controls the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and record numbers of governorships and state legislatures. It’s also the worst of times: It can’t pass any significant legislation. Nor can it quell the bitter struggle within the party between garden-variety conservatives and Trump-inspired firebrands. In that sense, Tuesday’s continued feuding between the president and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), along with the news that the Trump-tormented Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) will not seek reelection, is just the latest evidence of the debilitating divisions inside the GOP.

Indeed, in the long view of history, there’s nothing particularly surprising about the party’s current chaos. It’s a logical consequence of the conservative grass roots’ takeover of the GOP. Over the past half-century, many Republicans had warned party leaders to keep their distance from the base, seeing it as something like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings—too powerful and dangerous to be controlled. Now, the predictions of those Cassandras are coming true and the conservative movement is destroying the Republican Party from within.

For most of the 20th century, the GOP suffered from a critical political weakness. Following the economic depression of the 1930s, the party’s central doctrine of fiscal responsibility and restrained government became unpopular with a majority of Americans. This led to Democratic dominance in Congress for the better part of six decades. Republicans also had a hard time winning the presidency unless their candidate was a beloved figure like Dwight Eisenhower, or if the Democrats were severely divided, as they were over Vietnam.

The GOP of the mid-20th century was not an ideological party. It was a coalition of conservative, moderate and even progressive factions. But while the Democrats could rely on organized labor to drive voter turnout, only the conservative faction of the Republican Party had a real presence at the grass roots. This made it the likeliest means by which the party might be restored to the majority, but the other factions dreaded the darker tendencies of the conservative movement.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was the forerunner of today’s conservative populism. He played to his followers’ worst instincts and fears, and built a movement by manipulating the media and slandering his opponents as “un-American.” Conservative activists in the ’50s and early ’60s took over Republican organizations by trampling democratic norms, using communist-inspired techniques such as bloc voting and the use of kompromat. The John Birch Society and other right-wing extremist groups promoted conspiratorial thinking, even going so far as to call President Eisenhower an agent of the communist conspiracy. The 1964 presidential candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) welcomed Southern segregationists to the party of Lincoln, an outreach later cemented by President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” The incorporation of the religious right into Republican ranks, starting in the 1980s, made the party more rigid and dogmatic.

As the conservative movement came to play an increasingly important role in the GOP, its dangers were mostly held in check by leaders like William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. Buckley, founding editor of the conservative movement’s ideological flagship, National Review, realized that if conservatism was to become an effective and respectable governing force, it had to separate itself from what he called “the kooks.” He excommunicated John Birch Society paranoids, Ayn Rand’s objectivist followers, neo-Nazis and Klansmen from the movement.

What Buckley achieved on the intellectual side, Reagan accomplished on the political side. He insisted that the GOP had to be a big tent party and prevented conservatives from committing fratricide against moderate Republicans. While he famously declared in his first inaugural address that “government is the problem,” he added, “it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work.” He was willing to negotiate with Democrats on significant legislation like the 1986 tax reform, and he convinced conservatives that it was better to get most of what they wanted than to reject all compromise.

But as the conservative movement remade the GOP, it began to throw off the restraints that cooler heads once imposed. The reasons that the movement spun out of control are open to debate; they include Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth attacks on Congress as an institution, the rise of right-wing talk radio and Fox News, the metastasizing growth of outside money in politics, the decline of party discipline and leadership, the self-segregation of like-minded groups of Americans, rage and despair in collapsing working-class communities, and many others.

Republicans in Congress and the GOP leadership also share blame for the party’s plight. They missed countless opportunities to push back against the increasingly anarchic populism of the conservative movement, to defend the virtues of political experience and cross-aisle cooperation, or to engage with compromise-minded Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama instead of mounting an unrelenting opposition against them. None of this would have required them to make the GOP any less conservative, but they would have had to do the hard work of rethinking how conservative policies can meet the actual needs of citizens. The GOP’s failure to come up with a viable alternative to Obamacare is symptomatic of a broader inability to rise to the responsibilities of a governing party.

Whatever the reasons, the results are plain. All but a rump few moderate Republicans have been primaried out of office or have left politics in disgust. The virtues once preached by Buckley and Reagan—pragmatism, compromise, cooperation, realism, bipartisanship, restrained but competent government—now fill party activists with contempt. The most alarming tendencies of the conservative movement that once were exiled to the political margins—McCarthyite demagoguery, cynical mistrust of all institutions, anti-establishment nihilism, open racism, scorn for truth and traditional norms—have returned with a vengeance. The kooks are back, and it’s their party now.

It must have come as an unpleasant surprise to rock-ribbed conservatives like Senators Corker and Flake to realize that a near-impeccable ideological voting record is no longer a defense against being attacked by the movement they once belonged to. But the rise of the Tea Party and the triumph of Donald Trump have clarified that the movement’s goal is no longer to pass conservative legislation but to wage permanent war against things as they are. If the movement’s motto reflected its real motivation, it would be “Throw Them All Out and Burn It All Down.”

Moderates haven’t had a home in the Republican Party for years. Now it appears that traditional conservatives like Corker and Flake will join them in political exile, unless and until some Reagan-like leader emerges to tame the furies of the conservative movement.