By the 2004 election doubts about the Iraq War were growing, but much of the electorate was still in a state of denial. On the eve of the election a majority of voters still believed that the United States did the “right thing” in invading Iraq, was on a path to victory, or both.[18] And national security almost certainly gave Bush his winning margin.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, there were many pronouncements to the effect that the perceived Republican advantage on national security would help cement a permanent Republican majority. Thus Thomas Edsall, whom I’ve already credited for his prophetic 1984 book, The New Politics of Inequality, argued in his 2006 book Building Red America that national security would prove an enduring source of GOP advantage: “Any weakness on national defense that dogs the Democratic Party is substantially amplified in the context of a ‘long war.’”[19]
Yet there is a good case to be made that the successful exploitation of security in 2002 and 2004 was an inherently limited, perhaps inherently self-defeating strategy. Unless the United States is actively engaged in major warfare, national security tends to recede as an issue. The elder George Bush learned that in 1992: The 1991 Gulf War temporarily gave him an 80 percent approval rating, but a year later the public’s attention had shifted to economic concerns, and the Democrats regained the White House in spite of public perceptions that they were weak on defense issues.
The same thing initially seemed to be happening to the younger Bush: By the summer of 2002 his approval rating had descended from the stratosphere, and public attention was shifting to corporate scandals and the weak economy. Then came the buildup to war with Iraq. We may never know exactly why the administration wanted that war so badly, but military adventurism does have the effect of giving national security, an issue that the Republicans thought they owned, continuing salience.
The problem, which eventually became all too apparent, is that keeping concerns about national security on the front burner means picking fights with people who shoot back—and in real life the bad guys have better aim than they did in the Rambo movies. The quagmire in Iraq wasn’t an accident: Even if the Iraqis had welcomed us with flowers and sweets, there would have been a bigger, worse quagmire down the line. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a British official told Newsweek in 2002.[20]
What’s more, movement conservatism and major war efforts don’t mix. Any major military mobilization prompts calls for equal sacrifice, which means tax increases, a crackdown on perceived profiteering, and more. Both world wars led to a rise in union membership, an increase in tax progressivity, and a reduction in income inequality—all anathema to conservatives. Much has been written about the disastrous lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq. What isn’t emphasized enough is that the Bush administration had to believe that the war could be waged on the cheap, because a realistic assessment of the war’s cost and requirements would have posed a direct challenge to the administration’s tax-cutting agenda. Add to this the closed-mindedness and inflexibility that come from the bubble in which movement conservatives live, the cronyism and corruption inherent in movement conservative governance, and the Iraq venture was doomed from the start.
The national security issue seems to have given movement conservatism two election victories, in 2002 and 2004, that it wouldn’t have been able to win otherwise, extending Republican control of both Congress and the White House four years beyond their natural life span. I don’t mean to minimize the consequences of that extension, which will be felt for decades to come, especially on the Supreme Court. But defense does not, at this point, look like an enduring source of conservative advantage.
We believe that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.
So declares the 2006 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which also pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.
There are two different questions about the role of religion and moral values in the politics of inequality. One is the extent to which believers who don’t accept the separation of church and state—what Michelle Goldberg, in her hair-raising book Kingdom Coming, calls Christian nationalists—have taken over the Republican Party.[21] The other is the Tom Frank question: The extent to which mobilization of “values voters,” and the use of values issues to change the subject away from bread and butter issues, have allowed the GOP to pursue an antipopulist economic agenda.
On the first question, the influence of the Christian right on the Republican Party, the answer is clear: It’s a very powerful influence indeed. That Texas Republican platform doesn’t represent fringe views within the party, it represents what the activist base thinks but usually soft-pedals in public. In fact it’s surprising how long it has taken for political analysts to realize just how strong the Christian right’s influence really is. Partly that’s because the Bush administration has proved so adept at sending out messages that only the intended audience can hear. A classic example is Bush’s description of himself as a “compassionate conservative,” which most people heard as a declaration that he wasn’t going to rip up the safety net. It was actually a reference to the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian right author. His 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, held up the welfare system of nineteenth-century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together, as a model—and approvingly quoted Gilded Age authors who condemned “those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.”[22]
In the spring of 2007 the Bush administration’s management of the Justice Department finally came under close scrutiny, and it became clear that the department had, in important respects, been taken over by the Christian right. A number of key posts had gone to graduates of Regent University, the school founded and run by evangelist Pat Robertson; the Civil Rights Division had largely shifted its focus from protecting the rights of minority groups to protecting the evangelizing efforts of religious groups. At the Food and Drug Administration, Bush appointed W. David Hager, the coauthor of As Jesus Cared for Women—a book that recommends particular scriptural readings as a treatment for PMS—to the Reproductive Health Advisory Committee; Hager played a key role in delaying approval for the “morning-after” pill.[23] Bush’s 2006 choice to head family-planning services at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Eric Keroack, worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”[24] And there are many more examples.
The Christian right we’re talking about here isn’t merely a group of people who combine faith with conservative political leanings. As Goldberg puts it in Kingdom Coming, Christian nationalism seeks “dominion.” It’s a “totalistic political ideology” that “asserts the Christian right to rule.”[25] The influence of this ideology on the modern Republican Party is so great today that it raises the question of who’s using whom. Are movement conservatives using religion to distract the masses, as Thomas Frank argued, or are religious groups co-opting corporate interests on their way to dominion?
18.
See Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler, and Peter Feaver, “Iraq the Vote” (photocopy, Duke University, 2005).
21.
Michelle Goldberg,
24.
“Bush Choice for Family-Planning Post Criticized,”