Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, ?Ideas Have Consequences.? Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he?d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn?t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition ? small-town values with coastal reach.
In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party ? the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism ? but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, ?Rebel-in-Chief,? Bush ?reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don?t live along the East or West Coast. He?s not a sophisticate and doesn?t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn?t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven?t.?
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions ? Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it?s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it?s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it?s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clich?s took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking ?eastern elites.? (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the ?normal Joe Sixpack American? and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all ? men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission ? because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission ? by telling members of that class to go away.
Re: Republican class warfare
I read this earlier today. I think he makes some interesting points.
The whole anti-education thing is amazing to me. I can't relate to a party that tells me that people who go to Harvard are stupid Marxist sheeples. And that's a sentiment that comes from the party generally and from Palin and people on E08 specifically.
Why shouldn't we want our best and brightest leading our nation? Joe Six Pack does not belong in the White House or anywhere near national leadership. I don't want someone who embraces ignorance and close-mindedness leading the country or serving as a role model for children.
I think both parties push the separation of the midwest vs. the coasts or rural vs. urban. Both groups of people make assumptions about the other. It's certainly not something that just one party does.
I think one of the reasons why the Republicans are not being successful on the economy, and they should be the ones that are (of course the fact that a Republican is president now doesn't help), is that they don't explain why their policies will work, why it's good for the country in an easy to understand way. People want a hand out. Sure, give me my $1200 stimulus check, who cares what it does to our debt. We pay for it but we don't reeeally pay for it. People think it's perfectly fair that the very top-small-percent of taxpayers are paying the overwhelming majority of our taxes. Hell, raise their taxes and cut mine! That's fair, right? Of course not. Raise taxes and you get more revenue than by cutting taxes. That makes sense.. but it's not true. Economic issues are complicated and most people don't understand them. Republicans just don't make the case to normal people as to why they will benefit from their policies.
For instance, on education, the Republicans should have tremendous support in urban areas with the idea of allowing parents to choose where to send their kids to school. I don't think they make the case though.
It would also help if the Republicans stood by some of these ideas, like on economics.