In a tartly worded column this week, Washington Post writer Dana Milbank bemoans the conservative “cannibalizing…of Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Bennett of Utah.” He runs through the American Conservative Union (ACU) ratings for historical Republican leaders, compares them to Murkowski and Bennett, and finds that the latter two are just as conservative as Bob Dole, Gerald Ford, and others. He concludes that Murkowski and Bennett were “purged” this year because they were not conservative enough for today’s Grand Old Party. Millbank concludes, “In my book, they’re all ‘faithful conservatives.’ But I’m old-fashioned.”
Milbank has placed me in an awkward position, for I agree with his thesis but I totally disagree with his tone. His data are also problematic, as he has conflated anti-incumbent sentiment with anti-moderate sentiment. Anti-incumbent sentiment helps explain much of what has happened to Republicans (and to Democrats like Alan Mollohan and Arlen Specter) this cycle.
I’m willing to agree to his basic argument that the GOP has moved to the right. Milbank does not come right out and condemn this, but the use of words like “cannibalize” and “purge” are loaded enough that we get his drift. Chris Matthews and Mark Halperin discussed Milbank’s column on Wednesday’s Hardball, and both were in firm agreement that this trend to the right had to stop if the Republican party ever hopes to win elections again. This crazy Tea Party crowd, it seems, is only interested in purity.
I totally dispute this. I’d argue that the GOP’s move to the right in recent decades is a sign of electoral strength — and that today’s GOP, while it might not have as much in common with the “old-fashioned” post-New Deal Republicans, has quite a bit in common with the “older-fashioned” Republican party of William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge, who did pretty gosh-darned well at the ballot box.
Milbank uses the ACU legislative scores to track congressional ideology. He’s on the right track with those, and let’s push the analysis forward. We’ll use the DW-Nominate methodology to monitor the average ideological score of Republican senators from 1896 to 2008. DW-Nominate is a complicated process that produces a pretty straightforward result: -1 is very liberal, 0 is moderate, 1 is very conservative.
<“Shifting Ideology Among GOP Senators.jpg” Goes Here>
As you can see, way back in time Republicans in the Senate were actually quite conservative, but they shifted to the center around the Great Depression. They only started moving back to the right during the Reagan years.
What explains these shifts? There are many factors, one of which is New Deal realignment, which transformed the North from a GOP-dominated region to one that leaned Democratic. This graph tells the tale:
<“GOP Margin in the North.jpg” Goes Here>
Prior to the Depression, the GOP dominated in the North — beating the Democrats in the region every time since the Civil War — and the party had the electoral space needed to be conservative. But after the New Deal, FDR transformed the North to a region with a slight but sustained Democratic edge. The graph is bouncy, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that the GOP has won a solid majority in the North just five times since 1932.
This matters because the Republican party was an overwhelmingly Northern party for most of this period. Up until the 1970s, the GOP could count on zero Southern Senate seats and just a half dozen House seats — from the mountainous areas in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, and a few fast-growing cities in the Sun Belt. The party could really just compete in the North, and the North had swung to the Democrats.
Unsurprisingly, the conservatism of McKinley and Coolidge had to be set aside for the sake of electoral victory. The Republicans who stood the best chance of winning after FDR were those who were more moderate in their politics.
Why has the GOP moved to the right in the last 30 years? Again, there are many reasons, but part of the answer is the South. When FDR realigned the electorate with the New Deal, Dixie wound up on the right-hand side of the Democratic party. Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans formed a bipartisan, conservative coalition in Congress that was very effective at blocking liberal legislation from 1938 onwards. Slowly but surely, voters in Dixie drifted away from the Democrats, as the Northern liberals came to dominate the party. Liberals today would have you believe that this was solely about race, but that is just plain wrong. The vanguards of Southern Republicanism hailed from Dallas and Tampa, not from the cotton counties in the Black Belt.
Over time, the Republicans grew to be the majority party in the South. Here’s a track of the GOP’s performance in the Southern presidential vote:
<“GOP Margin in the South.jpg” Goes Here>
This is like the inverse of the graph of the North. Democrats used to be able to count upon smashing victories in the South, but nowadays even when they run a Southern Democrat against a Northern Republican (as in 1980, 1992, and 1996), the GOP still holds its own. In Congress, 1994 is the big breakthrough election. That was the first time since Reconstruction that the GOP controlled a majority of Southern House and Senate seats.
Thus, is it any surprise that the Republican party would move to the right? Parties have a lot in common with private firms — instead of maximizing profit, they maximize the chances of electoral victory. After the Depression, the North moved to the left, so the Northern-based GOP followed. When the conservative South finally started voting Republican, the GOP dutifully moved to the right.
To be more precise, the GOP moved back to the right. Milbank says he’s just being “old-fashioned” to call the post-New Deal Republicans conservatives, but that really depends on your meaning of “old.” In many respects, today’s Republican party signals a return to the party’s ideological roots in William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge, who are much older than Thomas Dewey and Gerald Ford! With a solid base of electoral support in the South, the party can again be unabashedly conservative in its economic program. The party has not had that kind of opportunity since the Great Depression.
I would suggest that Halperin, Matthews, and Milbank have it exactly backwards. They think this conservative brand of Republicanism is a sign of nihilistic demand for purity and thus electoral weakness, whereas I actually see it as a sign of confidence borne of electoral strength. Political necessities forced the GOP to shift to the center after the New Deal, and the realignment of the South has given conservative Republicanism opportunities it has not enjoyed since the 1920s. With all this has come political victory. Since 1980, the Republicans have won more presidential elections than the Democrats, have held a Senate majority more times than the Democrats, and have won the House of Representatives for the first time since a guy named Ike was President.
Milbank’s piece and the commentary from Matthews and Halperin are examples of a recurring type of analysis from the mainstream media bemoaning the death of moderate Republicanism. What I think these analysts are actually mourning is the end of the New Deal majority. Republicans were moderate when the New Deal coalition dominated the political landscape. It doesn’t anymore — large swaths of the old FDR coalition have swung to the GOP — and so the days of Republicans offering echoes of Roosevelt are long gone. That, I think, is what the MSM is so sad about. They much prefer a Republican party that plays second fiddle to the Democrats, and those days are done.
