The network of conservative think tanks has its counterpart in the world of journalism. Publications such as the National Journal, the Public Interest, and the American Spectator were, like the movement conservative think tanks, created with a lot of help from right-wing foundations—more or less the same foundations that helped create the think tanks. There are also a number of movement conservative newspapers: The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has long played a key role, while the Washington Times, controlled by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has become the de facto house organ of the Bush administration. And there is, of course, Fox News, with its Orwellian slogan, Fair and Balanced.
Last but certainly not least, there’s the nexus among lobbyists and politicians. The apparent diversity of corporate lobbying groups, like the apparent diversity of conservative think tanks, conceals the movement’s true centralization. Until his defeat in 2006 forced him to take a new job confronting America’s enemies, Sen. Rick Santorum held a meeting every Tuesday with about two dozen top lobbyists. Here’s how Nicholas Confessore described those meetings in 2003:
Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican—a senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors.[14]
Santorum’s weekly meetings and similar meetings run by Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, were the culmination of the “K Street Strategy,” the name Grover Norquist and former House majority leader Tom DeLay gave to their plan to drive Democrats out of lobbying organizations, and give the jobs to loyal Republicans. Part of the purpose of this strategy was to ensure that Republicans received the lion’s share of corporate contributions, while Democratic finances were starved—a goal also served by direct pressure. In 1995 DeLay compiled a list of the four-hundred largest political action committees along with the amounts and percentages of money they gave to each party, then called “unfriendly” lobbyists into his office to lay down the law. “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules,” he told the Washington Post.[15] Equally important, however, the takeover of the lobbies helped enforce loyalty within the Republican Party, by providing a huge pool of patronage jobs—very, very well-paid patronage jobs—that could be used to reward those who toe the party line.
The various institutions of movement conservatism create strong incentives for Republican politicians to take positions well to the right of center. It’s not just a matter of getting campaign contributions, it’s a matter of personal financial prospects. The public strongly believes that Medicare should use its bargaining power to extract lower drug prices—but Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2001 to 2004, pushed through a Medicare bill that specifically prohibited negotiations over prices, then moved on to a reported seven-figure salary as head of the pharmaceutical industry’s main lobbying group. Rick Santorum was clearly too far right for Pennsylvania, but he had no trouble finding a nice think tank job after his defeat—whereas Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Rhode Island Republican who lost his Senate seat the same year, had to make do with a one-year teaching appointment at Brown.
Lincoln Chafee’s defeat brings me to another aspect of how the institutions of movement conservatism control the GOP: they don’t just support Republican politicians who toe the line, they punish those who don’t. Chafee faced a nasty primary challenge from his right. His opponent, Steve Laffey, received more than a million dollars in support from the Club for Growth, which specializes in disciplining Republicans who aren’t sufficiently in favor of cutting taxes. “We want to be seen as the tax-cut enforcer,” declared Stephen Moore, the club’s president at the time, in 2001.
The club had high hopes of taking out Chafee: Two years earlier a candidate sponsored by the Club for Growth almost defeated Sen. Arlen Specter, another relatively moderate Republican, in the Pennsylvania primary. And these challenges are effective. As one Republican congressman said in 2001, “When you have 100 percent of Republicans voting for the Bush tax cut, you know that they’re looking over their shoulder and not wanting to have Steve Moore recruiting candidates in their district.”
Specter was first elected to the Senate in 1980, which makes him a holdover from the days when the GOP still had room for moderates.
Younger Republican politicians have, by and large, grown up inside a party defined by movement conservatism. The hard right had already taken over the College Republicans by 1972, when none other than Karl Rove was elected the organization’s chairman. Other notable College Republican alumni include Rick Santorum, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff. Movement conservatives run the Republican National Committee, which means that they are responsible for recruiting congressional candidates; inevitably they choose men and women in their own image. The few remaining Republican moderates in Congress were, with rare exceptions, first elected pre-Reagan or, at the latest, before the 1994 election that sealed the dominance of the Gingrich wing of the party.
One last point: The institutions of movement conservatism ensure a continuity of goals that has no counterpart on the other side. Jimmy Carter tried to establish a national energy policy that would reduce dependence on imported oil, and that was that; nobody expected Bill Clinton to pick things up where Carter left off. Ronald Reagan tried and failed to slash Social Security benefits; movement conservatives took that as merely a tactical setback. In a now-famous 1983 article, analysts from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation called for a “Leninist strategy” of undermining support for Social Security, to “prepare the political ground so that the fiasco of the last 18 months is not repeated.”[16] That strategy underlay George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the system—and until or unless movement conservatism is defeated as thoroughly as pre–New Deal conservatism was, there will be more attempts in future.
The mechanics of the widening partisan divide are clear. Bitter partisanship has become the rule because the Republicans have moved right, and the GOP has moved right because it was taken over by movement conservatives. But there’s still the question of ultimate cause. Wealthy families who hate taxes, corporate interests that hate regulation, and intellectuals who believe that the welfare state is illegitimate have always been with us. In the fifties and sixties, however, these groups were marginal, treated by both parties as cranks. What turned them into a force powerful enough to transform American politics?
Movement conservatives themselves, to the extent that they think about the reasons for their rise at all, see it as a tale of good ideas triumphing over bad. The story goes something like this: The Great Depression, combined with leftist propaganda, misled people into believing that they needed a big government to protect them. The institutions of big government, in turn, became self-perpetuating. But brave men, from Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan, gradually taught Republicans that government is the problem, not the solution. And the partisan divide is there only because some people still haven’t seen the light.
14.
Nicholas Confessore, “Welcome to the Machine,”
15.
David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf, “Speaker and His Directors Make the Cash Flow Right,”
16.
Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, “Achieving a Leninist Strategy,”