Guest Voice: On The Conservative Ascendancy Since The Great Society

The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts by people who don’t have their own weblogs, websites or who want to discuss something with TMV’s ideologically diverse readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV. This is by Mark A. Smith, an associate professor of Political Science and an ajdunct professor of communication at the University of Washington. He is the author of an intriguing new book The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society.

By Mark A. Smith

Political movements always face great difficulties in understanding their enemies. When a group expresses political beliefs fundamentally different than your own, it can be difficult if not impossible to understand its basic assumptions and ways of thinking. The temptation will always be to dismiss whatever success your opponents have as a fluke, the result of machinations, manipulation, money, or raw power—anything other than the cogency of their ideas.

Perhaps nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the interpretations by liberals of the conservative ascendancy in American politics over the last three decades. As conservatives since the 1970s increasingly won elections and implemented a policy agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and a retrenchment of the welfare state, liberals groped for answers as to why this happened.

Arguably the most widely held explanation points to the prominence of social and cultural issues. Expressed most powerfully by Thomas Frank’s wildly popular What’s the Matter with Kansas, this perspective holds that Republicans in recent decades undertook a giant bait and switch. During campaigns, Republican candidates supposedly fired up their base with red-meat appeals on issues like race, abortion, homosexuality, and religious expression in public life. After winning office, however, those candidates immediately pushed those concerns to the side and instead enacted an economic agenda favoring the rich.

One can see why analysis of this sort would appeal to liberals. By putting the blame on the dishonesty of Republican elites, it denies the legitimacy of the policies they passed. Ordinary voters, the account implies, opposed that agenda but were duped into voting for Republicans by hot-button appeals on social and cultural issues. At the same time, the analysis provides an effective critique of Democrats and their liberal allies. A failure to redirect public attention to a populist economic program, the reasoning goes, has sown defeat for Democrats in the past and will continue to bring Democratic defeats until the party rediscovers its economic voice.

This is one key problem with this account of the conservative ascendancy since the Great Society: it is deeply flawed. To be sure, religiosity has become more tightly linked to voting preferences, but the corresponding claim that economic concerns have been pushed off the political table is flat-out wrong. Judged by the amount of attention devoted by candidates and officeholders, economic matters have become more central—not less—to American politics.

The main driver of this transformation has been a rise in economic insecurity. In the midst of greater international competition, jobs are much less stable than they were for previous generations. Wages have been stagnant for most of the population. As is well-known, companies continue to shed their prior commitments to providing benefits, with fewer and fewer people each year receiving pensions and employer-provided health insurance. Personal bankruptcy rates doubled in the 1980s, redoubled in the 1990s, and are on pace to do so again in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

These basic economic trends are widely known. Their political consequences, however, are not so widely known. It would be odd if candidates, parties, and their intellectual supporters responded to economic insecurity by changing the subject and instead stressing social and cultural issues. As it turns out, no such thing happened, and it is here that the conventional understanding of the conservative ascendancy goes astray.

In the last several electoral cycles, Republican presidential candidates have run far more advertisements on issues related to the economy—such as jobs, incomes, growth, taxes, and government spending—than they did in earlier decades. Moreover, they have changed the arguments they offered on behalf of particular proposals. Post-World War II conservatives like Barry Goldwater normally offered freedom-based reasons for cutting taxes, curtailing government spending, and shrinking the welfare state. Beginning with Ronald Reagan, modern Republicans instead emphasized the economic consequences they expected would follow from their favored policies. Conservatives used to contend that social programs violated personal freedom, but now they more often argue that big government stands in the way of prosperity and economic growth.

The story of recent American politics is, of course, more complicated than I describe here, and I tell the fuller version in my recent book The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society. It’s a book, I hope, that has something to say to everyone on the ideological spectrum. Liberals might benefit from getting a clear-eyed view of their opponents that examines actual politicians and intellectuals rather than the caricatures commonly portrayed by critics. Conservatives might want to know how they have succeeded in the past, with hopes of repeating that success in the future. Moderates, too, might find comforting my conclusion that the so-called culture war is a myth.