by Henry Olsen
Hillary Clinton could have done something about this, but it would have required her to imitate her husband and tack to the center to compete for working-class Democrats or the moderately conservative business voters who disliked Trump. She did neither. She was always wary of the progressive wing of her party, which had backed Bernie Sanders in the primaries against her and some of whom were backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Hillary Clinton also had the Rising American Electorate theory in her camp. All she had to do was encourage turnout among these groups, she was told, and they would deliver her a victory. No one seemed to notice that many of those voters lived in states she was already going to carry, like California and New York. Running up the score in these states left open the thin possibility that Trump’s strategy of reuniting the Reagan coalition with positive appeals to the former Reagan Democrats and negative, “I’m better than Hillary” appeals to the others would let him win where it counted, in the Electoral College.
We all know what happened next. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, but that was due to Clinton winning large margins in states with large numbers of members of the Rising American Electorate. Trump won narrow victories in places where voter demographics were not changing as quickly and where Trump and Clinton had focused their efforts. He won the Electoral College by 306–232 because he won Florida, North Carolina, and the five midwestern states that Obama had carried twice. The Reagan Democrats were back.
Trump won whites without a college degree by 37 percent, 66–29. Moreover, unlike Bush, McCain, and Romney, he did nearly as well among midwestern working-class whites as among southern ones. Trump carried working-class whites in the five midwestern states he took from the Democrats’ column by over 30 percent in each.70 Recall that Obama in 2008 had won working-class whites in three of these states and lost them in the two others by only ten and fifteen points. Even in 2012 he had won these voters in Iowa and lost them by no more than ten points in most of the others.71
Trump’s laser-like focus on the concerns of the white working class had another side-effect that remains unnoticed by most partisans: he handily beat Romney among “cares about people like me” voters. Romney had lost by 81–18 among this group; Trump lost by only 57–35.72 Trump did as well or better on this question in each of the five midwestern states he gained; Romney, if one can believe it, lost “cares about people like me” voters by even more than 63 points in each of those five states. The media said Trump was nasty, bigoted, misogynistic, rude, and a fascist. For his core voters, though, he was the only one who really cared.
Progressive analysts have argued that these voters empathized with Trump because he expressed their own closeted racist or sexist thoughts. This is hard to swallow in light of these voters’ proved willingness to vote for blacks (Obama), or women.73 One can see this best when one looks at Wisconsin. Trump carried the Badger State by only 22,758 votes. He carried twenty-one working-class counties by a total of 34,300 that just four years had given comfortable majorities to both President Obama and the only openly lesbian US senator, Tammy Baldwin.74 Had Clinton simply run even with Trump in these counties, still doing worse than Obama and Baldwin, she would easily have won.
Even Trump’s record appeal with white working-class voters is not enough on its own to fulfill Reagan’s dream of a majority New Republican Party. That’s because Trump, unlike Reagan, did not try to build a positive coalition including all the New Party’s elements. As mentioned, he primarily relied on the party faithful’s hatred of Hillary Clinton to build his coalition. Even then he fell short, winning only 46 percent of the popular vote. While he was gaining millions of working-class two-time Obama voters, he was losing millions of upper-class McCain-Romney supporters.
Trump fell well short of Romney in votes and in percentage of votes cast almost anywhere there were highly-educated, prosperous people. He lost California’s Orange County, the first time a Republican had lost that conservative bastion since 1936. He lost congressional districts with high levels of education and incomes in Virginia, Texas, Illinois, and California that Romney had carried.75 He nearly lost a similar district represented by his nominee to become the Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, in Georgia. He saw his winning margins drop in a host of high-education, high-income areas even in places like Oklahoma, Indiana, and South Carolina.
This was true even in swing states that Trump actively contested. Trump carried the Milwaukee suburbs by 28,000 fewer votes than Romney did. He lost the Philadelphia suburbs by nearly 65,000 votes more than Romney did, and he lost the educated and affluent areas of Colorado by 54,000 votes more than Romney did. The Trump victory may point the way to a national Republican majority, but it does not deliver it automatically.
Nor should conservatives and Republicans expect to rely on Trump himself to deliver it. He has shown no inclination to develop the type of comprehensive philosophy that drove Reagan’s political ambitions. He also seems to think of the party and its members as pieces on a chessboard, of value only so long as they are of use. But it would be unwise for conservative Republicans to rely on Trump to deliver that majority even if he wanted to or could.
Imagine if Trump were to leave office, for whatever reason, tomorrow. Where would conservatism and the Republican Party be? Would voters across the broad potential Republican coalition have started to think of themselves as Republicans? Or would they view a Trump-less party as just what it was before, something that excited hard-core conservatives and business types but seemed cold and uncaring to others who would prefer not to vote for progressive Democrats?
