RETREAD TACTICS HAVE BLOWN UP IN GOP’S FACES BEFORE
WASHINGTON — Political energy is hard to define but easy to recognize. Attentive citizens can usually tell which side is rising, dominating the public discussion and laying ownership to the future. Such dynamism can wear out quickly, but it’s unmistakable when it appears.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives have been better than liberals at claiming that kind of momentum, even though Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections only once in the past three decades. Democratic presidential victories in 1992, 2008 and 2020 were each followed two years later by a GOP takeover of the House that stalled progressive legislative advances and complicated any claims that history was moving leftward.
But this moment in our politics is very different from Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution and the 2010 tea party rebellion — and not just because we can’t get Donald Trump out of our heads.
Especially in Gingrich’s case but also after the tea party wave, journalists and scholars scrambled to understand the big new conservative thing that had just happened. Democrats adjusted defensively to what they saw as a new reality, and Republicans boasted of knowing exactly where the public wanted to go.
Just before the 2010 election, three then-youthful Republican members of Congress, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, published a book called “Young Guns,” with the confident, even Kennedy-esque, subtitle “A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.”
The new Republican majority McCarthy leads has none of the forward-looking vibe of its predecessors.
For starters, the coalition on which it rests is old. Voters younger than 40 overwhelmingly back the Democrats; Republicans are strongest among Americans 65 and older. Back in Reagan’s day, young Americans were drawn to conservatism. Not anymore.
Its ideas are old, too. It’s astonishing that the main excitement of the coming Congress is likely to come from retread tactics drawn from those earlier GOP Congresses that did conservatives more harm than good.
It was the Gingrich Congress in 1995 that pioneered the government shutdown as a vehicle for forcing budget cuts. Instead, Republicans handed Clinton one of the central arguments in his successful re-election campaign a year later: that he protected the country from GOP cuts in “Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment.”
The fact that President Joe Biden and Democrats will have a very similar list to recite (plus saving Social Security and blocking a 23% sales tax) makes you wonder why conservatives can’t come up with some new material.
The threat not to raise the debt ceiling is a throwback to the 2011 tea party Congress.
Again, you want to ask Republicans if they have bigger goals than slashing programs (when Democrats are in the White House) and holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage — and if they aren’t tired of doing the same stuff over and over and having it blow up in their faces.
The lack of creative energy on the right means that the battle for control over the nation’s political agenda is very much up for grabs.
The president and his party will be able to point to projects all over the country that they financed in the last Congress — building infrastructure, investing in the fight against climate change and promoting new technologies.
Canvassing moderates and progressives at the federal and state level last week, I found ongoing enthusiasm for building on what happened over the past two years and taking on new challenges in areas such as child care, elder care and housing.
Voters, like music lovers, grow weary of hearing the same old songs and nothing else. The Young Guns of yesteryear aren’t young anymore. Neither are their ideas, their objectives or their methods. The thrill is gone.