A few voices on the right, some of them safely ensconced in their underground command post, deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker, are attempting to rewrite history. In this case, after the GOP sweep last week, they want to justify their support for the approach that led to the October 2013 government shutdown. One radio talk show host, Mark Levin, said, “The shutdown worked.”
That’s an impossible position to credibly defend. The government shutdown didn’t achieve a single one of its purposes, including its main one: defunding the Affordable Care Act. Everyone knew the GOP was uniformly against the ACA; it didn’t take the government shutdown to convince them of it. Polling shows that by overwhelming numbers the public didn’t like the government shutdown and by huge margins (53 percent to 31 percent), they blamed Republicans for it. “Americans have come to hold a harshly negative view of the Republican Party during the government shutdown, giving the GOP a far larger share of the blame for a political brawl that many believe is harming the economy,” the Wall Street Journal wrote at the time. Moreover, the image of the GOP fell to a record low in the aftermath of the shutdown. Republicans spent the last year climbing out of the hole they put themselves in. Simply because the shutdown didn’t ruin the Republican Party for generations to come doesn’t mean it was a smart idea.
What’s more interesting to me is to see this latest example of “epistemic closure” on display. I long ago came to expect this from the left; what’s a little more surprising to me is the degree to which some people on the right–or at least who claim to represent the right–succumb to it.
This probably should not be a revelation. After all, in some cases–Mr. Levin comes to mind–we’re dealing not so much with conservatives as dogmatists. (I should interject here that I’ve gone around the block before with Mr. Levin, who is certainly a passionate advocate for his views.) They are spending more and more of their time and energy targeting those they perceive as heretics, the impure in our midst.
To support their case, these self-appointed enforcers of conservative purity often invoke Ronald Reagan and claim to be his heirs. In fact, in many respects they don’t understand him very well at all. They twist Reagan this way and that, like Stretch Armstrong, to make him appear to match their own dispositions and patterns of thought and biases. Their absolutist mindset, if applied to the Reagan record–on amnesty (Reagan was for it), on raising taxes (Reagan passed what at the time was the largest tax increase in American history), on abortion (as governor, Reagan liberalized abortion laws), on campaigning for liberal Republicans (he chose Richard Schweiker to be his vice presidential nominee in 1976)–would have drawn their wrath. By their own logic, Reagan would have to have been deemed a RINO (Republican In Name Only).
This would be absurd, of course; Reagan was a great president and a great conservative. Judged for the totality of his acts and in his historical context, his record, while not flawless, was extremely impressive. Yet he could not even approach the standards of purity embraced by today’s radicals on the right. They are, to coin a phrase, the Jacobin Right. By this I mean they permit no deviation from what they view as the one true party line. It’s one thing to have substantive differences with people; it’s another to continually portray those with whom you differ as unprincipled and heretical. Not every policy or tactical difference rises to the level of fundamental and unforgivable transgressions against conservative orthodoxy.
These individuals have become to conservatism what Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips were to Reagan during his day: ideologues, often agitated and angry, who seem to draw energy from attacking those they deem to be apostates. How glorious it is to be a True Believer in an unfaithful age.
The important point, I think, is that these voices, while loud as ever, are losing influence. The Republican Party seems to have found a way to be both conservative and reasonable, principled and prudent. Those on the fringe appear to find this intolerable. They want to, in the words of Reagan, go over the cliff with all flags flying. That’s up to them. They just shouldn’t try to take Reagan’s party down with them.