Republicans and conservatives need to face some facts. We have been a minority party and movement in America for eighty-four years. We have won elections in that time, but never have we really taken hold of government and changed the debate in our direction for more than a couple of years at a time. In the end, it always seems that government remains big, it remains run by progressives or those espousing progressive values, and the only debates we influence are on the margin or about cost. Unless we change this, unless we change the very nature of the political debate, we will forever be little more than tax collectors for the liberal welfare state.
Ronald Reagan had a grander vision. He envisioned a new majority party, one that embraced every broad strain of conservative thought. It was a party that expressed and acted on the majority sentiments in the country, a majority that did not fall neatly on the left or the right. It was a party that embraced freedom without forgetting human dignity. It was a party that praised initiative without denigrating the average. It was a party called all to its banner regardless of creed, gender, or race, but did not treat everyone as merely an individual without a family, a community, or a nation to call home. It was a party that had a robust view of what American self-government entailed without placing government at the center of American life.
It was a party that interpreted rather than opposed the New Deal.
Some of you will surely wonder why I return to this theme. Doesn’t everyone today pay homage to the New Deal, pledging to retain its core elements like Social Security? At a surface level that is true: all but the most vocal libertarians or constitutionalists will say they want to retain the New Deal. But that commitment is for many only skin deep, and their underlying passive opposition comes through in what they say and, more important, what they do not say.
Reagan never had a problem saying that he believed it was society’s obligation to take care of its weaker members. He did not have a problem saying that free trade works both ways, and that government should step in to protect American jobs when unfair competition threatened. He did not have a problem saying that no one should be denied needed medical care because of a lack of funds, and that government had a role in helping those people out.
He did not have a problem saying those things, because in his heart he loved the average American. America was not great for him because it enabled great men to rise, although he admired men and wom
en who showed ingenuity and initiative. America was great because it provided a home to let all people live free and dignified lives.
In his youth, tutored by his parents and his times, he found the answer to those beliefs in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Government intervention and action seemed to be what Roosevelt told Americans it was, new means to implement old, traditional American values. In the world that existed before the New Deal—where a man could be fired for joining a labor union, or be left penniless if he lost his job, because there was no unemployment insurance—it was surely easy for Reagan, as it was for many millions of others, to see the New Deal as restoring an individual’s freedom and dignity if he lacked bargaining power with his employer. When that era’s conservatives said the world’s problems were none of our concern even as Nazi Germany marched and Imperial Japan sailed to wage wars of conquest, it was easy to see Roosevelt’s Democrats as both the voice and the arsenal of democracy.
If the Democratic Party had stopped there, Reagan probably would have remained a Democrat all his life. But it did not, because there was an undercurrent to Roosevelt’s New Deal that did not simply seek to restore America but to transform it.
Starting with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, some New Dealers believed America needed to be transformed, its individualist culture tamed to march to the beat of a centralized plan. Those who wanted a planned society also found it difficult to find communism as horrific or as threatening as did Reagan. For if America itself is something to be replaced, how can a regime whose central tenet was that America was inherently immoral be something to be loathed?
But as the Democratic Party left Reagan, he did not leave his core beliefs behind. His new conservatism did not pine for the days when men were men and employers could treat workers like beasts. He was against losing freedom by installments; he was against the rule of the many by the self-appointed few no matter what form that rule took. But he was also for human dignity. He was also for treating human beings with the respect they deserved and for giving each and every one of them a real fighting chance to live a decent life. He was for using government, when necessary, to accomplish these goals.
Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative that “the Conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”76 But Ronald Reagan could tell Americans in his famous speech endorsing Barry Goldwater that conservatives were for Social Security, even though that curtailed the freedom of a person to, as Goldwater wrote, “be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings as they see fit.”77 He could say that conservatives were for telling senior citizens that no one should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds, even though that takes money “from fellow citizens who may have different ideas about their social obligations,” against Goldwater’s beliefs.78
In short, Reagan was against returning to the America before the New Deal. He was for interpreting Roosevelt’s legacy in a way that maximized freedom and minimized bureaucratic control and the direction of Americans’ lives.
Reagan could be for these things because he was for addressing “the realities of everyday life,” not simply implementing an abstract theory. Can today’s Republicans, especially those who proclaim his name the loudest, say the same?
So many people who invoke Reagan’s name do not act or speak like him. Take Senator Cruz. No one quotes Reagan more and understands Reagan less.
Cruz treats conservatism as a singular creed with a single set of beliefs. Reagan treated conservatism as a set of principles about which there could be legitimate disagreement on particulars. Cruz treats Republicans who do not agree with him as the enemy, no better than Democrats. Reagan always sought to unify rather than divide Republicans and conservatives. Cruz would rather go down with flags flying, as he did in the attempt to shut down the government to defund Obamacare when Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. Reagan always disliked the “ultra” who would rather lose without compromise than get part of a loaf and come back for more.
