Beyond that, the cronyism that is an essential part of movement conservatism played a key role in the failure of Iraqi reconstruction. Key jobs were given to inexperienced partisan loyalists. Shoddy work by politically connected contractors, like the construction of a new police training center in which excrement drips from the ceiling, went unpunished.[5] And outright corruption flourished. These failures weren’t accidentaclass="underline" The systematic use of political power to hand out favors to partisan allies is part of the glue holding movement conservatism together. To have run the Iraq War with efficiency and honesty, the way FDR ran World War II, would have meant behaving at least a little bit like the New Deal—and that would have been anathema to the people in charge.
Ideally, as I said, the public should come out of this experience understanding that movement conservatives can’t actually defend the country. At the very least the Iraq experience should neutralize for a long time to come the ability of conservatives to win elections by striking belligerent poses and talking tough. Voters will remember where that got us under Bush—that the tough-talking, pose-striking leader misled the nation into an unnecessary and disastrous war. And if they don’t remember, liberals can remind them. So it should be quite a while before another movement conservative can do what Bush did in 2002 and 2004: use national security to distract the public from the fundamentally elitist, antipopulist nature of his policies.
That said, movement conservatives have repeatedly won elections even in years when the public wasn’t focused on national security. The most important, sustained source of this electoral strength has been race—the ability to win over a subset of white voters by catering, at least implicitly, to their fear of blacks. That source of electoral strength hasn’t gone away. There is, however, good reason to believe that the race issue is gradually losing its force.
In 2002 Ruy Texeira and John Judis published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book intended to emulate Kevin Phillips’s prescient 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Like Phillips they argued from demographic trends, which they claimed were running in the Democrats’ favor. The Republican victories in 2002 and 2004 made their thesis look all wrong, but the 2006 election gave it new life. In a 2007 article Texeira and Judis argued that “this election signals the end of a fleeting Republican revival, prompted by the Bush administration’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States.”[6] That’s not too far from my own view. But my version is blunter and cruder than theirs. I’d say that the politics of white backlash, which have been integral to the success of movement conservatism, are losing effectiveness for two reasons: America is becoming less white, and many (but not all) whites are becoming less racist.
By “white” I actually mean “non-Hispanic white,” and the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, from 6.4 percent of the total in 1980 to 12.5 percent in 2000, is the main reason America’s ethnic composition is changing. The Asian population is also growing rapidly, albeit from a lower base: Asians were 1.5 percent of the population in 1980, but 3.8 percent in 2000. Both ethnic groups are growing mainly because of immigration, although Hispanics also have a high birth rate.
The immediate political effect of immigration is, as I pointed out in the discussion of the Long Gilded Age, to disenfranchise low-paid workers, effectively shifting the political balance to the right. When low-wage immigrants make up a large part of the work force, those who have the most to gain from policies that promote equality don’t vote, while those who have the most to lose do. If that were the whole story, the changing ethnic mix of the U.S. population would simply be the by-product of a process that helps conservatives and hurts liberals. But it’s not the whole story. The new immigrants are nonwhite—or at least are perceived by many native-born whites as nonwhite, which is all that matters. And the interaction of that fact with the politics of race in America creates a dynamic that, I’d argue, ultimately deprives movement conservatism of its most potent political weapon.
To understand this dynamic one must first recognize that immigration is a deeply divisive issue for the coalition that supports movement conservatism. Business interests are pro-immigration because they like an abundant, cheap labor force. But voters who can be swayed by the race issue, and have been crucial to the movement’s success, also tend to be strongly nativist. John Judis has described the profile of Republican anti-immigration voters:
They are very similar to the white working-class voters who became Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s due to opposition to desegregation and the counter-culture. They are, typically, white evangelical Protestants from the South, Midwest, and non-Pacific West with lower incomes and without college degrees. They live in small towns and rural areas—usually away from concentrations of immigrants—and consider themselves to be “conservatives.”[7]
The result is bitter division within the movement over immigration policy. And this has a further consequence: The obvious reality that an important wing of the modern Republican Party is bitterly anti-immigrant pushes nonwhite immigrants into the arms of the Democratic Party. This has already happened in California: Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor, won an upset victory in 1994 by making illegal immigration the center of his campaign. In the years that followed, however, California’s growing Hispanic population responded by becoming overwhelmingly Democratic, turning the state’s politics in a sharply liberal direction. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as governor changed little: Schwarzenegger quickly learned that to be effective he had to govern as a modern version of an Eisenhower Republican, so much so that, like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (who recently declared himself an independent), he’s often described as being a de facto Democrat.
In other words, the political success of movement conservatism depends on appealing to whites who resent blacks. But it’s difficult to be antiblack without also being anti-immigrant. And because the rapidly growing number of immigrants makes them an increasingly potent political force, the race issue, which has been a powerful asset for movement conservatives in the past, may gradually be turning into a liability.
Republicans have sought to contain this problem by keeping immigrants and their descendants disenfranchised as long as possible. Some of the bogus voter fraud cases described in chapter 9 were aimed at Hispanics rather than blacks. In 2003, when Justice Department lawyers unanimously concluded that the infamous Texas redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act, they emphasized the way it diluted Hispanic voting influence. (The lawyers were, of course, overruled by political appointees, and the plan went through, leading to a five-seat Republican gain in Congress.) Yet the redistricting didn’t keep Democrats from sweeping to control of the House in 2006, and it’s hard to see such actions, reprehensible as they are, as more than a delaying tactic.
5.
The best overview of the follies of reconstruction is Rajiv Chandrasekaran,
6.
Ruy Texeira and John Judis, “Back to the Future: The Re-emergence of the Emerging Democratic Majority,”
7.
John Judis, “Continental Divide: Why the Immigration Bill Will Never Become Law,”