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ccording to conventional wisdom, the rise of the Tea Party as a powerful voting bloc, the Democratic Party’s considerable support for the Sanders campaign, and the ongoing purge of “moderates” from both parties are all indications that the political class is coming apart. For analysts of political culture, this growing divide has provided an unparalleled opportunity for extended diagnoses of America’s divisions—though, conveniently, the authors mostly dwell on the supposed ailments plaguing the other side, not their own.
Republican-leaning examinations of liberal progressivism, while respectful, have tended toward the philosophical and historical. Academics and think-tank types, especially those affiliated with Hillsdale College in Michigan and the Claremont Institute in California, point to figures such as G.W.F. Hegel as the originators of modern progressivism, and then move on to the American progressives of a century ago: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Herbert Croly, among others. While that approach is serious and intellectually ambitious, it is not very helpful to view the Great Society as an outgrowth of The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Democratic-leaning efforts to explain conservatism and the Republican Party are more rooted in the real world—and usually far less charitable. They seem deliberately to overlook the long history of conservative thinkers and leaders—from Burke and Hamilton through Kristol and Reagan—so that they can explain away conservatism as a disorder of the mind and spirit. One study, for instance, purported to show that conservatives are as they are because they react more strongly to negative or threatening stimuli than liberals do. Another found that conservatives are more prone to intense anxiety and bouts of fear, warranted or unwarranted.
The most striking and comprehensive example came in 2012 when Chris Mooney published The Republican Brain, which offered a purportedly scientific explanation for why Republicans “reject reality.” Only when the conservative pathology has been isolated under laboratory conditions and treated with “reality” could there be any purpose to laying out a history of conservatism. Any such history is therefore more like a psychiatrist’s case study, with a potential cure proposed at the end—the cure, of course, being the rejection of conservatism and the adoption of liberalism.
When word came that the veteran liberal columnist and political analyst E.J. Dionne Jr. was publishing a book called “Why The Right Went Wrong,” described as a “historical view of the American right,” there was some reason to hope that he would provide a more modest, more reasonable critical perspective beyond the psycho-biological claptrap of Mooney et al. That hope turns out to have been illusory. Dionne’s book instead condescends to conservatives in a different way, since with it he wishes plainly to help conservatives “reverse the wrong turn their movement took fifty years ago.” In truth, Dionne’s rhetorical strategy is to convince conservatives that everything they’ve believed from their movement’s putative conception is wrong, and also that everything progressives have believed has been spot-on all along.
Dionne begins his chronology with Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s nominee in the 1964 presidential contest. In Dionne’s telling, pre-1964 conservatism consisted of a very small band of intellectuals and a few politicians, and therefore Goldwater’s nomination took on a “heroic role in establishing conservatism as a legitimate and popular creed.” Goldwater tapped into the electorate’s deepest fears and hopes and brought a new conservative “crusade” to the public, one that persisted even though it was decimated at the polls by the juggernaut Johnson campaign. From beginning to end, Dionne’s answer to the main question of the book—how did the right go wrong?—is literally nothing more than “by going with Barry Goldwater.”
Dionne recounts the episodes of late-20th-century Republican politics refracted through the lens of Goldwater’s landscape-transforming campaign. Most political events on the right are treated as reactions to or endorsements of Goldwater’s basic principles: small government, free markets, anti-Communism, and traditional values. The right’s bounce-back in the ’68 election of Richard Nixon and Reagan’s installation of an authentic conservatism in the White House are, in this telling, events set into motion fundamentally by Goldwater’s “ideology.”
The early 1980s mark something like conservatism’s coming-of-age, according to Dionne, because Republicans realized they could really do something with their ideas. But he gleefully points out that in a number of ways they didn’t live up to their own principles—for example, Reagan was complicit in raising the Social Security payroll tax in 1983. And yet, Dionne points out with relish, today’s conservatives are eager to look at the age of Reagan with rose-tinted glasses as an unabashed triumph for a bona fide conservatism. He laments that seldom do they look to Reagan’s moderation for lessons. Instead, Dionne says, today’s conservatives view him simply as a champion of fundamentally Goldwaterite principles, whether or not those conservatives have a clue what Goldwater was about.
