Elephants never forget? Dionne argues otherwise
Is anyone out there in the punditsphere capable of even describing, much less making explicable, the torturous historical process through which the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt degenerated into the party of Donald Trump and the tea party? If anyone can, it’s E.J. Dionne Jr., columnist for the Washington Post and author of the new book “Why The Right Went Wrong.”
The GOP has wrestled with the notion of ideological purity since the era of Barry Goldwater, who famously declared that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” without realizing that democracy by its very nature is the enemy of ideological purity (which is why communist countries tend not to have opposition parties) and is instead a conflation of conflict and compromise.
Contemporary Republicans, on the other hand, like to profess that they’re working from the playbook of Ronald Reagan, who claimed in his first inaugural address that government is not the solution to our problems, “government is the problem” (of course, anyone who believes that has no more business being in government than an atheist has applying for divinity school). They fail to realize that, as Dionne points out, Reagan’s actions rarely matched his rhetoric. In reality, Reagan governed far more like the FDR for whom he voted multiple times than the Barry Goldwater for whom he campaigned. “He would test limits,” Dionne writes, “but not push beyond them if the political traffic could not bear what he had originally hoped for.”
Many of those who
claim to be Reagan’s ideological heirs, though, refuse to have anything to do with the grubby but necessary pragmatism of governance: For them, it’s all or nothing at all. That’s the antithesis of how Reagan actually governed.
Dionne begins his book by charting the course from Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 presidential campaign to Ronald Reagan’s two landslides, which, some claimed at the time, belatedly validated Goldwater’s philosophy. For example, in Reagan’s quest to change what Dionne calls “the underlying structure of government,” the president accepted the fact that much of it was untouchable but made up for it by slashing benefits for the poor even as he was lowering tax rates for the rich. Yet, as Dionne points out, Reagan was “spending more than ever,” mostly on the military — a recipe for exactly the kind of deficits that contemporary Republicans claim to deplore. Dionne merely claims that Reagan’s budgetary policy “left both liberals and small-government conser- vatives dissatisfied” and that “at the end of Reagan’s eight years, the federal apparatus was not only left standing; it was spending more than ever.”
It was only with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, however, that the Republicans became what they arguably remain today: the party of toxic obstructionism. In this, Dionne contends, they missed a historic opportunity. As Clinton turned deficits into a surplus and created millions of jobs, Republicans slid into a kind of reflexive nihilism that still exists to this day, from insisting on impeaching Clinton (“one of the most bizarre and distasteful episodes in American political history,” as Dionne put to compulsively voting for bills to obliterate Obamacare when they know the president will veto them. Ideological purity is all, even at the expense of common sense.
But as the book inches closer to the present and the 2016 election, Dionne incrementally segues from historian to journalist and becomes somewhat less effective. The reader gets lost in thickets of legislative and political detail that might profitably have been pruned.
As the GOP devolves into what Dionne describes as a “deep and angry pessimism,” can anything be done to salvage American politics? The consequences of the kind of toxic partisanship that has been the norm since the start of the Clinton administration will continue to have a catastrophic effect on our country. Dionne’s book expertly delineates where we are and how we got there. It’s for us to decide where we want to go next.