These differences extend to concrete policies too. Cruz was willing to risk national default on the debt ceiling bill to push conservative spending priorities. As president, Reagan strongly opposed conservative efforts to do that to him. He always insisted on a “clean” debt ceiling bill because the prospect of America welshing on its debts was hateful to him. Cruz is unwilling to raise even a dime in taxes no matter what spending cuts he might get in exchange. Reagan did make such deals, such as the one that has made Social Security solvent for the last thirty-five years. Reagan also was willing to raise taxes to provide new benefits: his catastrophic health insurance Medicare plan was financed by a surtax on wealthy seniors’ income tax payments.79
Cruz also misrepresents Reagan’s relationship with supply-side economics. In his presidential announcement speech, Cruz said “imagine it’s 1979 and you and I were listening to President Reagan.”80 Aside from implying he was a very precocious eight-year-old, he claimed Reagan was calling then for reduction in tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent. In a later Wall Street Journal op-ed touting his own tax plan, he called the supply-side guru Arthur Laffer “President Reagan’s tax advisor.”81 Put this together and the implication is clear: Reagan was a supply-sider focused on cutting the top rate, just like me.
But we have seen that Reagan always disavowed the notion that he was a supply-sider. The tax plan Reagan presented in 1979 would have cut the top rate to only 50 percent, and he always spoke about that plan as cutting tax rates by 30 percent for everyone. You will look in vain for any major speech of Reagan’s on taxes that makes the top tax rate the focus on his ideas. It wasn’t. He spoke about reducing rates for all, with a particular emphasis on cutting the tax burden for the average American, from the time he endorsed this concept in 1958 all the way through his presidency. Cruz’s focus on the top rate is the supply-side, Stockman way of talking about the tax code. But it was never Reagan’s.
If Cruz is Reaganism’s false prophet, others err in different ways. Take Ohio senator Rob Portman. In 2015, he wrote that cutting entitlement spending was a necessity to control the federal budget deficit.82 When describing why Medicare needs to be cut, he wrote, “the typical couple retiring next year will have paid approximately $140,000 in lifetime Medicare taxes and premiums, yet will receive nearly $430,000 in Medicare benefits.” Recall that this is the way David Stockman approached Social Security, as a forced savings program rather than a social guarantee that no American would experience poverty. But the whole point of programs like Social Security and Medicare is to use government as a vehicle to fulfill our society’s commitment to all of its members.
Redistribution of this sort is a feature of these programs, not a bug. That’s not to say that some people are getting benefits they don’t need or are paying less than they should based on their assets or income. But to talk about the program that gives retirees a chance to keep on living as if it were an accounting exercise is the epitome of putting other people’s money ahead of average people’s lives.
Reagan did not talk that way even as he believed privately that entitlements needed to be cut. That is because when the chips were down, he cared more about life than money. As he said in 1958:
Certainly no thinking American would dispute the idea that there should be an economic floor below which no American should be allowed to live. In the last few decades we have indulged in a great program of social progress with many welfare programs. I’m sure that most of us in spite of the cost wouldn’t buy back many of these projects at any price—they have represented forward thinking on our part.83
Would conservatives today say those words as Reagan did, with sincerity and enthusiasm?
The modern conservative use of the phrase “safety net” is another indication of the subtle yet crucial misunderstanding of the real Reagan that is rampant on the right. Conservatives regularly use the phrase “safety net” to refer to the panoply of means-tested government programs intended to raise people f
rom poverty. Indeed, Ryan’s 2014 antipoverty report includes the phrase four times, while the House Republicans’ 2016 “A Better Way” antipoverty plan uses it eight times. The only problem is that Reagan actually used a different term. He spoke about the “social safety net.”84
Leaving out that one little word speaks volumes about the mind-set one approaches poverty with. Leave out the word “social” and you leave out the sense of obligation to the less fortunate that it conveys. Leave out the word “social” and you leave out the idea that many of these programs are part of “a great program of social progress.” Leave out the word “social” and maybe you leave out the pride that was so evident in Reagan’s voice when he spoke about “the forward thinking on our part.” For Reagan, the word “social” implied that we could be truly self-governing, choosing freedom for ourselves and for the less fortunate of our neighbors.
The lack of a core idea of what government activity conservatives should be for holds back the cause of cutting government too. I’ve seen many conservative legislators come to state capitals or to Washington full of budget-cutting fervor. But without that idea of what government should do, they fall into one of two camps. The smaller camp is the legislator who, unable to distinguish between good and bad spending, votes no on everything. Ron Paul was that sort of congressman. That person never advances his or her ideas and always is on the short end of 434–1 votes.
The larger camp contains the people who start to vote yes on almost everything. If you don’t have a view of what government should do, then anything that seems to have support in your district or contain a good-sounding idea is OK. You’re opposed to “big spending” and “big government,” but protecting your big employer’s contract or supporting funding “for the children” or increasing health research no longer fits the idea of “big spending” or “big government.” The reason so many conservative legislators turn into big spenders once they are in office awhile isn’t because they get corrupted by lobbyists. It’s that they don’t have a strong enough sense of what government should do to let them act strategically to oppose what it should not.