In Dionne’s account, all subsequent major events in the life of the Republican Party—the George H.W. Bush administration, the Contract with America in 1994, and the rise of compassionate conservatism in the early 2000s—should be viewed as efforts to preserve or recapture Reagan’s successes (or what were viewed to be Reagan’s successes). He says those efforts mostly flopped: George H.W. Bush lost the 1992 election, the Republican-controlled House of the 1990s couldn’t make good on many of its promises, and George W. Bush’s policies remain hugely unpopular. These failures have frustrated the right greatly, Dionne points out, but rather than conceding, conservatives have doubled down on their ideology, culminating in peak Goldwaterism: the Tea Party.
Dionne’s argument is as old as Goldwater’s nomination itself and has been a staple of liberal analysis for a half-century. But in truth, the provenance of the American right is complex, and its history does not have an obvious starting place. Political divisions in the 18th-century English monarchy, the federalist and anti-federalist divide over the ratification of the Constitution at the end of that century, and the heating up of the slavery question in the 1850s would all be better places to start than Barry Goldwater. What makes the Goldwater campaign the right jumping-off point in Dionne’s mind? Unfortunately, the answer is never stated explicitly, but Dionne makes it clear enough: It was a loser from the outset, and even when it seemed to be winning it was losing.
There is, in this history, very little discussion of a pre-1964 conservatism—save for the works of Phyllis Schlafly and the young William F. Buckley Jr.—or of the ideas that would later be branded as a distinctly American conservatism. Dionne only once mentions the laissez-faire economics championed by Republican presidents like Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge—a fact that helped explain the right’s decades-long hesitancy to embrace Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Lincoln, the first Republican president, is mentioned only a handful of times and almost exclusively as a taunt to point out how far the party has fallen from grace. Dionne gives no indication that Lincoln’s commitment to the Founders’ understanding of the Constitution has anything to do with the GOP’s commitment to limited government or sharply separated powers. One could come away from Why the Right Went Wrong believing that the ideas behind the jurisprudential theory of originalism were conceived entirely by Robert Bork. Many of the political ideas Dionne believes to be quintessentially Goldewaterite—including a strong anti-Communism and emphasis on “family values”—were and are decidedly not.
Dionne’s deeper contention is that the Goldwater campaign inclined conservatives for the first time to political radicalism. This is why he delights in citing the sentence in Goldwater’s 1964 convention speech that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” and why he can only bring himself to describe Dwight D. Eisenhower’s conservatism as “moderate,” which it was not. He believes the unique Republican fire for radicalism that was sparked in 1964 is what has driven the history of the Republican Party over the last 50 years, and this belief entitles him to make such preposterous claims as “the Republicans are an unapologetically ideological party. The Democrats are not.”
Dionne’s 544-page diagnosis of the right’s ills boils down to this: The GOP is just too extreme, and conservatism is just too conservative. Even the “reform conservatives,” who have labored mightily during the Obama years to break free from the party’s policy sclerosis, come up short in Dionne’s view because they are content with the “limits placed on them by the increasingly conservative Republican primary electorate.” The solution, Dionne explains, to the Republicans’ problems—the way to “reverse” that “wrong turn”—is simply to be more liberal.
Any minimally competent political analysis of American historical trends would note that radical and distinctively American strains of conservatism can be detected as far back as the colonists. And in truth there was nothing long-lasting about the way Barry Goldwater—a man who lost the ’64 election by more than 20 percentage points and who carried only six states—packaged his own conservatism. Goldwater opposed civil-rights legislation and the extension of health-care benefits to the elderly, and such views had become fringe notions even on the right by the time Reagan won 49 states and 61 percent of the vote in 1984.
To be sure, Dionne is right that there exist thoroughly radical, impractical factions within the Republican Party. But so, too, are there thoroughly radical, impractical factions of the Democrat Party—Bernie Sanders’s staying power in the Democratic race this year demonstrates that. Dionne’s work here admits of no distinctions and therefore borders on historical illiteracy. Where the Right Went Wrong is one short step above the work of Dionne’s liberal compatriots who want to throw conservatives in the madhouse, yet it does not mark much substantive progress. Conservatism as a collection of ideas remains unworthy of engagement, something that still needs explaining away.
